Michael Slater: About Me

One year ago today I embarked on my current adventure, leaving Adobe after five years there and two years creating the startup they acquired, Fotiva. At the time I left Adobe, I had only the fuzziest idea of what I was going to do, but I knew it would be related to the web, and I was pretty sure it would be connected to Ruby on Rails. And that it has turned out to be.

I’m as busy as I’ve ever been, and my income in the past year is the lowest it has been in more than 25 years. But I’m having a great time, and I have a good feeling about where things are headed. I thought I’d take the excuse of this one-year anniversary to look back on my decision to leave Adobe, and catch my readers up on my business thinking.

Looking back on Adobe

I’ve not written much about my experiences at Adobe, in part because I want to avoid any possible appearance of breaking confidentiality agreements, and also because I wanted to gain some perspective first.

Looking back on my five years at Adobe, there’s a lot that I’m grateful for. I learned a tremendous amount about digital imaging and the PC software business, and about life inside a big company. I met a lot of great people, was able to immerse myself in digital photography, and had the opportunity to lead a research team and do technology licensing with the power of a big player behind me. The team I helped build for Fotiva continues on, in large part, as Adobe’s Santa Rosa office, and I’m pleased to have had some small role in growing the software business in the North Bay. And the product that started life at Fotiva has an enduring role as the organizer in Photoshop Elements.

In a strange way, though, I’m most grateful to Adobe for being so thoroughly dysfunctional when it comes to enabling innovation that it drove me out. As someone with a entrepreneurial heart, I found Adobe stifling. If I had been able to accomplish a bit more at Adobe, I might still be there, and then I would have missed out on so much.

To a large degree, the challenges I faced finding happiness at Adobe would be there in any businesses at that scale. But not entirely. Many of the other entrepreneurial folks I met at Adobe, who tried valiantly to build new products and services, have also left. They’re at an assortment of small companies, but also at Google, and Yahoo, and Apple.

One of Adobe’s biggest weaknesses, in my view, is the distance between top management and the people who have passion for innovative new product ideas. It is exhausting, and usually dispiriting in the end, pushing ideas up through a chain that, at it’s pinnacle, doesn’t seem very interested.

The difficulties I had getting new concepts to market at Adobe, especially when they were web-related, are symptomatic of top management’s resistance to exploring new concepts in the marketplace. Adobe doesn’t like to accept the risk of new markets in return for a role (and learning opportunity) as an early player. Perhaps at Adobe’s scale their approach of waiting until market opportunities are clear, and then buying their way in as needed, makes sense. But it did not make for a satisfying place for me to work.

My evolving Ruby on Rails business plan

When I left Adobe, I had done a little Rails development, and read a lot about it, and I felt strongly that it was going to be a big deal. I spent the majority of this year building custom Rails sites for small businesses, and set up Topaz Web Solutions LLC as the home for that work. I enjoyed it, and some of it is ongoing, but my focus has now shifted to Collective Knowledge Works, Inc., the company I cofounded this fall with my partner Christopher Haupt.

I spent quite a while looking for ways to build a business around delivering Rails-based solutions to other small businesses. I continue to believe there is a great opportunity in this domain, but the sales and support challenges are significant.

Collective Knowledge Works grew out of an idea I had to create a portal for Ruby on Rails developers. We’re now deep into doing just that: you can sign up for the beta list at BuildingWebApps.com. Within a couple weeks, we’ll be letting in beta testers, and early next year it will be public. I can’t wait to show it off, and I think it’s going to be a great resource for the Rails community. After eight years away from the editorial, publishing, and training business, I’m glad to be back in it.

Initially, we don’t expect BuildingWebApps.com to generate much revenue directly. Our first revenue stream will be from the Ruby on Rails QuickStart Seminar that we’ll be presenting in February in San Francisco. Later, we believe we can create revenue from the site itself in various ways.

Christopher and I have just launched the Learning Rails podcast, which has been an adventure of its own.

There’s a bigger plan in the background, too. All the technology we’re building for BuildingWebApps.com can be used for any knowledge domain. After we’ve had time to build out this first site, we’re going to develop additional knowledge domains, and enable others to host their own knowledge domains. That’s why we named the company Collective Knowledge Works.

It’s great to be back in this early business-building phase. And it’s wonderful not to have to try to sell new ideas up through multiple layers of management, but simply to decide what to do, and then do it.

Six months into my exploration of Ruby and Rails and the opportunities it represents, I’ve settled into a niche of building web applications that enable small and medium service businesses to better communicate with their customers.

