mikehar

Nice writeup. FWIW, I never saw Michael Abrash wear a tie. :)

We were very into 3D cards back then. We had a lot of ties to that part of the world. I had been doing video drivers for OS/2 and NT. I got to know Abrash from his writing on the VGA, 8514, and, of course, asm. At Valve, we hired a couple of great guys from 3dfx. I still have a 3dfx hat somewhere that I bust out on special occasions. The killer setup back then was hooking up two 3dfx cards (SLI). But I usually played on a standard card because I wanted/needed to see it run like most people would experience it.

We had a deal with one of the companies, maybe 3dfx, but I forget who, to include the first three levels of HL with their card. Even though the game wasn't anywhere near finished, we sent off a disk to the company with our first three finished levels so we could get paid. Somehow, it leaked. We were pissed at first, but then it took off. People loved it. It really gave us the confidence that we were on the right track. It was our first game. The validation was just what we needed.

Fun times.

Great article, it got a lot of it right. I worked on Bob and Bob 2. Yes, there was a Bob v2, but for some reason it got canceled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Long time reader, first time caller. :)

This doesn't really apply to Picnik. It was a real and sustainable business. We felt like we could make the product better by joining with Google. Our users were constantly on our mind. Picnik continued to grow dramatically while we were at google. It was closed down at its peak.

FWIW we tried to buy Picnik back from Google once we heard that it was going to be shuttered. They wouldn't sell. It was gut wrenching to see Picnik go dark.

As a co-founder of Picnik, I was surprised by this article. It contained several errors which is pretty astonishing given its brevity. Here are a few corrections:

1) Sposato was not a founder of Picnik. He was hired by the two founders, myself and Darrin Massena. 2) Sposato did not decide to sell Picnik. Naturally he was very involved in the process, but the decision was ultimately made by the board (which Sposato was not on). I can tell you that it was not an easy choice. 3) Picnik was not a "photo-sharing" site, it was a photo editing site with very limited photo sharing. 4) "One-third of our 25-person team, including my two business partners, quit right off the bat”. Both co-founders worked at Google for slightly more than a year. Sposato was there for about two years. Most of the people who left were marketing support or office management. We did lose our lead designer to Apple, but I don't recall any other product related departures in the first year.

Picnik was amazing. Great team, we had a lot of fun and millions of amazing customers. It was very rewarding to work on a product that your customers love. Selling was a tough choice. Picnik was very healthy, profitable and growing. We felt like we were able to capture much of that value in the sale price and also have the opportunity to work on a product at Google that we felt would have a huge impact.

Unfortunately for us, within our first six months Google decided to focus on Google+ and there wasn't room for any other photo product outside of Google+. I completely understood at the time why Google+ was important to Google, it just wasn't important to me. So I left. I don't know how we could have been able to predict the shift in focus to Google+ even with perfect visibility into Google. From what I gather, such a large shift in focus and investment was a unprecedented in Google before Google+.

I think Google is a great company, I have a super high opinion of the people that I met there. Perhaps this wasn't the optimal exit for the Picnik team, but it was pretty damn good.

-mike harrington