Six years and a day ago (I already made two posts yesterday, so this had to wait), we were at the Handelsregisteramt (the public office where you register companies here in Switzerland) where we officially founded the Sensational AG.
I even remember the weather (which is basically because I have a really hard time at forgetting anything): It was one of the few days that summer where it didn’t rain (completely contrary to the current summer). There wasn’t much to see of the sun either, but it was hot and moist.
When we founded, one of us was still going to school and I was absorbed by something else, so we continued keeping our operation on a slow level.
On February 4th, 2001, we really took off.
By then school was over for all of us and my thing was over too. We moved into a real office (the team was working together even before we founded the real company – but then we all were still at school and working from home and from the school house). I set up the basics of our internal network (which still works today – even some hardware is the same, namely Thomas, a Thinkpad 390 or something like that which is a central gateway). The internet access was still over a ISDN line, but at least it was something. ADSL was not available back then.
Mid 2001, we developed a barcode scanning application on a specific customers request. This application is the foundation of PopScan – our current Big-Thing.
In the last five years of operations, we did a lot of interesting stuff. Sometimes risky, sometimes just interesting and sometimes really, really great. I myself migrated to Mac OS, we migrated our telephone system to VoIP, we were running quite a big internet portal, we developed applications from scratch for the web, for windows and for PocketPCs. We moved office (inside the same building – even the same floor) and we finally hired two more people.
Looking back, we’ve come a long way while still being ourselves. And we managed to achieve incredibly much with just three (and now five) people.
Thanks Lukas, thanks Richard. It’s great to have this thing going with you!
gnegg 