Philip Greenspun founded ArsDigita in 1997.
Though the company lasted only a few years,
ArsDigita is famous in the startup world both
as the embodiment of a new model for software
consulting and as an all-too-colorful example of
the dangers of venture capital.
ArsDigita grew out of the software that
Greenspun wrote for managing photo.net, a
popular photography site. He released the software
under an open source license and was
soon deluged by requests from big companies
for custom features. He and some friends
founded ArsDigita in 1997...

will be rendered by the browser. It will have a simpler user interface, but
it will be guaranteed to work on any kind of computer, and it will survive
changes in operating systems.” It pretty much has; I have plenty of web pages
that I built in 1993, and here in 2006 people can still grab them, even though
there have been a lot of changes in computer operating systems and software.
I told the professors at MIT that all I wanted to work on was Internet applications
and they told me I was...

to build similar things where people would come register at the site and
exchange information and maybe go and try to buy something. The stuff was
just broken. People’s sites were down. They had bugs. If you tried to buy something,
you’d get halfway through the checkout process and you’d get a server
error. I thought, “All these people don’t even have the fundamental ideas of
how to put the server together, and we could just tell them, ‘Look, this is how a
medium-volume online community can be run off of a computer that’s...

with the IRS for hiring people as 1099 employees and having the IRS say that
they should have been W2s. They said, “Look, we’re not hiring anybody to be a
1099 employee, so either work for us on the payroll (and we don’t want to hire
you guys full-time) or form a corporation that we can hire.”
So we had to trundle down to a law office and set up an LLC for the company.
Right around that time, the Technology Square office complex, which
housed the MIT computer science lab, decided to ban...

toolkit. In some cases, they’d heard from Edward Tufte in his lectures.
People would ask, “What’s good on the Web?” and he’d say, “Nothing’s good on
the Web,” and they’d say, “C’mon, give us two good websites.” And one of the
ones he’d mention would be photo.net as an example with good design.
But most of the business was because we’d released free open source software.
The 15-year-olds would just use it, and the big companies would decide
that, since they had so much money and I guess not enough good programmers,
it...