it was fall of 2001. i had just wrapped up selling electron economy to viewlocity, which has an intense experience of growing and then shrinking a team. during this process, i was the sole executive driving the acquisition and dealing with major investors. once the ink dried, i thought about taking a break, but i didn’t. instead, i holed up in my house and got wired in.

the fall of 2001 was a relatively quiet time. i mainly stayed at home and began building what would become the first real company i would found. at the time, i didn’t think of myself as a “founder.” i was just building software or talking to pilot customers. zero distractions beyond that. i financed the company for the first nine months, recruited a small core of engineers to the team, and we all worked out of my house. pure awesome times.

it was crazy and fun, looking back now. those were great times. it felt like i was really living in silicon valley (but then again i am a 4th generation bay area native!). eventually in august 2002, we raised a $5.2m series a. i moved the company out of my house and became the ceo of the entity: composite software (original name -> codemetamorphosis).

the idea for composite came from a combination of trends. at electron economy, i began to see that interfaces to data were becoming more standardized (with soap, etc.), and historically many of the challenges with data integration had been addressed with adaptors. companies such as crossroads software and active software were started to address this basic issue for enterprise app integration. these forces, plus some of my previous work in bioinformatics (querying multiple public genomic databases with local private databases) provided a background in building federated query engines.

the vision for the new company — composite software — was to build a data virtualization layer whereby the data could stay in the original system and our software could build a queryable composite view. large data lived in multiple heterogeneous silos, and getting a single view of an entity (in our initial case, a customer/client) is a very hard problem, both from a technical standpoint (high-performance queries on vertically partitioned data) and an organizational perspective (in their context).

in the fall of 2002, a year after incorporation, composite was lucky to have a few customers and seven-digit revenue. over a five year journey, our founding team grew the company to where it is today, still alive and doing well, with over 100 employees and many diverse customers and partners. these days, i advise the ceo. i recruited him into the company early, as well as several of the original engineers that worked out of my house are still with the company a decade later.

growing up in the valley, the dream of building software has always been around me. electron gave me a taste. but founding composite was the definitional move in my career. even though electron flew high and then was grounded, many opportunities and connections came out of that experience, especially interfacing with new investors and management. but, something deep down told me turn inward and just write code/have fun. i didn’t want to manage again just yet. i was a bit tired and exhausted from all the busyness of business. in a way, it was easier and more comfortable to build a new piece of software and re-recruit some of my colleagues than to go out into the real world. and, it was one of the best (and most fun) decisions i’ve ever made.

now on the venture side, i am grateful to be in the position to evaluate all these great new people, technologies, and business models. it’s like a never-ending stream of innovation, all coming by the kp offices. it is humbling. and, yet, we can only invest in a few teams each year. we have to be really selective. we have to consider the market size. we have to consider the competition. those are all the harsh realities of today’s technology market.

yet, at the same time, for better or worse, i am trying to find someone who wants to go through what i did. someone who wants to recruit teams but also has the moxie to know when things aren’t working out. someone who has already been working out of their house. someone who has convinced their former team members to go into battle with them. it’s not because this is the only path, or the best path — there are many paths. but, this is the only path i know, and if you’re not on this path, there’s a good chance i won’t be able to help you in any meaningful way. in future posts, i will share many of the learnings that i made throughout founding/building composite software. stay tuned.

in the world of software and the west coast, it sure does feel that there’s been a significant shift underway, north to san francisco. i could feel it for myself, even before i started at twitter in 2010. being at twitter in the heart of sf it was such a wildly different experience than palm and page mail road, and though i’ve grown up and lived and worked in the heart of the valley for so many years, it was clear that something new was swirling around the city proper. nearly the next two years were spent taking the 280 into twitter hq daily, a new habit that became a ritual.

now after a year at kleiner perkins, my colleagues and i have been observing this trend, as well. it’s not hard to spot — just glance over our calendars. while the center of gravity for kp is and will always be on sand hill road, the firm did secure an office in the city about a year ago, and we operate out of it while we are in the city. sometimes i’m there, jordan is there often, and so are chi-hua, megan, ray and bing when he comes up. plus so many others.

i’m in sf a few days a week, but i’m still working south of sand hill road quite often, and that area is still — and will always be — critical to the heartbeat of the valley. i’m excited to continue to spend more time in sf and to reconnect with old twitter friends and meet new companies. just drop me a note if you’d like to come by some time, and you may just see me walking around soma anyway. also, if you have any ideas on what you’d like to see us do with our sf office, please let me know. it’s a quaint space, not really that big, and not something that warrants a big press event, but we do want to create another space where friends in the ecosystem can come to and meet others, as well. i’m looking forward to your ideas, and thanks for reading. see you soon, either on sand hill or in the city!

i have an exciting announcement to make, and one that may surprise former and current colleagues…i’m really excited to announce that i’ll be hosting a new video interview series on techcrunch tv (TCTV) called “founders’ stories – engineering companies.” the concept is simple and straight–forward: on the first wednesday of every month at noon pst, TCTV will publish a short video conversation between me and a founder focused exclusively on some of the key technical challenges they faced in the creation of their products and businesses.

i’m personally excited for this new opportunity because it gives me yet another excuse to do what i love most — talk directly with technical founders and learn to understand the inner workings of the technical issues they’ve faced. the beauty of making it into a show is that these conversations become “open-sourced,” in a way, and will hopefully help transfer and spread knowledge within the community through a conversational format. (another potential win in this series is that future founders may better understand how a technical former-operator like me may be thinking in a venture context.)

enough about me, though. it’s all about the guests, and we have a great lineup on tap, such as bradford cross from prismatic (we’ll discuss balancing design and engineering decisions and other topics), a number of founders both at the later stages of their company’s evolution and others that are very early, and more. of course, i’m open to suggestions for guests, so feel free to contact me.

thanks in advance, also, to all the folks at techcrunch and TCTV for the opportunity. if you have any suggestions for guests, or topics to drill into, please don’t hesitate to comment or shoot me a note

here is the first session:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/07/founder-stories-bradford-cross-of-prismatic-on-running-his-startup/