So the 15-year anniversary of my first startup has inspired me to distill some lessons I learned from being CEO through all its ups and downs. Let’s set the next few blog posts here in context with a very condensed history of IPI.

I started in 1993 with Scientific-Atlanta as my main client. I built the first prototypes of their 8600-X interactive set-top box using Macromedia Director, Lingo, a set-top box and a soldering gun. I expanded IPI by recruiting some great young talent, leveraging a talented family and pairing up with some fantastic partners for some big CD-ROM & multimedia jobs.

Loren, IPI employee #1 and mentioned in the last blog post, was the one who pushed to get IPI into the Internet business in 1994. For a little context, the Mozilla 1.0 browser was just starting to surface at the time.

Loren’s insistence proved prescient, and IPI achieved numerous notable achievements in the Web 1.0 days, including launching the first online banking Website for Labor Day 1994, launching Kodak’s first online photo sharing site with IBM, building the first marketing archives intranet for The Coca-Cola Company, launching the inaugural Marines.com site and building almost all of what was NationsBank.com — the Gomez #1 rated online banking site two years in a row for 1999/2000.

I was the then-youngest ever Small Business Person of the Year finalist in 1999. Bank of America Ventures invested $8.3mm for a 10% stake in the company in mid-2000. I owned the other 90%. Since I’ve already said I’m not typing these posts from a Corona-like scene, you can probably already sense that I’ll have at least one valuable lesson to share.

In 2001, IPI began to focus on product development and has several patents pending or in the final stages of review. From 2002-2005, we hunkered down to survive the Web 1.0 bubble. By 2006, IPI was back to debt-free and self-sustaining although nowhere near the company it was is 1999/2000.

In 2007, I put IPI on the shelf to dabble in something different but more about that later. Tomorrow, I’ll have some thoughts about a favorite VC analogy: big pieces of small pies vs. smaller pieces of big pies.