Mike-O-Matic

When I graduated from college in May of 2001, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to end up. Like most kids who were a little wet behind the ears, I still thought that the Internet Gold Rush was in full swing. A number of my good friends had dropped out and found themselves in nice high 5-figure jobs with little more to show in the way of skills than ratty corduroys and a fondness for PHP. Naturally I thought having the degree would be enough to secure a decent job; turns out I was wrong. After striking out on a number of interviews my senior year, including a promising one at a secretive converted homestead in Cupertino, I was jobless heading into May.

My dad had been working up in Albany, NY, for a few years running a distribution company, and during this time he met an entrepreneur running a small ISV called FNet that specialized in warehouse management software. Eventually this man, named Ted, was able to convince him to come aboard and head up the sales effort. I had started talking to my dad a lot during the job search and our conversations often came back to FNet and the interesting work they were doing. My father had spent almost 30 years in distribution and logistics and he was certain that the FNet’s Portal products could make a lot of sense for the industry. In time I started to become really interested in the company as well; a quick conversation with Ted just before graduation and I had a new job.

I moved up to the NY Capital Region at the end of the month and lived in a spare room in my dad’s house. The next day we drove into the office at a local college’s incubator center, which was housed in a former school for wayward girls from the turn of the (last) century. Our specific offices consisted of the old chapel (stained glass and all) and two rooms across the hall that became the ”Executive Suite.”

It is always unusual starting your first real job. You really don’t know what to expect. I thought I would have a hand in solving big strategic problems of the sort my father and I had talked about over the phone; marketing, product positioning, and a little coding on the side to get the juices flowing. Seems I was misinformed. I was plopped down in front of a computer and given some simple tasks to complete, making web pages utilizing Oracle’s XSQL servlet, XSLT, and a little JSP for the interactive parts. It took me a while to figure out what a database does, nevermind how to connect to it; fortunately Ted and the other two coders, Viktor and Scott, were willing teachers and I was able to get up to speed in weeks.

Fnet life was undoubtably like that at many other small product-based companies. We typically coded for 8 to 10 hours a day using a mixture of languages and tools. The applications were originally built to manage warehouses, and the company had started coding them before they had a customer; many of the features were based on reading documentation for other systems similar to ours on legacy platforms and converting them to the web. Ted was a former Oracle project manager, so our system was based on that database. On the front end we used a combination of XML/XSLT for pages that were primarily display-oriented and JSP/Java for ones that involve interactive elements. Ted, perhaps due to his background, had designed the system to make extensive use of the database for all business logic; all updates were performed in stored procedures, users got individual Oracle usernames and passwords, and all queries were run through user-centric views. This pattern made certain things more complicated than they needed to be, but did ensure robust data security in a database to be used by multiple companies.

The company started on a promising note. After completing development of the first version of the product, the company submitted its business plan to a prestigious competition hosted by Hewlett-Packard and won; the prize was a huge HP-UX rackmount server. The thing weighed a ton, and we had to wheel it around the whole incubator complex to get to the elevator, one of those 1900 era elevators with the cage and the raised mechanical buttons. It became our production server and heated the chapel all winter.

Sales took a while to catch up to this promise, however. At first the company worked mostly by word of mouth, taking on a customer here and a customer there. The original business plan was for the company to lease warehouse space and use the technology we had developed to provide third-party logistics services but this was slow to develop. The plan introduced by my dad (and codified in the award-winning business plan) was to instead provide software on an ASP model to customers to run their own warehouses. We eventually released an online store component (largely written by yours truly) that let customers create online stores from their warehouse inventory, and let orders be entered directly into their warehouse system. This was able to attract a handful of customers, but much of the time we were building new functionality to land a specific customer rather than pushing our platform as is.

In time, my dad was able to come up with a good and under-attended market: school cafeterias.

For more of the story, please read Part 2.

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