Stealth mode is overrated

Last month, eight people on my startup team went to DEMOfall to announce YackPack. We wore bright green t-shirts, handed out new business cards, and demonstrated YackPack over and over and over. We had a blast, and the outcome took us all by surprise.

But for me the biggest surprise was how I felt deep inside: liberated, unleashed, unchained.  At long last, I was free from the prison of stealth mode. And it felt sooooo good.

Since the fall of 2002, as soon as my book went to press, I started devoting my time to one question: How can technology help us stay connected with people who matter most?

This question became something of an obsession. I started reading and researching everything I could to find the answers. In addition to the many academic papers and the  books I read, I talked to aunts at family reunions, colleagues at parties, and strangers in airports. No one was off limits. Who matters most to you? How do you keep those relationship alive? What role does technology play?

In the process people opened their lives to me. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that staying connected to people who matter most was getting harder, not easier. The anecdotal evidence was growing each day. So in April of 2003, I formed a corporation and started formal research to solve this problem.

Then I made a mistake: I decided to operate the company in stealth mode.

I remember two people advising me against stealth. First, one of my students, Manu Kumar, said stealth was a bad idea. As we talked after class, he explained how working in the open was a better strategy. I knew Manu was smart and savvy, but I didn't believe him (sorry, Manu).

Later I had dinner with Jerry Michalski at an Italian place just off Highway 101 in Marin. Jerry explained how I could address this question -- and run the company -- with an open source mentality. I didn't get it. I didn't really understand open source, and I just didn't understand Jerry's vision.

To be fair, many people said stealth was the right way to go. In fact, most people did. And this mode was familiar to me, because while finishing my Ph.D., I also worked at Interval Research, Paul Allen's super-secret thinktank in Palo Alto.

So I chose stealth mode. In retrospect, this was my company's first big mistake.

Fortunately, the future of YackPack still looks bright. We're all excited about what's coming. But I'm  convinced that had I listened to Manu and Jerry, my life would have been easier. And I'm convinced YackPack would already be in the world, with millions of users connecting richly with friends, family, and colleagues. As it stands now, we hope to launch our beta tomorrow with a limited "invitation-only" rollout. There's a big difference between a few hundred users in beta and what could have been.

In growing my company from a research question to a launched internet service, I've learned an important lesson: Stealth mode is overrated.

Comments

[Jose]

Can you briefly give some of the pros and cons to starting a company in stealth mode?