Today, very few small service businesses have web sites that do much for them. Typically, if the business has any web site at all, it is mostly brochure ware, with a contact form as the limit of its interactivity. Yet almost every such business has interactions with its customers that could be facilitated by a customized web application.

For example, health care practitioners must deal with requests for appointments, referrals, records, and prescription refills. The office staff then needs an effective workflow to process these requests.

Accounting, financial services, and design firms have other needs; they typically have confidential documents they need to provide to their clients, and they need data from their clients. A web application can provide a much superior and more secure alternative to email.

There are countless other examples of businesses that could significantly improve their interactions with clients and customers via the web. But the vast majority of them have found it too intimidating and too expensive to implement the web solutions that they need.

I’ve found that my experience running small businesses makes it easy for me to understand the needs of these kinds of businesses and craft solutions that work for them. The Ruby on Rails platform dramatically reduces the time, and therefore the cost, to build these systems. And since I’ve now built several such applications, I have a set of building blocks to draw from that further streamlines the process.

In time, I expect to offer off-the-shelf hosted solutions for certain types of businesses, but for now I’m finding that each business has different needs. The best approach, for now, seems to be building a custom solution using building blocks that I’ve already created, plus new ones as needed for a particular business’ needs.

If you know of a business in need of such an application, please send the my way: ms (at) mslater.com, or 707.829.6447.

Happy new year!

When I left Adobe at the end of November, I promised myself that I would “take a break” for perhaps as long as three months, and certainly through December. So for the first time in decades, I’ve had a little while without a job, and not actively building a business.

“Work” has always been a major focus of my time and energy. For most of my career, I’ve worked for myself, running small businesses. The past five years at Adobe taught me a lot, and there were some good times, but in the end its final lesson was that I prefer being in my own little business. So I decided to change paths, without being entirely sure what the new path would be.

Taking this month “off,” I spent a lot of time with my family and doing things around the house. I’ve been getting more exercise and doing more cooking.

But did “taking a break” mean staying away from my computer? Only a little. I let myself spend time on what I was drawn to. And I’ve ended up spending a chunk of time on this blog (coding and writing) and on building my first from-scratch Ruby on Rails site (for my brother’s medical practice).

I left Adobe with a general direction but not a specific plan. I’m taking time to talk with lots of folks, learn some new technology, and let my thinking evolve before diving into a new business. I’m exploring hosted web services, online communities, niche e-commerce, and training.

Somewhere in there I’m sure there’s a few good business opportunities. Stay tuned. It’s a new year!

Today was my last day at Adobe. It was an odd feeling walking out the door for the last time.

I had a great job at Adobe. There were a lot of exceptional people I had the pleasure of working with. I’ll miss working with many of them, but I’m sure the relationships will endure. I’ll miss being in the digital photography industry, though I think I’ll enjoy it even more as a hobby.

I won’t miss the shrink-wrapped software business model, the isolation from strategic decision making, the split between marketing and development silos, the financial tyranny of being in a public company, and, most of all, the too-small box I felt I was in.

Seven years ago (on Thanksgiving day, in fact) I had the idea for a photo appliance, and registered the PhotoTablet domain. A couple months later we raised a round of financing and started a company, which evolved to be a PC software company and was renamed Fotiva. Two years later we sold the company to Adobe, where I’ve been for five years.

I’m starting on my fourth career. First I was a hardware/firmware engineer; then a newsletter publisher and conference producer; then a manager of software development and research. Now it’s on to building a business based on web applications. I think it’s a bigger opportunity than anything I’ve done in the past.

I’ve just reached the end of a seven-year adventure into software for digital photography. The adventure began with my first digital camera, a Nikon 950, in July 1999. My frustrations with the difficulties of working with digital photos on the PC led me to conceive of a digital photo appliance, a “photo tablet,” during the Thanksgiving weekend that year. In February 2000, my cofounders Ken Rothmuller and Bernard Peuto had signed on, and PhotoTablet was incorporated. A couple months later, we closed on $2 million in seed funding from the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, thanks to the vision of general partner Stewart Alsop.

During the next six months, we realized that our tablet appliance concept was ahead of its time. Our product plan evolved by September 2000 to be based on a PC application, and by early 2001 we had built a great executive team, including CEO Jim Heeger and VP Marketing Tanya Roberts (both now at PayCycle). We renamed the company Fotiva, and set out to raise a second round of financing to bring the product to market. Alas, the fall of 2001 was the worst of times for raising money, especially for a consumer-focused digital photography company. We ended up selling the company to Adobe Systems in December 2001. The software that we built at Fotiva turned into Photoshop Album, and then into the organizer mode of Photoshop Elements.

