Stories to learn from

[Muslimah]

<b>Bismillah</b>


<b>Saber Bhatia of Hotmail
</b>


http://www.grid7.com/archives/86_faw-2-sab...of-hotmail.html


The enabling tool they built internally during development BECAME the actual product


Just like Paypal, the Hotmail founders (Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith) originally set out to build an entirely different product. They sought to make a simple plug-n-play database that anyone could use to store structured information and then expose it via the web. That product was called JavaSoft and sounds as if it would have been Google Base ten years before its time. Both founders held their corporate jobs while developing Javasoft. When their IT department implemented a firewall, it killed their ability to access their personal email (which they had been using to collaborate during development). They were forced to use paper and floppy’s to trade data and it crippled their development efforts. They were driven by necessity to find another way to access their personal emails remotely and it occurred to them that web sites could be accessed from anywhere. They immediately began developing a web-based email client.


The parallel here for us was that the original concept for the hardware version of JumpBox was born when Kimbro was working a consulting gig for a major hotel chain. He stepped into a situation of utter chaos with twenty consultants on the job using excel spreadsheets to track bugs and “free climbing” with no source control. He entered the situation and implemented a bug tracker, source control and a wiki for documentation to put some structure to the development effort and after the three days it took to setup this open source infrastructure, he thought “wouldn’t it be neat if a pristine instance of all this stuff could be cloned on small form factor machines and used every time you parachute into a gig and need development infrastructure?” This was of course before the concept of virtual appliances existed and he was thinking of a hardware-based appliance at the time. But he essentially arrived at the JumpBox concept in an effort to “scratch his own itch” - a common theme throughout the Founder’s At Work series.


Using the JavaSoft idea to test the waters with VC’s


Once they had the web-based email working they thought “other people probably have the same problem… we should share.” So they opened it up and began offering web email access for others and (just like Max posting his Palm Pilot security application) they had immediate visibility and rapid adoption. They gradually realized that the web-based email idea was bigger than the Javasoft product idea, but given the low barrier to entry they feared that telegraphing their intentions by distributing the business plan of the web email to VC circles could leak the concept to someone like Netscape and blow them out. They needed to tread carefully in how they approached potential investors so they used the JavaSoft story to gauge their reaction and broached the web email idea only after they had confidence in the VC.


Just-in-time scaling