By now most of you have probably heard the news that DotNetNuke Corporation has raised a round of capital from Sierra Ventures and August Capital. This marks another major milestone in the history of DotNetNuke. Nik Kalyani 
, one of my co-founders in DotNetNuke Corp., has a great blog post describing some of his journey to reach this milestone. Like Nik, I have a similar story I would like to relate about how we reached this point in our company and our project’s history.
My experience with DotNetNuke goes back to February 2003, a little over a month after it was first released. Over the next 6 months after it’s release I became increasingly involved with the DotNetNuke project. By the summer of 2003 I had been invited to participate on the DotNetNuke core team which marked one of the first major milestones in the growth of the project. Over the following year the project made rapid progress and we went through a core team re-organization which included the creation of a Board of Directors.
The original Board of Directors included Shaun Walker, Scott Willhite, Dan Caron, Patrick Santry and myself. In the summer of 2004, the four of us traveled to Philadelphia where we laid out a long term vision for the project and the eventual formation of a company to act as steward for the project. This was another key milestone in our growth as it was the first time we articulated our vision as a group and started putting in place the seeds of the company.
Not long after that meeting we started executing on parts of our vision. Patrick helped us get a book deal with Wrox press for the original DotNetNuke Professional book covering DotNetNuke 3.0. The book deal represented a key milestone in meeting our marketing goals for the project and provided some much needed credibility for the project. Shaun, Scott, Dan and myself went to TechEd 2005 to promote the book launch and to continue our discussions on the formation of a company. Unfortunately, Patrick Santry was no longer able to devote time to the project and we invited Nik Kalyani to join the Board of Directors in his place.
After returning from TechEd, I went down to Guatemala on a mission trip with my church. I was working on a DotNetNuke project at the time for my old company, DataSource Inc., where I was the CTO. While in Guatemala, I spent some time thinking about where I was going with my life. I lived in the suburbs of Washington DC and was becoming very disillusioned with the fast pace of life and the long hours I was spending at a job I did not enjoy. I spent more than 3 hours a day on my commute and my quality of life was not that great. I was making a great salary, but I was sacrificing my health and time with my wife in order to maintain our life.
While in Guatemala, I was able to continue working a couple hours a day on a DotNetNuke project for a company in New York City. It dawned on me, that if I could work from the jungles of Guatemala, that I did not have to be constrained by location. Working on an Open Source, and web based project, there was nothing tying me to Washington DC other than my job. While reading through the forums I found a post pointing to a blog by this guy named Phil Haack who needed a DotNetNuke developer for his company. I called my wife and we decided to sell our house and move to Ohio to be closer to her parents who were getting up there in age and starting to have serious health challenges. I IM’d Shaun to let him know that I was going to be making some changes and leaving DataSource. He suggested that we accelerate creation of the new company.
It was around this time that Dan Caron decided that for personal reasons he could no longer devote his time to the project. Although he remains a close friend to this day, our paths had to separate. Maybe someday they will rejoin. He was an instrumental part of our early growth and he coded several key parts of the DotNetNuke project which remain in place to this day.
August and September flew by as my wife and I sold our house and moved to Ohio. In under 6 weeks, I went from being CTO at a tech company with a cushy salary to being unemployed and wondering how I was going to cover the mortgage every month. For the next 6 months I worked to close out the project I had been working on at DataSource. This client came with me when I left as it was a DotNetNuke job and I was the only one with sufficient expertise to finish the job. Unfortunately, the project was dragging on as the client asked for more and more changes to make PortalStore behave more and more like their existing ad-hoc system. What started as a few minor modifications, became a major rewrite of large portions of PortalStore to meet the customer’s demands. Since we were still not quite yet ready to start DotNetNuke Corp., I allowed the customer to drag the job out longer than I should have.
Finally, in the summer of 2006 we were ready to formally launch DotNetNuke Corp. This was the start of another major milestone in DotNetNuke’s growth. Those of us on the board had known for some time that we needed dedicated management team to help guide DotNetNuke and to help fund it’s growth. What many people don’t realize is how much money it takes to run a large Open Source project. Although the community can aid the project to a certain degree by volunteering their time and energy, no large Open Source project has ever achieved the level of success that we envisioned without major funding of one sort or another. There needs to be someway to ensure that you have the necessary infrastructure, legal resources, management resources and dedicated programming resources to keep the project going. Volunteers certainly reduce the cost, but they do not completely eliminate it.
For the last two years the four co-founders of DotNetNuke Corp. have been focused on putting together a solid business plan and pursuing capital in order to enable us to grow this company and this project. We spent many weeks wondering if we were doing the right thing. The project suffered a little as we were not able to give it the full attention it needed. Our business suffered as we struggled to find the right balance that allowed us to build a profitable company while staying true to our Open Source roots. We struggled to find a business model that also highlighted the cooperative nature of the eco-system we helped build. The four of us fundamentally believe in an abundance mentality where our goal is to help grow the DotNetNuke eco-system and enable other companies to thrive and grow, even as DotNetNuke Corp. continues to thrive and grow.
In working through the challenges of the last couple of years, we have found other individuals like Larry Augustin and Navin Nagiah who understood our vision and shared our passion for the project. They helped us craft a solid business plan which in the end was well received by a number of well-known venture capitalists. In the end, we chose to work with August Capital and Sierra Ventures because of their backgrounds and their belief in our team and our vision for where this can go.
It has been an incredible 6 years since Shaun and the rest of us started this journey together. There have been several major milestones along the way, each of which paved the way for further growth. I have been incredibly blessed to be a part of such an incredible team. While my co-founders and I may not always see eye-to-eye on everything, we have always remained friends. We have all suffered through incredible personal challenges. From financial hardship to family health challenges we have always understood we are in this together and have been there to support each other when needed.
As Shaun said so well at OpenForce, we could not have made it this far without the support and understanding of everyone on the project team and in the community. We have received tremendous support in keeping things moving on the project, even when we ourselves were distracted with the fund raising process. I was proud that our investors were able to meet many of you at Open Force. They were able to see first hand what a truly incredible community has developed around DotNetNuke. I think one of our customers said it best when they said that the difference between going to OpenForce and going to DrupalCon was like being at a conference with adults versus being at a conference with a bunch of twelve year olds. To me that says a lot about our community.
Finally, I think that there is one last thought worth sharing about this milestone. To the best of my knowledge, no other .Net Open Source company has closed a Series A round of funding. This is a major milestone, not just for DotNetNuke, but for the broader .Net Open Source community as well. We aim to prove that you do not have to use PHP or Java to build a hugely successful Open Source company that will interest investors. We hope to pave the way for broader Open Source adoption within the .Net community, not just on the consumer side, but on the developer side as well.
Certainly Microsoft and more specifically Scott Guthrie and the Developer Division deserve our appreciation since they have done so much over the last 6 years to help us get to this point. They provided Shaun with critical guidance and support early on that allowed him to get to a critical mass with the project. All along the way they have provided access to key technical resources that allowed us to overcome some technical challenges, and they even made introductions to people like Shirley Brothers at DevConnections who became a strong partner for the OpenForce conference. These are just a few of the ways in which Microsoft has been a great friend of the project.
So here’s to a great first six years. Now we begin the journey towards making the next six years even more incredible.