This is a temporary house for my blog. I might stick around here or not, but you can continue to bookmark this page (blog.calbucci.com) and subscribe to my feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarceloCalbucci) because those links are not going to change.
If you got here to read some of my old posts, I'm sorry, but I have to figure out how to import them first. It should be available in a couple of weeks.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
My last post on Sampa
On Monday night, August 17, 2009 I'll be shutting down Sampa's servers forever.
So I felt I should do just one last post on this platform that served me and my family well since May 19, 2006 (public beta launch). I did the first blog post back then, and might be the one doing the last blog post.
I'm very sorry to all I disappointed.
Sign off from Sampa,
-Marcelo
PS: The blog.calbucci.com address will live in some other house, so I'll continue to blog. I just don't know where yet.
My last post on Sampa
On Monday night, August 17, 2009 I'll be shutting down Sampa's servers forever.
So I felt I should do just one last post on this platform that served me and my family well since May 19, 2006 (public beta launch). I did the first blog post back then, and might be the one doing the last blog post.
I'm very sorry to all I disappointed.
Sign off from Sampa,
-Marcelo
PS: The blog.calbucci.com address will live in some other house, so I'll continue to blog. I just don't know where yet.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Cheap furniture, office supplies, dividers, white boards, etc.
Here is your only chance at getting Sampa office furniture, supplies, softwares, printers, etc., for cheap.
This Thursday (August 13), between 11am and 4pm, we'll be selling everything at our old office. What we don't sell will be donated later.
You can buy everything we have for $1,000 bucks (bring a big truck and two friends to load it), or you can buy the individual pieces for 10% of their retail value. All payment must done in cash and all items must be removed by 4pm on Thursday. Everything is sold "as-is", no returns, guarantees, etc.
If you have questions you can contact Paul: paul@sampa.com.
Here is a summary of what we have:
Software
Tables
Conference table
Cabinets
Office supplies
White boards
Shredder
Cabling
Dividers
Power strips
Color Printer
Half height fridge
Sm Microwave
Warehouse shelving
Dispersing Two Myths About Sampa History
One thing that I learned over the years is that you can’t pretend an angry mob of anonymous commenter and blog posts don’t exist, because when someone searches for you or your company years later they will find that information and have no other data on the web to disprove it, unless, you take the time to make that online record.
So I want to disperse two particular misrepresentations that you’ll find on the web about Sampa, and, both are about investors and investments.
Myth 1: “How a team of 2 people burns $1.4M in 12 months?”
There are 3 things wrong with this statement. Seriously. The saddest part is that I read it (or parts of it) on professional journalists reporting of Sampa closure, which shows the quality (decline?) of online reporting – I guess you can’t trust everything you read on the web.
Let me start by saying that we raised $400K in 2007 and $1M in January/Feb of 2008. In other words, at best we would have burned $1M over 18 months. But the reality is that we didn’t spend all that money.
Finally, as we closed Sampa there were just 2 people. But in 2008 we had a team of 9 employees and contractors working with us.
Myth 2: “Sampa investors told us to do X”
I’m amazed by the basic lack of understanding of the relationship between an investor and a startup. You read about how investors pushed the product into direction Y, or how they were mad at the founders because they didn’t do X, etc. As far as I know, this is all baloney and people talking like that never had an investor beyond friends and family.
Like most people on this planet, investors are busy people. They didn’t invest on you because they thought they could decide the destiny of the operations. They invested in you because they thought *you* would make good decisions.
To go direct to the point, our investors never asked us to take the product on any direction. All the decisions, smart and stupid ones, were done by us. Investors were not “mad” at us because we shutdown Sampa. None of them gave us a hard time. They were certainly very upset their investment didn’t return what they wished for, but that’s part of being an investor and accepting risk. Not only that, but they are wise investors. They have invested on many startups to diversify this specific investment class and they certainly invest on many different asset classes as well.
So I want to disperse two particular misrepresentations that you’ll find on the web about Sampa, and, both are about investors and investments.
Myth 1: “How a team of 2 people burns $1.4M in 12 months?”
There are 3 things wrong with this statement. Seriously. The saddest part is that I read it (or parts of it) on professional journalists reporting of Sampa closure, which shows the quality (decline?) of online reporting – I guess you can’t trust everything you read on the web.
Let me start by saying that we raised $400K in 2007 and $1M in January/Feb of 2008. In other words, at best we would have burned $1M over 18 months. But the reality is that we didn’t spend all that money.
Finally, as we closed Sampa there were just 2 people. But in 2008 we had a team of 9 employees and contractors working with us.
Myth 2: “Sampa investors told us to do X”
I’m amazed by the basic lack of understanding of the relationship between an investor and a startup. You read about how investors pushed the product into direction Y, or how they were mad at the founders because they didn’t do X, etc. As far as I know, this is all baloney and people talking like that never had an investor beyond friends and family.
Like most people on this planet, investors are busy people. They didn’t invest on you because they thought they could decide the destiny of the operations. They invested in you because they thought *you* would make good decisions.
To go direct to the point, our investors never asked us to take the product on any direction. All the decisions, smart and stupid ones, were done by us. Investors were not “mad” at us because we shutdown Sampa. None of them gave us a hard time. They were certainly very upset their investment didn’t return what they wished for, but that’s part of being an investor and accepting risk. Not only that, but they are wise investors. They have invested on many startups to diversify this specific investment class and they certainly invest on many different asset classes as well.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Interested on buying Sampa's assets? (code, users, domains, patents, etc.)
If you are interested in buying any of Sampa's service assets, send an email to me at marcelo@sampa.com and I'll send you a PDF with more information. I'll not send you the doc if you are "just curious" or if it doesn't seem you'd be a qualified buyer.
We will be running a small auction for the pieces available, including the entire system. This auction doesn't include furniture, desktops, and office furniture/supplies.
Here is what's for sale:
- Domains: sampa.com, sampasite.com, BrainUse.com, InTheSphere.com, etc.
- Source code (exclusive and non-exclusive)
- Users table
- Patents (2-pending patents: security and 404-prevention)
- Entire Running System
We are *not* interested on trading anything. And pretty much everything is on the tens of thousands of dollars range.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The StartupDay Conference and an all-star speaker list
Mark on your calendar: Saturday, September 26, 2009 between 10am and 5pm == StartupDay 2009, a conference for pre-entrepreneurs and those who want to learn about startups.
I'm one of the organizers of the conference and we are very excited to have startup rockstars like Rich Barton (Zillow/Expedia), Alex Algard (WhitePages/CarDomain), Jonathan Sposato (Picnik), Josh Petersen (43 Things), Kelly Smith (Inkd/ImageKind) Matt Hulett (RealGames) and many more. Check out the speakers and register for the event.
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