History of Open Lab, part I - trial and error
Open lab was founded in January 2001 in Florence by four partners:
Caterina Feroci, Laura Mirri, Matteo Bicocchi and myself.
We all voluntarily dropped our previous jobs as they didn't seem to have any sense or direction. Our main am was to build beautiful web applications; we still do web applications, I don't know if they are any more that beautiful. They surely are quite practical.
It was great fun just to set up the company; we did most of the interior decoration of our office (in Via Venezia, in Florence center town) by ourselves, and everybody liked it; we did a great opening party, with live music in the office.
Matteo and myself started working together in 2000, when I was employed in another software house; we had fun, and that gave us the idea to start a new company. We had some potential customers, but when we started really setting up the company, we had so much to do, and we were so uncertain about the technology, that we kept telling our potential customers that we would meet later, and later, and later... . When we belived to be ready to start our bigger contract at the time (it was only 11.000 of today's Euros, but for us it was big money), we were months late; so we went to the customer in panic. But to our surprise, they were happy to see us, and not at all angry for our delay; they are happy customers of ours to this day.
In the first two years, the company tried to apply the internal design and development skills in many fields, and in most of them we didn't succeed. We tried internal design, shop design, palace surface decorations; we even tried to put up a company for Beer production! As developers, we tried to produce and sell promotional flash games, in particular a race game to Continental, but it didn't work out; this was unfortunate, as we had a starting agreement with Unit9, a London based company that produces beautiful promotional games.
But stil one of the constant focus was the idea of producing a good web based team management solution: this way teamwork 1 was released. Almost nobody knew that it existed, but it was pretty (we sold 1).
Anyway, we had a vision, and everything else follows from that.
"A dog's got personality: and personality goes a long way" - Pulp Fiction.
Caterina Feroci, Laura Mirri, Matteo Bicocchi and myself.
We all voluntarily dropped our previous jobs as they didn't seem to have any sense or direction. Our main am was to build beautiful web applications; we still do web applications, I don't know if they are any more that beautiful. They surely are quite practical.
It was great fun just to set up the company; we did most of the interior decoration of our office (in Via Venezia, in Florence center town) by ourselves, and everybody liked it; we did a great opening party, with live music in the office.
Matteo and myself started working together in 2000, when I was employed in another software house; we had fun, and that gave us the idea to start a new company. We had some potential customers, but when we started really setting up the company, we had so much to do, and we were so uncertain about the technology, that we kept telling our potential customers that we would meet later, and later, and later... . When we belived to be ready to start our bigger contract at the time (it was only 11.000 of today's Euros, but for us it was big money), we were months late; so we went to the customer in panic. But to our surprise, they were happy to see us, and not at all angry for our delay; they are happy customers of ours to this day.
In the first two years, the company tried to apply the internal design and development skills in many fields, and in most of them we didn't succeed. We tried internal design, shop design, palace surface decorations; we even tried to put up a company for Beer production! As developers, we tried to produce and sell promotional flash games, in particular a race game to Continental, but it didn't work out; this was unfortunate, as we had a starting agreement with Unit9, a London based company that produces beautiful promotional games.
But stil one of the constant focus was the idea of producing a good web based team management solution: this way teamwork 1 was released. Almost nobody knew that it existed, but it was pretty (we sold 1).
Anyway, we had a vision, and everything else follows from that.
"A dog's got personality: and personality goes a long way" - Pulp Fiction.
posted by Pietro Polsinelli at 9:30 PM
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