Along the way, I learned a great deal about the photo industry, the shrink-wrapped software business, and life in a big company. It was a grand adventure, but I’m thrilled to now be returning to the world of building a small business.

View the Fotiva web site, captured for posterity as a PDF file before it was taken offline. (Keep in mind that this is more than five years old now, so many of the external links and email addresses no longer work.)

Just in case you want to dig into my deep dark past, during which I wrote hundreds of articles on microprocessors, personal computing technology, and even digital photography, here’s a few of them. These are all pretty old – I put my writing career on hold for my seven-year dive into digital photography software – but I think they stand the test of time reasonably well.

Microprocessors

• Microprocessors Changing the World: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Microprocessor, Microprocessor Report, August 1996

• Microprocessors: The Next Five Years, EE Times, October 1996

• Looking Back on Ten Years of Microprocessor Report, , Microprocessor Report, August 1997

• The Microprocessor Millennium: Ruminations on Microprocessors, Computing, and Thinking, Microprocessor Report, December 1999

Digital Photography

• Digital Photography Coming of Age, Microprocessor Report, July 1999

• An New Era for Digital Photography—And Me, Microprocessor Report, July 2000

Computing Platforms

• The Future of Computing Platforms, , Microprocessor Report, August 1994

• USB Destined to Dominate, EE Times, May 1995

• The Future of Serial Buses, Microprocessor Report, November 1999

• Appliances vs. PCs: The Future of Computing Platforms, Microprocessor Report, January, 2001

• Rethinking Web Appliances, EE Times, September, 2000

So now that I’m on my way out of Adobe, what’s next?

I’m not sure yet. I’m interested in building a bootstrapped (vs. venture financed) small business in the web applications space. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to serve niche markets with focused solutions. I love the idea of a very small company being able to deploy hosted applications that make a real difference to its customers. It’s amazing what you can accomplish today with a few people and a great framework like Ruby on Rails.

Watch this space for updates as my plans solidify.

From late 2001 through November 2006, I was at Adobe Systems. I joined Adobe when it purchased Fotiva, a startup I cofounded two years earlier. My most recent work there was as director of a small research team that prototyped leading-edge features for future products and evaluated advanced imaging technologies for licensing. The features my team developed include the Flash photo gallery in Photoshop Elements 5 and Lightroom, the map view in Photoshop Elements 5, and the auto-stacking feature in that product. Other features remain in development, so I can’t disclose them.

Fotiva began as PhotoTablet, which I cofounded with Ken Rothmuller and Bernard Peuto to create a tablet-based appliance for digital photography. With venture funding from Stewart Alsop at New Enterprise Associates, we began developing the tablet in early 2000 but quickly switched to creating a PC application, PhotoJournal. Jim Heeger joined in early 2001 as CEO. At the end of 2001, we sold the company to Adobe, and PhotoJournal evolved into Photoshop Album, and then into the Organizer mode of Photoshop Elements.

For 12 years, from 1987 through 1999, I was a computer technology analyst, consultant, writer, publisher, and conference producer. I created the Microprocessor Report newsletter in 1987 and launched the Microprocessor Forum conference the following year. During the next decade, we added the Embedded Systems Report newsletter and PC Tech Forum and Embedded Processor Forum conferences.

Before starting Microprocessor Report, I was an independent consultant specializing in embedded microprocessor applications. I began my career as an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where I worked from 1977-1980.

I have always enjoyed writing. At Hewlett-Packard, back in 1978, I wrote a self-instructional text for technicians, titled Practical Microprocessors. While working as a consultant in the mid-80s, I wrote Microprocessor-Based Design, a textbook on embedded systems engineering. Between 1987 and 2000, I wrote hundreds of articles for Microprocessor Report, as well as for publications such as PC Magazine, EE Times, Electronic Business, and Nikkei Electronics Asia. (See Selected Writings.) More recently, I wrote books on how to make the most out of Photoshop Album (The Photoshop Album 2.0 Book) and Photoshop Elements (Organize Your Photos with Photoshop Elements 3).

My primary hobbies are photography and boating, which are combined in my web site, BoatingSF.com. You can more than 1,000 of my photos there. I’m currently shooting with a Canon 20D (and a Canon SD700 for casual shooting).