I can add a bit more color to this story as I was intimately involved in it.
I worked at the company that was bought by HP in Oregon and then later in Texas. It was called RLX technologies and created the first blade server. After it was purchased by HP I stayed on for a few months before moving on to a startup in Oregon. It seemed like a great idea as they moved me back to Oregon.
My best friend, who got me on at RLX after my first startup (NEI: high speed telecom startup) had crashed and burned, had taken a position at this startup in Oregon (we both were from there and had met after graduating from Oregon State). It seemed like a way to continue the work we had started at RLX and would get me back to Oregon. So win-win.
Long story short: the startup had issues and he moved on to found IMSafer. I would of liked to but needed to stay on for another 6 months, so I wouldn't have to pay back half of my moving expenses.
Once I finally moved on to IMSafer the company was still small with only 6 of us. It was a great time and we built something truly exciting and helpful. We had a wonderful time at the Techcrunch 40…, but that's a story for another time. :) I believe Paul knows this story too, as it was one of the big reasons we got into Ycombinator!
I will skip to the end as Jason supplied much of the interesting info and the color to that debacle. But, I will add, just as you don't count your chickens before they hatch you never, never invite your new 'partner' (board member, investors…whatever) to a board meeting until the money is in the bank.
Once the assets were sold only 2 of us stayed on with the new company that bought us. It was a trying time, but my best friend did get to move back to Oregon and it was just us, keeping a rather complicated site up and running while working on creating the 'new' product that was to make all the money.
While, at IMSafer we had realized that there could be big money in using this software in a more enterprise fashion. We realized that many virtual worlds for kids were popping up and they had use for software like this. He, I and another one of our friends from our old RLX days set out to create a real-time piece to the software that was much better at moderating less dangerous content like curse words, etc. It would quickly mark words they found objectionable and pass the text on to the more complicated software outside their enterprise to look for the truly dangerous things.
From the point that IMSafer crumbled to when he and I decided to leave or got fired…depends on who you are asking, we had grown the business to a million dollar run rate in 8-9 months. But, we had been bought by a startup and we had very different opinions on how to run it with the purchasing company…and we lost!
About that time we left/got fired we decided to do something new. Both of us had vary different experiences buying a new car and decided we wanted to fix that. After getting in a small fight with our former employees we got them to relinquish all rights to CarWoo! and proceeded to build it. At the time it seemed a bit crazy to fight for something that wasn't much more than a landing page and a bunch of crazy ideas, but in hind sight…seems like genius….I have decided to tell it as a stroke of genius!
After we got into Ycombinator we told Paul about this story and at the time he said it was the worst 'pulled funding' story he'd ever heard. It's possible he's heard worse since, but somehow I doubt it.
5 of the 6 of us were married at the time and 4 of us had children. As we were in the tussle over CarWoo!, which was almost nothing at the time my wife had our second child.
Tommy and I got our call that Ycombinator had accepted us while sitting in benchmark's parking lot in the spring of 2009. We had come full circle i guess you could say.
We moved down to Palo Alto, left our wife and kids behind for the time being and the rest is history.