So Download Squad seems to think we’re some sort of photo-sharing loser. I’ve seen this story so many times, it’s not even funny. Let me recount a few of the Silicon Valley’s best. There are plenty more, but I’ll leave those as an exercise to the reader.

In 1995, Pierre Omidyar founded eBay. Prior to eBay, he worked for my partner, Chris MacAskill, at General Magic, who left to start fatbrain.com. Pierre spent years of gruelling effort getting eBay off the ground – no venture capitalists would touch it. Why? It was a flea market, a haven for junk – or so they thought. eBay was an also-ran to OnSale. OnWho?

Over at Stanford, Larry and Sergey founded Google. The Valley was shocked and amused that anyone wanted to enter the search engine space, let alone a tiny startup. Hadn’t Altavista and Yahoo! already fought this war? Silly PhDs, right? Who’s laughing now?

Every year we’ve been ‘also-ran’ to someone different. In the first year big brands, like Adobe, Canon, and Microsoft all shut their sites down. In the second, the P2P photo-sharing apps flamed out. In the third year, we were ‘also-ran’ to sites that ran out of money and got acquired. Now look who’s first out with hot new features.

smugmug’s less than three years old, and I’m positive that our sales and profitability are ahead of both eBay’s and Google’s at the same age. We’re profitable, have no outside investment or debt, and have possibly the best customer service on the web. Best of all, we’re all having a great time building a great company.

Gandhi maybe said it best: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Just look at eBay, Google, and smugmug.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 12:48 pm and is filed under smugmug. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.