Z-Blog

Image via WikipediaExactly one year ago was Zemanta’s first public presentation. That took place in Kiberpipa, the topic was an announcement of our project Strip mine, and Andraz had that famous slideshow, where his email in footer changed from previous academic one, to new @zemanta adress.

This marked an important change in lifestyles for all of us, and after a year, I am sure, that I don’t regret it. It’s been a very interesting ride so far.
We started in a garage of course. Ok, to be honest, it was actually a room in my appartenment, with a desk made of a closet sides and the first server humming in the storage room. We moved from there in September, directly to ‘luxurious’ house in Kensal Green and at the same time expanding team to 7 people. We had to multithread the team at that point, having Gasper managing Ljubljana office, while we were hacking London.

Looking back I mainly find good memories of crazy adventures, like building the final prototype that got us to Seedcamp in two nights of six guys hacking. Or squating in Gherkin offices. Or assembling the second server on the floor of a local shop in Kensal Green. Or smuggling the server and the chef’s knife wearing top hats from London via Paris back to Ljubljana in December. Or using team work on California parties to secure precious minutes from journalists in the middle of the night.
There were some frustrations, like the ‘no internet’ crisis, and also, the last morning of Seedcamp, when we were sure we blew it, was probably the worst feeling ever. We survived and with each new experience we grew stronger.

We evolved from an enterprise, tailor-made product to generalized web service, from a two-men band to a 15 people venture-funded company, from Slovenia to the World. It’s not anything near final success yet, but it’s a nice start.

I’d like to thank everyone who was part of this process. Friends, families, patient girlfriends, co-workers, TFL, Seedcamp mentors, Hellerehrman, Eden Ventures, T.A.G., Saul, Scott, Eric, Erica, and everybody else we’ve met in this time.