About Us / Blog

Three years ago, Sherry and I had a glass of wine at Santana Row. We talked endlessly and excitedly about what was happening to the social web — It, the red-headed stepchild of the Internet was finally becoming mainstream.  Years of patrolling chat rooms for violators, building idea after idea of how email and the Internet could marry someday, trying to figure out the missing pieces between networking and social networking — it sent us spinning. And it sent us on our way to building our company from the germination of an idea — vertical, niche based social network focused on Family. 

We did it. We mortgaged our house to build our first product, Family Routes. We worked insane hours in a real garage (a true garage startup!), did the Sand Hill trial by fire and learned very fast about how quickly vertical SNs were taking off. We couldn’t move fast enough. Before we could think straight (heck, before we were incorporated), we got in front of the best attorney on the planet (AMC), got desks from Ikea and bootlegged a copy of Visio. Our product came alive in just under one year. We were in serious debt, but we were live with Family Routes, a private social network for families.

There were great successes with Family Routes. For several months we beat out our closest competitor (who had been funded for about $5 Million) on Alexa rankings, traffic and users; we got picked up in the press, got a lot of VC interest and gained our now CTO, Aaron. 

Our last blog post from Family Routes said: February 2 at 12:34 PM

February 2 at 12:34 PM

The Midnight Train

When we launched Family Routes last year (alpha in February, beta in March 2006), we set out to launch a proof of concept.

I have no idea how many times we went to the negotiating table for funding..angels and VCs…using terms and metrics we didn’t ever truly understand at the time. Eventually we decided that our “Proof of Concept” was actually something we were proving to ourselves.

After much thought, we took out home loans, maxed out credit cards and went for it. We believed in Family Routes. We believed in ourselves and we still do.

Almost one year has passed and with no marketing dollars (I mean, not one-single-solitary penny), no promotions, no frills, we have managed to lead the family social networking space. It is something we are truly proud of.

That said, Family Routes, as a technology, as the product it was built with on a tiny shoestring budget (think Equity Line!) has reached its capacity and needs to be overhauled. We’ve been waiting for the overhaul to become critical before we gave in to a rebuild, and now is the time.

In the past year, we’ve managed to take on four great clients. Each project just as interesting as the next. They are fun, challenging and fulfilling projects. But they are not our baby, our Family Routes. That said, this contracting firm we have built, is a great reminder that we are good at this stuff, this web stuff, this building of community stuff.

We’ve been putting a little bit of money aside each month to save for our rebuild of Family Routes. And we’re proud to say the time has come. We are going to rebuild inhouse, no offshoring this time (eeek, never again).

We expect the new site to be up by our one year anniversary. Our proof of concept has indeed become our proof.

The redesign never came to pass.  In the end, Josh Stein from DFJ (who I will always be grateful to for his honesty and integrity), sat me down and said, “The best business person is the one who knows when to call quits.” — we closed Family Routes that very day in March 2006.