I have been running Webvanta ever since, through all the usual startup ups and downs, restarts, pivots, and more. It has been a tough business, but it was really starting to hum last fall.

Then the world shifted. In October I was trying to ignore a nagging gut pain, which in early November was diagnosed as stage 4 intestinal cancer.

As my pain level increased, pain meds began affecting my state of mind, and medical appointments filled up half my week, it became apparent that continuing to run Webvanta was not something I could do much longer.

Personally, my top priority is to ensure continuity of service for all of our customers. The business needs more resources to do so reliably, so we have made the difficult decision to seek a buyer.

Webvanta’s client list is diverse. In addition to hundreds of small and midsize businesses, such as Macbeath Hardwood, Mr. Pickles, Payette Architects, and Olde Towne Jewelers, Webvanta has focused on educational institutions and mission-driven nonprofits.

Major education and nonprofit customers include the University of California (six different sites at UC Berkeley), the Nature Conservancy (casalmon.org), the Green Music Center, West County Health Centers, Music Academy of the West, and Ag Innovations.

A client list like this is impossible to build quickly — but this situation allows someone to acquire it instantly.

We are moving very quickly, as time is of the essence. We’re planning to identify all the interested bidders by the end of April and to close a deal in May.

If you’d like to learn more, email me at michael@webvanta.com, or call me at 888.670.6793 ext. 7.

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Webvanta has been so different from my previous startup, Fotiva. We financed Fotiva (originally called PhotoTablet) in early 2000, in the final days of the bubble. We had nothing but a PowerPoint deck, yet we raised considerably more money than Webvanta has raised, and at a higher valuation. Times certainly have changed.

Fotiva existed for less than two years from conception to the sale to Adobe. In retrospect, it was amazingly quick, though it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Webvanta has already been in business for longer than Fotiva’s entire existence, and we just now closed the Series A. We’ve had our product on the market for several months, we have paying customers, and we’re well on our way to 2.0. And we’ve done all this on a fraction of the capital that Fotiva consumed.

By building the company more gradually, instead of being urged on by the VC-driven “get big fast” mentality, we’ve been able to explore market opportunities and evolve our product strategy more naturally. Keeping the company small has had its challenges, but it’s also been empowering.

We’re well set for great growth in 2010. I’m grateful to everyone who has played a part in making this possible: my family, which has endured a dramatic reduction in my income along with long work hours; my business partner, Christopher Haupt, who has done most of the real work of building our product; our board members, David Hehman and Greg Seal, who have been extraordinarily supportive; the angel investors who have provided the capital; and the designers and site owners who have been our pioneering customers. Thanks!

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It was 10 years ago last week that the idea for PhotoTablet came to me—an Internet tablet that takes care of your pictures. The day that name came to mind, I bought the domain and started writing a business plan.

Four months later, I had quit my job, had $2 million in venture funding, and was building a team.

Another four months later, we realized that the tablet idea was not going to work (as a business), and we transformed into Fotiva—a PC software company.

Within a year, we were in discussions with Adobe about selling the business to them. We had the product nearly ready to take to market in the fall of 2001, but with venture funding in a serious drought, we didn’t have a lot of options.

Two years after conception of the idea, we completed the sale of the company to Adobe. In retrospect, it seems an incredibly short period, though it didn’t feel that way at the time.

Last month, Adobe laid off the last of the original Fotiva engineering team, marking the end of an era.

My Stint at Adobe

A year after the acquisition, the software we built at Fotiva debuted as Photoshop Album. After two more years, it was rolled into Photoshop Elements as the Organizer, where it lives on today in version 8.

In my first year at Adobe, I was focused on getting Fotiva’s software turned into a shipping product. After a year in product management, I moved into engineering, managing a small research team and doing technology acquisitions.

For five years, I tried to find or create a role at Adobe that I enjoyed, and I can’t say I ever really succeeded. Although there were some great times and lots of good people, my entrepreneurial spirit and Adobe’s big-company culture did not mesh well. In the fall of 2006, I left Adobe to focus on the Web—something that I found almost impossible to do at Adobe.

Adobe and the Web

From the start, the PhotoTablet/Fotiva vision was for software and an Internet service working in conjunction to deliver the complete product. After the acquisition, however, Adobe senior management was totally disinterested in the online aspect. After pushing on this issue on and off for a few years, I eventually got support for building an online photo service. A dozen people worked on it for nine months—and then Adobe decided not to fund its rollout.

Another year later, I tried again, and once again saw projects started and then canceled before shipping anything. About the time I left three years ago, yet another online effort was underway; I left because I had no confidence in the way it was being approached. This project too ended without shipping anything.

