Lijit

This guest post was written by Dan Jones, our VP of Engineering Chief Architect and one of the original “fantastic” four to start Lijit.

Lijit celebrated its second birthday on Saturday, and like a proud parent, it seemed only appropriate to force people to look at pictures and listen to endless stories about our wonderful child. Actually, if you think in terms of “internet years”, Lijit is probably more like a 30 year old than a child. But I’ll still take this opportunity to get a little nostalgic and talk about how things have changed over the past 2 years.

The idea…

Lijit was founded on the idea that we were going to do something cool around trust networks. This was an area of expertise of our original CTO, Stan James, and was the basis of his Master’s thesis–the Outfoxed browser plug-in. However, like most startups, the original idea changed along the way. After a few months of building the service, a slightly different idea began to emerge which involved creating trust networks for publishers (bloggers) and making those networks searchable. Along the way we have continued to refine this concept but the core idea is to create search based applications that can make publishers better.

The name…

The company was originally incorporated as Outfoxed Corporation, named after the browser plug-in that Stan created. However, it was decided early on that we needed a new name that was fresh, hip, and available (sounds like we were looking for a relationship). Anyone who has ever tried to come up with a name that is available as both a .com and .net domain knows that this is a hard and frustrating process. All the cool names you come up with are taken, and you quickly digress to considering silly names that have marginal relevance to what you actually do.

Our group was no different, and we spent several weeks thinking of names and promptly rejecting them. This was all supposed to culminate with a meeting at the Old Louisville Inn, with a notebook containing several pages of potential names, where we all voted for our favorites. Fortunately no consensus was reached because shortly thereafter, Leslie had a flash of brilliance while in Las Vegas, and came up with Lijit. It was the first name that everyone seemed to like and it didn’t take long before we were officially Lijit.

The office…

For the first couple of weeks of Lijit’s existence, we met in Todd’s basement, hatching plans, and figuring out what needed to be purchased to actually move into an office. Todd found some office space in Louisville that was a good deal and had nice views of the mountains. We moved in and decked out the office with cool Ikea furniture and an old foosball table that Stan bought on craigslist, and hunkered down to build a kick-ass service. Then last summer, with the continued addition of new people, we outgrew the Louisville office and needed more space.

Sing the following to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies:

Well the next thing you know Lijit needs some air…

The investors said Todd move away from there…

Downtown Boulder is the place you oughta be,

So they loaded up a truck and they moved to Walnut Street…

Boulder, that is…

Coffee shops…

VC’s downstairs.

Todd, Stan and Colleen found a great office and had it built out with all the standard high tech startup amenities (cool colors and cubes, brick wall with skylights, umbrellas to keep the developers from getting sunburned under the skylights, a new foosball table and a couple of game consoles–and of course, Rockband). Boulder is a really cool place to work. It’s a great town in a beautiful location, with lots of places to eat, etc. But even better, there is a very tangible tech/startup energy here that I don’t think you’ll find elsewhere in Colorado.

The infrastructure…

One of the tricks to starting an internet based company is figuring out how to scale your infrastructure. It is usually not too difficult to set up a few web servers and a database in a hosting facility to get you going. We started out with 3 web servers and a couple of database servers in a half rack with me acting (and I mean that literally) as the system and database administrator. However, the challenge is figuring out how and when you need to buy lots more hardware and hire professionals to manage it so that you can scale to the next level.

We were very lucky to attract two of the best Systems and Network guys we know (Mike and Zach) to build out our infrastructure. Mike wrote a great post about it, so I won’t go into details here. Suffice it to say that they have built some cool stuff that will allow us to continue to scale incrementally as we grow.

The people…

I saved this one for last, because I truly believe that it is the people that make Lijit special. Lijit has grown over the past few years and we have managed to attract and hire a lot of sharp people that work well together. But while the number of employees has changed, I think that the culture has been a constant. It’s a culture that promotes doing a great job that you can be proud of and having fun doing it. And one that values the individual and the contribution that they make to the success of the company as a whole. I hope this never changes.

As you can see, Lijit has gone through many changes over the course of its young life and we continue to grow and mature as we go. Fortunately, we have a great group of people that have the experience and the willingness to adapt to the changes required at each stage of this growth. There are still lots of challenges that we will face, and lots of things that we would like to do better and faster, but I really believe that with the team of dedicated people we have, we will be up for meeting these challenges at each step along the way.

So thanks for sitting through the tales of a doting parent. I hope I didn’t bore you too much (and I hope you’re not thinking “Man, that is an ugly baby…”). It’s been a fun ride and I’m looking forward to the next 2 years to see where we go from here.

Tags: birthday, celebration, employee guest post, reflection | View Comments