The year is 1999. I was six months out of school, at a boring too-slow corporate job at Capital One, long before I had any idea I’d start fraction.work, or HiddenLevers, or anything else…

I had this crazy idea that people should be able to collaborate on documents online, and that source control style versioning ought to be the norm for all docs!

SmartWorkGroups was born – the og feature set: you could upload documents, and your coworkers could drop sticky note comments (SmartComments lol) on them. Mind you this was the IE5 era – I literally went to a book store to look up how to manipulate the DOM and get the SmartComments to be draggable!

So we had a cutting edge product (with zero customers), but I was a noob and figured the logical next step was VC.

Email was the norm by 1999, but that also meant VCs were drowning in emailed pitches and meeting requests. I looked up an east coast VC, Edison Ventures, and lo and behold – they listed a fax number to send pitches! I think I went super high tech and used eFax to fax the pitch – and then silence. I never heard back.

A few weeks later we got an email from a company called Digital Paper – an Edison Ventures portfolio company! Digital Paper was also in Northern Virginia, so we got an in-person with them, and pitched our hearts out. It didn’t quite land. We looked like a bunch of kids straight out of school (which we were).

I moved to Boston, figuring we had failed. I was a failure. Took it pretty hard, this is what I quit my job for?

To be crawling back to Boston to live with friends still in school? Started working at a different startup.

And then out of the blue a few months later – we see a user sign up for SmartWorkGroups! (no one signed up, there were zero users at that time, just us)

Myles Trachtenberg – CTO of Intralinks!? What was he doing on our site? (finding basic security holes it turns out)

And then we got an email from their strategy guy, Adam Sloan! Started talks with them, and within a few months, we were acquired. Face value on the deal was a bit over a million, although only a tenth of that was cash…

All because I sent a fax. Turns out that outreach turned enough wheels that it ended up with Intralinks, and they were growing explosively at the time.

P.S. Is there a message here? If anything, I think it’s just to use non traditional means to get across and get seen outside the noise.

But don’t try a fax machine today. Unless it’s to a doctor’s office. Lord knows why, but they still use them.