Finally, in 2008, Adobe delivered Photoshop.com. Aside from the “third time’s a charm” aspect, I think the reason Adobe was finally able to launch a photo service was that the driving force was the creation of a Flex showcase. Unfortunately, it was too late to make much of an impact.

Adobe had plenty of engineering folks with a passion for building web services for photography, and a few products have made it to market. But the heavy-weight process and infrastructure, combined with top management that is often unsupportive of web initiatives, has kept Adobe from being a significant player in the online photo world.

Team Shifts

As part of this web initiative that began in 2006, the Organizer code base that had its roots in Fotiva’s code was transferred to a team in India for future development. What remained of the engineering team that I had built, and which Adobe acquired, was redirected to work on Photoshop.com.

In some ways, this was a great opportunity for the team, but it also meant a loss of continuity in the Organizer development. The people who conceived and built multiple versions of the product were no longer responsible for it. The results have been predictably uninspiring, though whether this is due to the transfer to India or to an overall reduction in resources is hard to tell.

I no longer use Photoshop Elements Organizer, after leading its creation and importing more than 70,000 pictures. I just doesn’t perform well enough, and Lightroom is closer to my interests. (I use iPhoto for video clips, since Lightroom frustratingly doesn’t support them, but that’s another story.)

The Annual Purge

More years than not (since 2000), Adobe has conducted an annual purge of employees toward the end of the year. The past two years, this purge has been especially deep, driven no doubt by the sagging worldwide economy.

I understand the need to realign resources when strategies change. But the frequency and vigor with which Adobe rearranges and lays off people leaves a lot of casualties. Having worked there for five or ten years, produced consistently good work, and supported the company through previous transitions is not enough to keep your job when management shuffles priorities again.

I don’t want to get into the debate about the merits of offshore development, but it is a fact that almost all of the Fotiva engineers were eventually laid off, and their work moved to India.

The Power of a Small Company

Aside from my five years at Adobe, I’ve mostly run small companies. After leaving Adobe three years ago and starting Webvanta a year later, I’ve been struck again by the incredible efficiency advantage small companies have.

Two or three people, juggling half-a-dozen roles, can get more done than a team of ten at a big company like Adobe. The absence of the innovation antibodies that are an epidemic at Adobe is a huge boost, not to mention the elimination of most meetings.

But the most important difference of all is having the people with the ideas and passion be the same people making strategic decisions.

The post 10 Years Later: Thoughts on PhotoTablet/Fotiva/Adobe appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

On September 8 we officially launched Webvanta, and that’s kept me swamped. It’s going great, with about 35 sites up now, about a dozen more that we’re involved in building, and a steady stream of designers signing up. There’s hundreds of user accounts and dozens of sites being built by folks we don’t even know—it’s a great feeling to see it taking off.

The level of activity has noticeably picked up in the last few weeks, and the custom development side of our business now has about a 6-week backlog.

We’ve launched our first ecommerce site, and we’ll have another one launching within a week or two. We’re near completion of a large site for a local non-profit that is converting over from Drupal. This project has driven us to polish up a lot of loose ends with our information portal features, so many customers will benefit.

We also recently announced the Webvanta Design Contest—we’re giving away a MacBook Pro for the most innovative site built with Webvanta, plus three iPod Touches for the runners up. Please help us spread the word!

The post Webvanta Update appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

Facebook has “pages” for businesses, which are like profiles, but for non-humans. This seems like a good idea, but they’re missing some core features to support the way businesses work.

For example, it appears to be impossible to remove the person who originally created the page as an admin. So if someone creates your Facebook page and then leaves the company, well, too bad, they still have access to modify the page.

I’m not alone in this concern. There’s a discussion thread on this issue in their so-called help that has posts by 73 people, going back two and half months, all struggling with this problem. No one from Facebook has replied, and no one has proposed a fix.

There’s plenty of other ugly corners. When I try to change the profile image for the Webvanta page, for example, it takes me to the profile picture for my personal page.

Because we have less than 1,000 fans, we can’t get a vanity URL, so the URL for our page is the lovely http://www.facebook.com/pages/Webvanta/70984967800?v=wall&viewas=0. (For my personal page, I was able to get www.facebook.com/mzslater.)

Facebook clearly has lots of work left to do before they’re really ready for businesses. But with more than 200 million users, they have their hands full, and they’re riding a tidal wave, so I doubt they’re worrying about it too much. And, of course, there’s no way to actually contact anyone and get a question answered.

The platform is full of awkward bits like this, and I’d like to say that someone will step in and do a better job and displace them, but the reality is that they have reached critical mass in terms of user adoption, and the vast number of people on Facebook is going to make it very hard to displace. As a business, if you want to participate in social marketing, you need to go where the people are, so you really have no choice about whether to go elsewhere.

