I started out with Linuxcare as the second real employee (if you go alphabetically). There were the three founders; Art, Dave, and Dave. Then there were Ed, Bryan, and I. We first worked out of our homes and had staff meetings at the VC offices. To say we were childlike, having fun, watching where Linux was going, would not even sum up the feelings. Soon, we reached our first real zenith and got a real office over at 650 Townsend, SF. Our first office was this tiny room and I have memories of a group of support people sitting around in a small room watching the phones ring around through their hunt group and desperately trying to catch it. Ed and I had come from the GAP, Inc. So did Art and a few others that ended up there. We also had Dave Mandela who setup our first network and uttered one of the more funny statements during our first days. One day when trying to do something online, Dave stood up and demanded to know “who was taking the bandwidth?” We all looked and around and pointed out we were all NAT’ed to the small ricochet modem so there was no real bandwidth to be had. Almost the next day, DavidM was busy stringing CAT5 cable and building our first network.
I remember working for DavidM on this web project awhile and Edward Tast and I built these Sun boxes. We got the boxes racked and stacked and DavidM asked whether we had installed the memory and disk drive upgrades he had ordered. Of course, we found tiny little boxes all packed separately and had to go unrack and unstack. It was probably funny after and maybe even during :).
Another memory I have was first building the lab at Linuxcare. We had a weekend to build it and the next Monday HP was coming from France. We spent the weekend assembling it, making it look like a lab. Ned then said it looked too neat. We decided to let Duncan Mackinnon loose on it. Soon it looked much like any other corner of the big room. Funnily enough though, when we powered up all the servers, the lights dimmed in the building.
People will also remember that Linuxcare gave away cars, bug stickers, strange doodads, and a really mighty little CD that could rescue, create, move, copy, ssh. It was one of the more wondrous of little tools that I still use to this day.
I did my duty there in Professional Services too; so I managed to support a number of enterprise clients like IBM, Dell, HP, Sun. We did pretty nice consulting gigs with most of them and for almost 1.5 years I managed the technical relationship with Dell Computers. To this day, I still have Linkedin links to people that I once worked with. The Dell thing was the most fun though.
Then there came the hard times. Layoffs, ruined mergers, more layoffs. In December 2001 I left under a severance package. Then I came back in 2006. It was like I never really learned the lesson that “you can never go back again”. But I also met some amazing people. People like Phil, Simon, DaveR, Kurt, Jeremy, and others. But I think Levanta was star-crossed in its own right. It never knew what it wanted to be and its failure was etched in the stars. You simply cannot live that long without a compelling vision. So I left again in December 2006. It was 5 years later almost to the day of the first severance. I was able to tell Dan Lee there that he should feel honored. He got to sever me twice from the same company in the same month with 5 years inbetween.
So, why all this memory and happenstance? Because Levanta is gone dear reader. I will miss it and what it might have been; but I’ll never miss a whole subset of the cast of characters who thought they were above the laws of space and time. No you were not as it turns out. You made the failure as much as if you drove the car. You simply cannot run the company like its your personal kingdom. Sorry. So, it will be gone and people will wonder whether it was good or bad.
It was neither. Like most cultural and social entities it was a bit of both. Its been almost 9 years of the company either known as Levanta or Linuxcare. I’ll miss one and hardly notice the passing of the other.
Faretheewell.
