VC200

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The VC200 is a large part of the history of TextDrive The 46th VC, Trel1023, named it.

List of VC200s:

  • -1 (negative one) - jason da man
  • 1 - joseph duemer
  • 2 - Damelon
  • 5 - 6sigma
  • 9 - Jon Hicks
  • 10 - alderete
  • 11 - elmar
  • 12 - zarprey
  • 13 - Ray
  • 14 - kamvik
  • 15 - cameron
  • 16 - case
  • 17 - valdok
  • 19 - Robert
  • 21 - Brad Smith
  • 22 - Matt
  • 23 - Alex: Big Ring Design
  • 24 - Dan Sauve (sublinear)
  • <25 - mistersugar
  • 25 - ajd
  • 27 - iperry
  • 29 - Kelly Sims (greyfodder)
  • 30 - mapu
  • 31 - Kees Brandenburg (kees-b)
  • 32 - nissarup
  • 34 - -jw-
  • 37 - Ben
  • 38 - cczona
  • 39 - Mandek
  • 40 - Espresso
  • 42 - aufrank
  • 44 - Kjell: station11
  • 45 - mly (matt)
  • 46 - Trel1023
  • 52 - fncll
  • 58 - Jon Plummer
  • 61 - Hans: Lumilux
  • 63 - Tom
  • 64 - nesher
  • 68 - Chris
  • 69 - Kibitzer
  • 6tysomething - gummi
  • 72 - Justin French
  • 74 = Echo
  • 77 - Jonathan LaCour
  • 79 - greenrift
  • 80 - sderuiter
  • 81 - Ryan
  • 82 - Jeff Adams (Tinyfly)
  • 85 - visualounge
  • 87 - kemmott
  • 88 - Reinier
  • 91 - Webby
  • 96 - ruiling
  • 100 - jbenton
  • 102 - Sam MacCutchan (sewm)
  • 104 - Sandbox Wizard
  • 107 - eapen
  • 108 - scottj
  • 109 - max3
  • 110 - phil
  • 112 - Bradley Froehle
  • 113 - nammer
  • 114 - Christopher
  • 116 - jeffkono
  • 119 - alicson
  • 121 - twohorses (P. Borenstein)
  • 123 - Adam
  • 124 - Polexa
  • 125 - Mike
  • 129 - JoNtE
  • 132 - Peter Gallagher (pwg)
  • 133 - liampage
  • 134 - Terry: MacLuddite
  • 136 - Smerp!
  • 137 - Rod Knowlton (ArchStanton, rodk)
  • 138 - Gary Slyter (hedgehog)
  • 140 - rograndom
  • 141 - dhdesign
  • 142 - jumpserve
  • 144 - Robert McHardy (rmch)
  • 145 - tim
  • 148 - rschroed
  • 149 - kevin
  • 150 - ryanschwartz
  • 152 - Jai
  • 153 - enrique
  • 156 - mamash
  • 157 - Jez Nixon
  • 165 - jdbanks
  • 167 - me3dia
  • 168 - since1968
  • 171 - mtprell - Nanomonkey
  • 172 - JAIMIE VC172
  • 174 - mikeo
  • 178 - cnladd
  • 181 - eugene
  • 193 - alvin
  • 187 - EddieG5
  • 191 - ryanjbonnell
  • 194 - mrpatto
  • 195 - Gavin
  • 196 - erdanese
  • 199 - ngungo the Last


2004-05-25 8 Ways to Sunday

Dean Allen, creator of Textpattern and Textile, is starting his own hosting company and shirking venture capital to fund it with up-front money from the first 200 customers. It’s an insanely great hosting package, for $199, for life.

I encourage any bloggers who are starting to outgrow their current hosting providers to look at the specs, read the thread in the Textpattern support forum, and go for it. Those using PHP/MySQL tools should be especially interested, since the servers will be optimized for this. WordPress users may also be interested to know that if you choose to become part of the “VC200” 10% of your one-time payment will be donated toward the WordPress development effort.

I just took the plunge, and I’m looking forward to a big fat upgrade come June. :-)

(thanks for the tip, Photo Matt)

Update: As of about 4:45 4:15 PM my time on May 26th, all the spots are gone. People on the Textpattern forum are joking that Dean should write a book on how to finance your business start-up by raising $40,000 in 75 hours. It wouldn’t have been possible without the goodwill and trust Dean had already built up in the blogging community or without the ceaseless patience that he and Jason Hoffman showed in answering absolutely every question someone posted about the new service. Way to go, guys. Congratulations on your successful fundraising, and best of luck with the new venture.

Now where are keys to my account, already? ;-)



2004-05-28 Ruminate

Textpattern and the VC200

In order to raise some funds for his business without giving in to the strings that came attached to true venture capital funds (he had an offer on the order of 1.5 million if he wanted it), Dean Allen– author of Textpattern had a good idea. He offered up 200 spots (the VC200) to those who wanted to pony up $199 for lifetime hosting on his new TextDrive hosting service (and a free t-shirt). He sold all the spots in around 80 hours. I am happy to be one of those early adopters.

This is getting a lot of notice in blogging circles, with much of the focus being on how effective this rather simple idea was. It’s certainly a financial no-brainer. I can ill afford to waste extra cash, but if the service were to last only two years I would have saved double my investment in hosting fees while supporting a developer, service, and software that I enjoy.

That last clause is the important aspect of all of this. Dean didn’t raise 40k in three days. Dean was rewarded with a 40k investment after years in the weblog community, creation of the Textile markup system and then the elegan Textpattern software, and a consistent record of good-natured, excellent, responsive interaction with those who use his software.