My request for Facebook: please charge me $100/year for having a business page, and use that money to provide appropriate features and a support line. Or take some of that $200 million you just got from the Russian investors and use it to provide better support.

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I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the last three months that it’s been an incredibly challenging time to raise capital. We began our active fundraising with a presentation at the North Bay Angels on September 18, a day when a Wall Street Journal headline read, Worst financial crisis since ‘30s, with no end in sight. And things got worse, much worse, from there.

The freezing of credit markets, followed by the stock market collapse and the widespread economic malaise, made investors of all stripes extremely risk-averse. This week’s treasure-bill interest rate of 0% is the latest indication of the conservatism that pervades today’s investment climate. Many people are focused not on getting a return on their investments, but on simply preserving their capital.

Despite all this, we kept moving forward, refocusing on a smaller convertible debt financing instead of a Series A offering. We worked closely with several members of the North Bay Angels to craft terms that addressed their concerns about investing in these challenging times.

Today we closed the financing. I’m honored by the trust that our investors have placed in us. It is so easy these days to simply say “no” to any investment proposition. I am grateful to the intrepid souls who chose to support our efforts and say “yes.”

I’m thrilled to be able to put a renewed focus on moving the business forward; raising capital is always a big distraction, and in this climate, it was a huge distraction. Although we hope to raise additional capital in the future, we’ve structured the business in a way that it is not dependent on future capital infusions to survive.

The opportunity in front of us is tremendous: no matter what happens to the economy, the web will continue to be a crucial tool for businesses and organizations of all kinds, and we offer them a lower-cost way to gain more benefit from it. We believe that the way most web sites are built is overdue for a massive shift to software as a service, and we have a powerful platform to enable this shift.

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Webvanta is a hosted platform that enables anyone to build content-rich, database-backed web sites with all the cool Web 2.0 features, without programming. We think of it as content management system + KnowledgeBase + community.

If you want to build a site that communicates your knowledge about a particular topic and fosters a community of interest, we believe Webvanta is the best solution available.

We’ve found our initial traction with information portal sites, but you can build nearly any type of site using the platform. In the coming months, we’ll be expanding the features to enable more drag-and-drop design, as well as even richer KnowledgeBase features, e-commerce capabilities, and more.

Looking for Custom Projects

Webvanta is self-service, and you can do everything yourself, within the limits of the platform. But we’re also looking for custom site creation work that builds upon the platform.

We’ve found that with our experience in building sites, we can greatly accelerate a company’s time-to-market by helping them think through the structure of their KnowledgeBase. And because we are intimately familiar with the platform and have lots of experience building sites with it, we can implement custom designs very quickly. We can also develop custom extensions to provide features that aren’t available to self-service customers.

The post Webvanta is Live! A Great Solution for Rich Content Sites appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

This came just as my startup company, Webvanta, has been pitching angel investor groups and putting together a Series A financing. The financial crisis has obviously made this process more difficult. It will take us longer to close the financing, and we’ll probably do it in a couple of stages. But we will make it through. We don’t have a high overhead to support, and we’re deeply committed to doing whatever it takes to succeed.

In terms of the market for our service (vs. the market for investment dollars), tough financial times don’t trouble us much; in such times, our service will be even more attractive to our customers because it slashes the up-front costs of having an effective web site.

Clearly the situation is bad. The fear is building on itself and making things even worse. The folks who are tasked with trying to stop the downward spiral have an unenviable job. As an entrepreneur, my job is relatively simple: keep pushing forward, and ensure that, above all, the company survives, so we can prosper in the good times that will eventually follow.

As our investor, board member, and staunch supporter David Hehman is fond of saying, Perseverance Through Adversity Leads to Success.

Warnings Galore from Investors

You can read all the gloom and doom predictions you can take by picking up your daily newspaper. Of more interest to entrepreneurs than the mainstream press are the writings of various folks in the startup community. The first was a lengthy piece by Jason Calacanis, The Startup Depression, which first went to his “private” email list but was later posted to his site. It seemed pretty severe at the time, but a few days later it started to seem almost reasonable.

In the past two weeks, there’s been a series of warnings coming from leading investors, giving advice to their companies. These were meant to be private communications, but with plenty of well connected bloggers eager to publish, anything that goes out to a sizable list doesn’t stay private for long.

Ron Conway’s email to the companies in which he has invested, titled IMPORTANT PLEASE READ ASAP …..REGARDING CURRENT MARKET CONDITIONS…, was the first such memo to be leaked. The core of Conway’s message is this:

“The message is simple. Raising capital will be much more difficult now.

