Happy Birthday, Bitshelter

Happy Birthday, Bitshelter!
Although PhotoShelter wasn’t launched until late June 2005, our company, Bitshelter, was founded a year ago this month. Happy birthday to our little Delaware corporation!

I still find it amazing that in this day and age of multi-billion dollar companies like Microsoft and Google, that a few friends can get together and still build a product or service that can have a noticeable and positive impact on a given industry. But in many ways, our organizational size makes us ideal for realization of a new product. It reminds me a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell’s (author of The Tipping Point, and fellow Yalie…) article in the New Yorker magazine, where he describes a food engineering company’s quest to develop the perfect cookie with three different teams. The supposed “Dream Team,” which had a large number of top experts from the industry turned out to have too many cooks in the kitchen to be effective. And a small team comprised of a few people was the most successful in the end.

I remember sitting down to dinner at Le Zinc in Tribeca in December 2004 with Grover, Jason and Jeffrey to discuss PhotoShelter for the first time (I got the salmon burger and it wasn’t very good). It’s hard to believe that it’s all come together, and that people around the world are using the service a year later!