We reached post number 1000 here on the Open Sources blog last week and Matt and I decided to make an attempt on reflecting back on what we've been through and learned this year.

In 2006 I accomplished the following:
-Graduated from Business School
-Made the finals of the Kauffman Fellowship
-Started a company and got $4m VC Funding
-Helped get Glass Lewis acquired

It's been a long year.

I started writing this blog for InfoWorld back in July of 2005. At the time I was working as a consultant for IDG running the LinuxWorld conference, as a part-time analyst for OSDL, and working for a few VCs looking to make investments in open source. I was also doing an MBA program and yet somehow I felt the need to do this blog as well. When I went on our MBA class trip in October 2005 I asked my pal Matt to pitch in on the blog and from there, it's been nothing short of bliss. He and I remain great friends and it's been a great partnership on the blog. We figured out early on that if you insult Apple, Microsoft and the GPL you can get lots of traffic.

When I look back, I have only vague memories of the last year. One positive aspect of my work overload was that I was forced into doing a lot of thinking. Part of what came out of all that thinking was that I decided that I wanted to start a company-and I did in April along with Ross Mason, the head Muleman.

I came across the Mule project in May of 2005 while still in business school and working on a Release 1.0 report about open source community. I was also trying to solve an integration problem at Glass Lewis involving several disparate systems. I was trying to find some kind of open source EAI and found Mule along with a few other projects. I made my developers download and try them all and I started digging into the communities.

The Mule project was started by Ross (one of the things I learned from the Release 1.0 was that OSS companies that had a “founding technologist” tended to be very successful) who also managed the community. I emailed Ross in early June of 2005 and it just so happened that he was going to be SF for JavaOne on his way back from Australia. We met up for lunch and talked about Mule and what he planned to do with it. He and his girlfriend were on their way to Malta where she grew up and they had planned to live (it's south of Sicily.) His plan was to continue doing pro services for Mule in London and my plan was to finish school and try to go work for a VC.

In September 2005 my pals at Glass Lewis asked me to come back and help them launch a new product and move the data center and the company itself. I had been working with GL for nearly 3 years so it was an easy choice to bail out from the anarchy of consulting. I knew that I would probably only need to be there for six months or so to get everything done so the founders encouraged me when I told them that I was thinking of starting a company.

In a sidewise line, I found out in January that I had made the finals of the Kauffman Fellowship, a program that matches VCs with people looking to go to the dark side. At the same time Ross and I started talking again as I wasn't really sure what I would do if I didn't "match" with a firm. In February I moderated a panel on open source marketing at OSBC and found that several OSS companies that I really liked were interested in hiring me. That afternoon day I sat down with Jason Maynard and Tim Golden, told them about the Mule idea and they both said that I should do that. The next day at lunch, Peter Yared told me the same thing.

A week later I went to the Kauffman shindig and found myself surrounded by literally the smartest, most interesting people I had ever met in my life. I honestly felt like the dumbest guy in the room (which is usually true) but I hit it off with a number of VCs. However, for this go-around of Kauffman, China seemed to be the hip thing and the firms wanted people who knew more about consumer than enterprise. After the first night I realized I wasn't going to match so instead I started pitching the VCs on doing something with Mule-basically my pitch was around open source EAI. The next week we had our first of about 20 VC meetings.

Ross came over for a week in April and we made the rounds of both the east coast and Silicon Valley. Generally everyone was positive, so we went off to do a ton of due diligence about the users and the product. We were fortunate to have a large list of users and VCs who were willing to talk to them-basically making sure Ross and I weren't totally lying.

After several months of meetings, due diligence and IP clean-up MuleSource closed $4m from Hummer Winblad and Morgenthaler Ventures. Since then we've been working like dogs. Actually, my dog is very lazy in comparison--though he has raised almost $70m.

I would estimate that Ross and I have been working 80 hour weeks since July, and while working this much is not always pleasant, we are still excited and believe in the company and the market opportunity.

One of things that I've realized is that running the company takes a lot more focus than all of these assorted projects did. I find myself having less time to write and less time to think in general. The key to that is hiring more people and getting back to my lazy ways.

Getting to our thousandth post took just over a year. I like to think we can get another thousand out in 2007 and continue to bore/annoy as we have done for the last thousand.