Phil Libin's team built a Nokia e-commerce site using Vignette's Story Server, a content-management system they found useless. They sent Vignette a blunt letter calling the product "crappy." Three weeks later, Vignette acquired them and let them fix it.
And the way we sold that company is we wound up doing a. We wound up doing this project. We did E commerce sites. So back then, E commerce wasn't really. It was just getting started. And we build shopping carts and websites where you can buy stuff. And we did a really big project for. I think it was for Nokia. So one of the major companies at the time, they wanted to sell stuff online. And the client had decided that they were going to use this thing called Vignette ST Story Server, which was this giant content management package from a big company that had just gone public. And we begged them not to use it because we looked at it and we said, this thing, the Story Server, you paid a million dollars for it. It doesn't do anything. We know. We are technical guys. We're in charge of implementing it. I'm telling you, it doesn't do anything. It costs money, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything. You still need to customize it for a year, but we can do that year of customization without that thing. And it would be just as good. Please don't use it. Just give us the million dollars instead. And they said, no, no strategic decision. CEO played golf with somebody. We need to do it. Said, all right. So we had to build this very big, complex site using this technology. And it was impossible because the thing didn't do anything more than it didn't do anything. It kind of prevented you from doing anything. And so we had to fight uphill to actually connect it. We had to build all this plumbing to connect this thing, this Story Server thing, to real things that actually did something. So you can have shopping carts and inventory and whatever. And it was really difficult, far harder than it would have been without it. But it worked. And we launched a product. And then we were sitting around right afterwards, we were just kind of joking around, and one of my friends suggested, hey, we should send a letter to Vignette. And we should say, like, dear Vignette, just thought you'd like to know that we had to do something with your crappy product. And we managed to do it, and it worked. But, like, boy, it was difficult. Your product sucks. And we were sort of laughing about that. And then I thought, why not? Let's do that? So I wrote a letter to Vignette, and I wasn't quite as rude about it, but that's exactly what I told them. And three weeks later, they bought the company. Because they immediately wrote back, like, really? We would love to get it to do something. And yeah, we know that it's Back then, everything was booming so fast, they didn't have time to actually write a product. They were too busy selling it. They were too busy growing. And they knew it, and they were actually really good about it. And they bought us pretty much immediately. And then we helped redo the architecture so that a couple of years later, it actually did do something. And so the lesson we learned from that is, A, this whole experiment of just really trying to not tolerate stupidity and not have any assholes. That worked really well, although we may have just gotten really lucky the first time around. And B, we would just be direct about what you want. We had a thing that we thought that would be useful information to tell this big public company, and we did. We told them, and they did the right thing, and they bought us and everyone. It kind of worked out well for everyone.
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