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Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

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Brad Fuller

Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

Great to hear that Dabble DB has raised some $. This is great news for
Squeak and Seaside (I assume you are running Squeak, correct me if I'm
wrong.)
I hope that this gives a significant push to Squeak/Seaside in the press.

Blog from GigaOM (http://gigaom.com/feed/)

Dabble DB, a Vancouver-based online database / hosted application
creation company has raised around $2 million dollars in Series A
venture funding from Ventures West, a Canadian VC fund. Paul Kedrosky, a
venture partner with the fund, is leading the investment in the
eighteen-month-old company. The company will also come out of “beta”
tomorrow.
“I think it is a great platform for building data centric apps,” says
Kedrosky. His logic - Dabble DB is selling “picks and shovels” in this
Web 2.0 boom. They have already garnered quite a few paying customers,
and perhaps this new round of financing will help them scale their
operations. Dabble DB falls under the same category as say a Ning:
companies that help build on-the-fly web apps.
The company was started by Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton, both first time
entrepreneurs. DabbleDB has received some good reviews. I plan to spend
some time looking at Dabble DB later. I might be wrong, but my guess is
that these kind of offerings could have a similar impact on online-app
creation as Visual Basic Studio did for the Microsoft and its ecosystem.
(Guys, correct me if I am off base!)

--
brad
sonaural

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Avi Bryant

Re: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

On Jun 26, 2006, at 10:00 PM, Brad Fuller wrote:

> Great to hear that Dabble DB has raised some $. This is great news for
> Squeak and Seaside (I assume you are running Squeak, correct me if I'm
> wrong.)

We sure ain't running Ruby on Rails... ;)

Avi
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Brad Fuller

Re: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

Avi Bryant wrote:
>
> On Jun 26, 2006, at 10:00 PM, Brad Fuller wrote:
>
>> Great to hear that Dabble DB has raised some $. This is great news for
>> Squeak and Seaside (I assume you are running Squeak, correct me if I'm
>> wrong.)
>
> We sure ain't running Ruby on Rails... ;)
>
HA!
I was referring if it was VW or Squeak.

--
brad
sonaural

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Cees De Groot

Re: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

In reply to this post by Brad Fuller

On 6/27/06, Brad Fuller <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Great to hear that Dabble DB has raised some $.

Cool! Avi&Andrew - congrats and good luck!
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Boris Popov, DeepCove Labs (SNN)

RE: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

Exciting times for Smalltalk indeed, good job guys!

Forgive me for asking all the wrong questions though, but I couldn't help
wondering how your pitch about bootstrapping the startup at this year's StS
plays into all of this? It certainly sounded like a well-thought out plan
(and very close to being realized), did something change that you weren't
anticipating perhaps? Something that others considering a similar approach
should be preparing for?

Thanks!

-Boris

--
+1.604.689.0322
DeepCove Labs Ltd.
4th floor 595 Howe Street
Vancouver, Canada V6C 2T5

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-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Cees De
Groot
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 12:08 AM
To: The Squeak Enterprise Aubergines Server - general discussion.
Subject: Re: [Seaside] Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

On 6/27/06, Brad Fuller <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Great to hear that Dabble DB has raised some $.

Cool! Avi&Andrew - congrats and good luck!
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Avi Bryant

Re: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

On Jun 27, 2006, at 7:30 AM, Boris Popov wrote:

> Exciting times for Smalltalk indeed, good job guys!
>
> Forgive me for asking all the wrong questions though, but I
> couldn't help
> wondering how your pitch about bootstrapping the startup at this
> year's StS
> plays into all of this? It certainly sounded like a well-thought
> out plan
> (and very close to being realized), did something change that you
> weren't
> anticipating perhaps? Something that others considering a similar
> approach
> should be preparing for?

It's just a matter of timing. Taking VC earlier - before we had a
working product and paying customers - would definitely have been
"premature optimization", as we said in our talk. There's also no
way we would have gotten the same terms we ended up with if we hadn't
bootstrapped most of the way. Doing without it entirely would have
been possible but painful. Like any optimization problem
generalities only get you so far; you have to profile the specific
case. We did. One relevant note: support costs are, say, O(log(N))
in the number of customers but revenues are O(N), so those low values
of N are expensive...

I intend to write a blog post about this, but ultimately we look at
this as "make it work, make it right, make it fast". We spent a long
time in those first two stages (pre-beta and then beta), we're now
into the third and the cost/benefit ratio of taking some money (as of
optimizing) is quite different.

Finally, we just genuinely liked Paul Kedrosky and David McIntyre at
Ventures West much more than we ever expected to. For a couple of
VCs, they're great guys (how's that for a backhanded compliment...).
Personal chemistry plays a huge part in building a company.

Nonetheless it was pretty funny giving that talk knowing that this
was coming - we had prepared the abstract well before, of course, and
were bound by confidentiality agreements so couldn't change it.

