While I was researching Philip Greenspun, there was a bit of information that grabbed my attention. He had started 6 large companies. Although he had to give up on 3 of them, I was interested in learning more about the companies he started. I chose to look deeper into the story behind ArsDigita. This was a company he started not by accident, but by a need he saw in the market. It started off as photo.net, which was a place he posted a bunch of pictures he took while in Alaska. People saw them and wanted to know more about how he took them or if they could get a picture similar to his. People were able to ask questions and then eventually other people were able to go on and answer other than Philip as well. He talked about one of the reasons they were able to succeed against a major corporation such as IBM was because he was able to know what the customers need better than anyone. This was their golden ticket because people were literally telling him what they wanted/needed on his website.
However, although the company was doing extremely well, people wanted it go public. In order for it to go public Philip was told he needed to get venture capital money. Basically what ended up happening when he did this was the company began to fail. The venture capitalists came in with no understanding of what was actually making the company successful. They ended up firing Philip and 4 of the 5 original founders. They cared more about what the people were wearing and how they could talk rather than the results or ideas they had. The venture capitalists were certain that this company was doing things the wrong way because it was total opposite of how IBM was doing things. When in fact, this was the exact reason the company was doing so well- Philip knew this. If someone wanted a company like IBM, they could easily just go to IBM themselves. If ArsDigita tried to be like IBM, they would perform worse than them because they had much less money and resources behind them. Philip was the one who did all the selling, talking, programming, and everything else, but because they didn't like the way he went about it they got rid of him. This is ultimately what caused the demise of the company because they lacked what Philip knew that made the company a success when he was in charge.