(theme song by <PIG>)
Friends,
I’m sad to announce that Drawn to Scale is closing up shop. After 4 years of a brutal, exciting journey starting when I was 25 — we’ve given all we can.
Why? It seemed we had everything going for us — paid customers such as American Express, a major telecom, Flurry, and 4 others. Our technology worked brilliantly, we had a big hiring pipeline, and we had great media presence against our competitors who raised 10-100x more cash.
Yet five days before we signed term sheets for a big A round or sold the company, we started getting hit by a series of black swans — and we just didn’t have what we needed to recover. I’ll leave the public detail at that level, but I will say that paying employees’ health insurance out of your meager savings is a powerful incentive to change course.
In a few months I’ll have a very detailed postmortem with what went well and how we screwed up, but for now I’m going to enjoy freedom, a regular sleep schedule, and helping others.
Andre Durand has asked me to join Ping Identity as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence helping them build some amazing new stuff for developers. I’m also advising several startups, sitting on some boards, and doing some *extremely* limited consulting.
xoxo.
BTW, if anyone wants more t-shirts, I’m totally gonna print some.
Bradford, All the best to and your team.
tom
Hi Bradford,
My name is bryan and I’m a learning to run a company now as I write this comment. I caught your post of hacker news and it got me here. I’m looking forward to read about your detailed post on the path to failure and what are the tragic black swan events that happened. In fact, I treated this as a great learning opportunity, so thank u for sharing.
Lastly, I would love to a T-shirt from you.
Cheers
Bet my boots D-T-S has useful IP — good luck monetizing this. In the mean time Ping Identity just gained a super EIR. Certainly the Personal Cloud space really needs a different approach to see scale in opinion. All the best.