Hey Dan

There are times in you life you get to do amazing things. Believing in your self and the people around you makes a magic happen. A small band of passionate people doing what they love can do great things. The times you can say “I am proud I was part of that.”

A little under 5 years ago, a good friend named Steve called me and asked if I was looking for a job. He had just started at this start-up company. Seven guys had something they thought was cool. It was not even a real product yet. They had very little real idea of what they wanted to do, but they wanted to try. So I went and interviewed.

It was the most unfair interview, by the end I would have gone to work for free. I did not even know what they made. The passion and drive I saw, was amazing and I wanted to be a part of it. They offered me a job and I took it. Two weeks latter on July 6th I started work.

I was lost, there was so much to do and so much I did not know. My first day I crashed the 1st ever lab prototype server. By the end of the day I was mortified, I felt completely over my head. I remember driving home many nights thinking if I could just figure this or that out. Reading everything I could get my hands on.

One night I worked on something for hours, it just was not working, reproducing my steps over and over. The nature of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I was proving that. 2 am that morning I woke up out of a dead sleep with the answer. I could not wait to get back into work, I must have shown up at 6am waiting for someone else to show up. I pulled up what I had been working on and the solution worked! You could not have found a more excited group of people.

That was the way most days at that company were. Some days you had the answers and someday you struggled. There was no one to call for help, it was just you and these brave souls to solve what ever came up. I was employee number 11.

Two years latter we had 70+ and were growing to fast to keep up. That was the problem. I can explain what happened and why, you see I knew what was really going on. We all worked together, the CEO down to the guy that handled freight, we were in this together. That is why it was no surprise, when we started to run out of capital. The company was merged with our competitor a couple of month latter.

We lost a lot of really great people in the merge, and tried to adjust. Looking back I think we could not have known how long that road would be. In the couple of years following we have lost more of those people every couple of months. Some found other dreams, some just could not fit in to a culture that does not understand being so excited about working somewhere you would have work for free. This week we are losing all but a hand full. Once again I am proud to have been number among those people…

So I am unemployed, but at the moment I feel the story of Netier Technologies is more important to tell. That is the amazing thing I helped build, and to the end of my days it will be more then a company or a product some one can buy.