Avi

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timrowledge

Re: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

On 27-Jun-06, at 3:03 PM, Avi Bryant wrote:

>
>
> I intend to write a blog post about this, but ultimately we look at
> this as "make it work, make it right, make it fast".
I'm so happy to see this meme cropping up more and more. I (to the
best of my knowledge) first coined this way of explaining engineering
in a nutshell for Smalltalk classes I taught 20 years ago.
"Rowledge's Rule" is my little attempt on immortality :-)

tim
--
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Strange OpCodes: HEM: Hide Evidence of Malfunction

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Sebastián Sastre

RE: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

In reply to this post by Brad Fuller

Thats great news. I think you are an example. Congratulations. I wish all
the best for all of you and your work.

Cheers,

Sebastian Sastre

> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: [hidden email]
> [mailto:[hidden email]] En nombre
> de Brad Fuller
> Enviado el: Martes, 27 de Junio de 2006 02:00
> Para: The Squeak Enterprise Aubergines Server - general
> discussion.; [hidden email]
> Asunto: [Seaside] Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M
>
> Great to hear that Dabble DB has raised some $. This is great
> news for Squeak and Seaside (I assume you are running Squeak,
> correct me if I'm
> wrong.)
> I hope that this gives a significant push to Squeak/Seaside
> in the press.
>
> Blog from GigaOM (http://gigaom.com/feed/)
>
>
> Dabble DB, a Vancouver-based online database / hosted
> application creation company has raised around $2 million
> dollars in Series A venture funding from Ventures West, a
> Canadian VC fund. Paul Kedrosky, a venture partner with the
> fund, is leading the investment in the eighteen-month-old
> company. The company will also come out of beta
> tomorrow.
> I think it is a great platform for building data centric
> apps, says Kedrosky. His logic - Dabble DB is selling picks
> and shovels in this Web 2.0 boom. They have already garnered
> quite a few paying customers, and perhaps this new round of
> financing will help them scale their operations. Dabble DB
> falls under the same category as say a Ning:
> companies that help build on-the-fly web apps.
> The company was started by Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton, both
> first time entrepreneurs. DabbleDB has received some good
> reviews. I plan to spend some time looking at Dabble DB
> later. I might be wrong, but my guess is that these kind of
> offerings could have a similar impact on online-app creation
> as Visual Basic Studio did for the Microsoft and its ecosystem.
> (Guys, correct me if I am off base!)
>
>
>
> --
> brad
> sonaural
>
> _______________________________________________
> Seaside mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

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Brad Fuller

Re: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

In reply to this post by timrowledge

tim Rowledge wrote:

>
> On 27-Jun-06, at 3:03 PM, Avi Bryant wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> I intend to write a blog post about this, but ultimately we look at
>> this as "make it work, make it right, make it fast".
> I'm so happy to see this meme cropping up more and more. I (to the
> best of my knowledge) first coined this way of explaining engineering
> in a nutshell for Smalltalk classes I taught 20 years ago. "Rowledge's
> Rule" is my little attempt on immortality :-)
>

I'll remember Rowledge's Rule. It's good. I like it.

We (myself and two others) coined a term at Atari for a new method to
develop successful games. In a nutshell, 1 in 10 arcade games really
made it to the market as a "hit." The particular problem was that it was
very difficult to tell if a game was going to be popular or not. You
never really knew until it was developed, built and put in an arcade.
Development of each game was expensive. At the lab, everyone certainly
had their ideas on the proper ingredients of a successful game. Some
indications of a popular game were the ones that were played often in
the lab. Developers that had track records were not always the ones with
the next big hit. We even instituted "walk abouts" where every month on
a Friday afternoon all labs were open to play games and critiqued in a
friendly, lively atmosphere - that info was fed back to the game team.
However you must get the game developed, built and out there in the
arcade to gather statistics and watch people play.

On the premise that 1 out of 10 games made it, an expensive proposition,
we came up with a quick-develop method that we called "Find Failures
Fast" or "F-cubed." And that's just the idea: get the puppy developed
quickly so players can get the idea of the game. If they don't like it,
dump it and start over.

The Rowledge Rule reminds me of F-cubed.

brad
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Yanni Chiu

Re: Congrats to Dabble DB raising ~$2M

In reply to this post by Avi Bryant

Avi Bryant wrote:
> Nonetheless it was pretty funny giving that talk knowing that this was
> coming - we had prepared the abstract well before, of course, and were
> bound by confidentiality agreements so couldn't change it.

Congrats, and I hope the VC's don't mess up a good thing (as is
their reputation). And thanks for blazing the trail, once again.
Hopefully more Smalltalk/Seaside is on the way.

BTW, I figured something was up, due to the long beta period,
and relative silence of late. My figuring was that big-$ were
on the table to buy the product, before the launch. But in
hindsight, notwithstanding the STS'06 talk, the VC funding is
a much more practical outcome.

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