Dean (and his partner, Jason) continue to hit the right notes. Interested in the service but using the other popular blogging tool WordPress? No problem, sign up and he donates 10% to the WordPress development fund. Have a question about a feature or specs? They’ll not only give you a straight answer, but the answer might contain a useful look at the personal philosophy driving their business

That’s what caused me to make the investment (and stick with TextPattern through my growing pains). I don’t always agree with Dean, but I respect that he has a passion for what he does and a direction he wants to go. Some things I might like to see in Textpattern aren’t going to appear there just because I want it– or even because it is considered “popular”– if it doesn’t fit in with the elegant and productive Textpattern model of content management.

I look forward to TextDrive following the same path and offering a focused, powerful, and useful suite of tools that make sense for users like us (”us” being Dean, Jason, and the Textpattern community) rather than a poorly maintained batch of “features” that exist solely to populate a matrix comparing competing services. What makes Textpattern special– and what will set TextDrive apart– isn’t captured by such crude assessments.


This entry was posted on Friday, May 28th, 2004 at 3:45 am and is filed under Geek. One Response to “Textpattern and the VC200”

1. Social Media Club » The Importance of Social Media Says: September 19th, 2006 at 11:54 am

[…] I was talking with Jason Hoffman of Joyent over a few pints in London about the early days of Text Pattern and how Dean Allen originally turned his personal passion into a real business. It is a perfect example of why things are different today than before, but it is also clearly about business in the age of personal power and open, participatory networks. Dean could not have found a better partner than Jason. He is clearly one of the smartest people I have ever met in the Valley, and I have met quite a few people in my 5 years living there. I can’t do the entire story justice here (Chris Lott did), but the interesting part I want to share is the story of the VC200 - which was the 200 people who answered Dean’s call for pre-paying for a year’s worth of hosting at $199 each, giving the company enough money to get up and running without having to sell their soul to the venture capitalists. […]



2004-06-01 The Daily Whim

TextDrive, or How To Raise $40,000 In 4 Days

I recall when Josh Marshall decided to solicit his readers for funds to send him to New Hampshire for the primary. The money came in much faster than he’d ever dreamed, and he cut it off after about 24 hours. During that time, he averaged about $200 per hour. I found that a pretty amazing example of “user funding.”

So I don’t know what exactly to call this: “We have no photographs of our CEO strutting past server racks, or of women in telephone headsets awaiting your call, but we hope you’ll consider joining us all the same.” Well, it’s called TextDrive, which is a web hosting company (now with it’s own Wikipedia entry!), but that’s not what I mean. It obviously takes a fair cash investment to start up this kind of business, especially to do it right. As I explained in more detail earlier, Dean “Da Man” Allen had the option to sign a deal containing many zeroes with venture capitalists. But he decided he really didn’t need that many zeroes, just a few. Maybe four.

So he came up with a less obvious option: raise the funds from the relatively small user base of a program that hasn’t even been properly released yet. One might think, this man has been in the vineyards too long. But one would be wrong. Dean’s gamble paid off handsomely, and quickly: “The plan involved raising startup capital in a newish way – something I thought, optimistically, we could do in a few weeks. And here it’s happened in 75 hours. So here’s to user-funded startups!”

200 people paid $200 in about 75 hours, an average rate of over $500 per hour. Dean ends up with $40,000 to start his business, and 200 “mini-VC’s” (now known as the “VC200”) get web hosting for the life of TextDrive.

Of course, not just anyone could do this. You can only do that kind of thing if you have an excellent reputation in the web community, built through years of free contributions. If you have the free thinking brain to come up with the idea. And maybe some dog pictures. Only then does the phrase ”$199 web hosting for life” sound like something other than just another fly-by-night con.

When you read the specs of the servers you’ll be on, and the results of some Apache benchmarking tests … well, you wish you’d bought two. But I’ll settle for one.

Though the doors of TextDrive are open today, it will be some unquantifiable amount of time before this site is moved to the new servers. June may be an odd month around here.

Later: A new “lifetime” offer from the TextDrive home page: “Available until 7 June 2004: Buy a year’s worth of TextDrive’s best hosting plan for $199 (regularly $300 month-to-month or $250 yearly), and get the same discounted rate every year for as long as you stay with TextDrive.”


2004-06-02 08:58:33

I’m definitely in two minds about the excellent VC200 badges created by Enrique.

Now before you jump on me to defend Enrique’s honour, let me explain…

The VC200 badges are, without doubt, very cool and I am mega-impressed that Enrique took the time to create them so we can all show how proud we are to be in the VC200. I’ll certainly be using mine!

It’s just… I kinda miss some of the avatars that have disappeared. I like the avatars for two reasons: (a) they help visually identify a poster in a thread—good if you’re scanning through to find a past post, and (b) they lend an individuality to a fairly austere medium, an individuality which (I like to think) tells something about the poster.

For example: Dean’s elegant and spare Text-Patterner; Jason’s simple and austere ‘J’; klaatu’s straight and mildly forbidding face; there’s one (can’t remember whose) featuring a snail on a pile of round rocks which was really nice in its simplicity. I miss: mamash’s slightly spooky impressionist image, greyfodder’s intriguingly odd biplane pilot (that’s what it looked like to me).

My own, of course, is a picture of my dog—neither artisitc nor memorable! So I’m just kinda… wistful about the missing artistic avatars.

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