Startupland. Svane Mikkel

lives. Everyone communicated saying, “Send me an email,” and everybody had an email address. I experienced emailing between Copenhagen and San Francisco and having these messages arrive instantly. I couldn't believe how much smaller the world was, now that it was connected by the Internet. It was completely fascinating. And I couldn't help but notice the significant gap between how technology was adopted in San Francisco and how it was integrated into our lives back at home. (It wasn't.)

      Mostly what I took home from San Francisco was the sense of being at the start of something big. Today, technology is so extremely refined that it often seems to work by pure magic – you look at your iPhone and it's hard to distinguish from the supernatural – but back then it was possible to understand the web protocols and learn how to write HTML and have an idea of how to participate. You could see the path to being a creator in this new world. I felt a little bit like I had found oil on a nearby property, and I understood there was immense value in drilling it out of the ground.

      There were so many things to be inspired by in the United States that I wanted to take everything I saw and bring it back with me. And that's exactly what a lot of us did.

      When I returned to Denmark I was obsessed with what I had experienced in California, and I wanted to recreate it. I built a portal, a website that brought information together from multiple diverse sources – this was all the craze back then – and called it Forum.dk. Initially it was almost impossible to buy domain names for a new web service. The Danish system was extremely restrictive, requiring you to document that you owned the name already. It made everything slower and more complicated than I had anticipated. Further exacerbating matters was the fact that there were still so few people on the Internet in Denmark.

      Still, we started toying around with the portal, researching how we could produce and gather content. We struck up a partnership with a source to distribute news for free. We also went outbound and created our own content: I had guys pick up flyers from dance parties and raves, and we put the events in a database so people could see where the best ones were happening. We added community elements and chat rooms (one of the first chat rooms in Denmark). The site gathered users, and although it was not our original intention, it became very popular with teenagers.

      I kept a small office in the old part of Copenhagen, known for its cobblestone streets and little cafés and shops, and I worked with people who wanted to help out. They were not real employees. After all, there was no real way to pay them. It was hard to monetize this endeavor. Advertising hadn't really moved to the Internet in Denmark, so that wasn't an option.

      Still, making money wasn't the main point; that was secondary. It was the potential that we were pursuing. (To deal with the more pedestrian matters of making money, I did a variety of unglamorous jobs, including waiting tables and cleaning houses. Living the dream!)

      Though I had no clue how to make money off this project I loved, an opportunity came along and solved that problem for me. A newspaper offered to buy Forum. We sold off the actual service, and what we had left was the software. Now, instead of being a community portal that didn't charge anything for its services, we became a software company with products to sell.

      The Danger in Riding Market Waves or Going Kaput

      Soon I discovered that there was a real market for this software. Companies wanted to have their own websites and provide community services for their users and visitors online. We rebuilt the entire product portfolio in J2EE, the most interesting and forward-looking software framework at the time, but also the most expensive in terms of software stack. We sold it on top of BEA WebLogic and Oracle RDBMS and primarily into large media companies or web properties, but all kinds of organizations including financial institutions became customers. Soon this remnant of our original service turned into a real business.

      We named the company Caput, which means “the head” in Latin. And of course it also sounds like kaput – or “no longer working,” which was kind of cute in the beginning (kind of), but in retrospect of course it's a terrible, terrible name. But we were growing this in the halcyon days of the Internet. Things were both promising and exciting – everything was working.