Excerpts from the Innovation Economy blog.
Ray Ozzie e-mailed last week to let me know he has a post-Microsoft start-up, and he is hiring. But aside from mentioning that the company is called Cocomo and doesn’t yet have an office of its own, he did not want to divulge much.
Ozzie is perhaps best known as creator of the 1990s collaboration software Lotus Notes, and more recently as the person Bill Gates chose to succeed him as Microsoft’s chief software architect in 2006. Ozzie spent four years in that role.
Ozzie wrote that Cocomo is “being bootstrapped with a few folks that I’ve worked with before. In the short term, I probably won’t be posting much more than ‘they’re recruiting,’ because the team won’t be ready to talk about what they’re working on for some months.’’
When I asked more about whether Ozzie was an adviser to the new company or part of the founding team, he replied: “I’m devoting the vast majority of my attention right now in helping to get the project off the ground with the team, so yes, in that respect I founded it and am part of the founding team. That said, it’s a really strong set of players who are quite capable of doing and growing this on their own; quite fun.’’
It seems that former Microsoft executive Matt Pope is also a cofounder of Cocomo. Ransom Richardson, another former Microsoftie based in Boston, is also part of the team.
Cocomo’s first public job posting seeks a lead user interface designer with extensive mobile experience. But it does not describe the company’s focus in any detail, saying only that Cocomo is building “a new communications product for this new world . . . We aspire to deliver compelling tools for social interaction that people will use, value and love.’’
Ozzie wouldn’t say if the company has raised any money. While still without office space, most team members are in Boston.
Via e-mail, Don Dodge, a Google executive who worked alongside Ozzie at Groove and at Microsoft, wrote:
“I think times have changed significantly, but I’m not sure Ray has. Ray is a big thinker [who tends to work on] big ideas that take years to develop, and more years to sell and get to scale. That worked well for Lotus Notes and to some degree for Groove, but I don’t see many recent examples of success using that model. Today everything is mobile, social, games, and small apps. Not exactly the sweet spot for Ray. But, he is one of the smartest guys I know, so he will probably come up with something interesting.’’
Start-up powers down
AutoVirt, a Nashua start-up that sought to simplify the process of “migrating’’ corporate data from one storage system to another, closed its doors in December. Résumés have started circulating, founder Klavs Landberg is searching for his next gig, and the company is seeking to sell its intellectual property.
AutoVirt once had 40 employees and about $20 million from venture capital firms Sigma Partners and Kepha Partners. The chief executive, Josh Klein, left in November. Vice president of engineering Caesar Naples left around the same time.
The company developed software to analyze data stored on Windows-based file servers and network-attached storage hardware and move it around as necessary. Files used regularly might sit on more expensive solid-state hard drives, while files accessed only occasionally could be shifted to less-expensive storage media.
AutoVirt was founded in 2007, and it launched a reseller program last fall.
“Unfortunately, the company is unwinding,’’ confirmed Jo Tango, founder of Kepha Partners and a board member at AutoVirt. “They made some good progress, but the market didn’t develop for them.’’
Steve Duplessie, founder of Enterprise Strategy Group, mentioned AutoVirt’s demise on Twitter last week. He explained that AutoVirt was “a classic example of a great solution to a non-problem - a nice-to-have versus a need-to-have. People spend money on need-to-have, not nice-to-have.’’
Most IT groups, he said, are content to shuffle data around manually, even if it is more time-consuming.
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