You should lower your “burn rate” to raise at least 3-6 months or more of funding via cost reductions, even if it means staff reductions and reduced marketing and G&A expenses. This is the equivalent to “raising an internal round” through cost reductions to buy you more time until you need to raise money again; hopefully when fund raising is more feasible. Letting go of staff is hard and often gut wrenching. A re-evaluation of timelines and re-focus on milestones with the eye of doing more with less will allow you to live many more days, and the name of the game in this environment in somerespects is survival–survival until conditions change.”

Even more dire in tone was Sequoia Capital’s Doomsday Meeting. This was an in-person, emergency meeting that the CEOs of all of Sequoia’s portfolio companies were required to attend. It was supposed to be private, but notes from the meeting, as well as the slides themselves, soon made it on to the web.

Prudent, or Self-Serving?

These missives have provoked a variety of reactions. From my perspective, you can’t blame investors for wanting to do what they can to help their portfolio companies survive, and it is clear that there’s hard times ahead. Valuations are going to fall, with some of the drop attributable to the genuine change in exit opportunities and prices, and some of it due to investors taking advantage of the crisis to get better deals. That’s just how the system works.

Venture investor Fred Wilson’s Don’t Shoot the Messenger responds to some of the criticism, and the comments to his post are well worth reading for an assortment of opinions.

The best way to manage a company is indeed different in boom times than in downturns, and investors are appropriately concerned that entrepreneurs won’t adjust quickly enough. After all, being an optimist is a necessary characteristic for creating a new business. We’ve come to a point, however, where we need to be a little pessimistic about the near term to ensure our survival, so we can continue to be optimistic for the long term.

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At the beginning of Startup Camp, each company gives a lightning talk describing itself. The format is like the Ignite events: 20 slides, which are automatically advanced every 20 seconds, giving you about seven minutes total. It’s a demanding and inspiring format.

I started with an edit of my standard pitch but decided that there really was no point in having word slides at this speed. Spurred on by the book “Back of the Napkin,” I’ve been creating illustrations to anchor each slide. It’s a little daunting how easy it is to spend two hours on a slide that’s going to be shown for 20 seconds, but it’s a great discipline for really clarifying your thinking and figuring out what your main points are and how best to communicate them.

Another great thing about Startup Camp is that getting into it also grants admission to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, which immediately follows it. Foo Camp invitations are highly coveted, thanks to the incredible collection of people that it gathers and the wonderfully free-form way the even unfolds.

The post Startup Camp This Week appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

Of course, the electronic information flood is now far larger than the paper flood ever was. Fortunately, we have better tools for dealing with it. But I’ve found it non-trivial to find a way to use those tools that really works for me.

A couple years ago, I decided to get serious about reading the blogosphere, and I accumulated a long list of interesting feeds. This quickly became untenable, however; opening your feed reader to find 10,000 new posts is downright depressing, and leads to a quick exit. And with plenty of email every day, it was all too easy never to even get to the feed reader, especially knowing that once I went there, the flood would be overwhelming.

I started having the feeds from a few key sources emailed to me instead, and I found that this prodded me to actually read those. This approach worked for a while, until I found that I was missing too much stuff from feeds that weren’t being emailed to me, and that the emails were becoming tiresome. Among other issues, a feed reader is a much better interface to a list of posts than is an email message with a string of posts in it.

In the past few weeks, I’ve switched my approach again. I created a category in my feed reader called “Top”, and moved into that category the two-dozen or so feeds I care the most about. I stopped all feeds being emailed to me, so now I’m drawn to the feed reader each morning, as the feeds I’ve become accustomed to reading aren’t in my mail any more. And I create a sort of “feed amnesty,” setting all messages in all feeds to “read,” so I could track just the new stuff from now on.

So far, this is working really well. I at least skim all of my top feeds almost every day, and I find I can keep up with them pretty easily. And if I find myself with a little more time for news reading, I’ll dive into one of the other feed categories, with feeds that didn’t make the “top” cut. Feeds like engadget, which is interesting but not critical for me and has dozens of new posts in a typical day, I have given up on reading.

For me, a big part of this is accepting that there’s just no way I’m going to keep up with as much stuff as I’d like. What has helped me a lot is to make the decision up front—here’s what I’m going to keep up with, and here’s what I’ll keep in my feed reader but not expect to read regularly.

I also find it helpful to be ruthless about what subjects I’m going to track, and which I’m not. My top interests vary with time, but whatever they are at the moment, I try to just ignore most everything else. It’s narrowing, in a way, but for me it’s been the only way to keep up with those things that seem most important.

As for watching the Twitter stream—I have to admit I’m mostly not doing it. That’s another blog post, but for me, most of the time, getting short, frequent updates from lots of people just feels like too much information.

How do you deal with the information firehose?

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