A sticker from 2014
This is a sticker from a visit Lowell and I made to Weebly headquarters. The sticker is adhered to the back of a magazine, or if I remember correctly, the back page of one of those small-format airport-style crossword puzzle books that have “easy”, “medium” and “hard” puzzles in them, and often other kinds of puzzles as well like word jumbles and acrostics. Doing crossword puzzles on an airplane calms me. I’m pretty sure the purpose of the sticker was to be used as an “admittance badge” and that we got it at Weebly’s front desk. Examining it now, what I find odd is that is has our combined names on it rather than a separate one for each of us.
A few years after we started Schedulista, Lowell and I almost sold the company. We ultimately received offers from GoDaddy and Weebly. GoDaddy was really eager to buy and we had a general idea of the range they’d be willing to pay. Weebly was our secondary (BATNA), as they say) and we flew down to Frisco to meet with David Russenko, Weebly’s founder and CEO.
David gave us a tour and told us a few interesting stories. IIRC: He recounted how three of them started the company while still in college, and after some initial investment they ran out of money. The investors wanted to liquidate. But David was convinced that Weebly had potential and could make money and so he and another cofounder continued on, in a sense, he said that they “started over as a bootstrapped company”.
David was sharp and energetic. I was impressed. I remember that everything I said he would ask for some detail about it. For example, when I mentioned that a long time back I’d worked a little bit on the Linux networking stack, he asked me what the kernel version had been. I had no idea and I remember afterwards I felt bad that I didn’t know. But looking back on it now, heck, there are so many details about just about everything that I don’t remember.
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