After a hiatus since 2019, Brian and I are committed to working on products and company building again. Hurray!
We’ve taken time off. Brian has been successful with eng leadership coaching, and he will continue working on that. I moved to Portugal a few years ago, toying with some startup ideas and exploring some job opportunities since being here - but something wasn’t clicking.
Working at another company didn’t resonate, no matter how good the prospect but the work I did on my ideas didn’t progress fast enough. What was lacking was the accountability to somebody else. I wrote Brian an email proposing that we reunite and do what worked for us in the past.
This is how Fairly Fantastic came to be.
I can’t help but being a little nostalgic, so here’s a little bit about what happened the first time around…
It was an exciting time to be part of the Austin Ruby on Rails community: Twitter took off like a rocket at SXSW, Capital Factory buzzed with startups and hosted several community meetups, including the very active Austin on Rails group led by Damon Clinkscales.
Brian and I met at a startup called FiveRuns. The startup didn’t work out, but it was probably the first company in Austin that was hiring full time Rails software engineers. It was a talented team that included Mike Perham (Sidekiq) and Bruce Williams (Absinthe).
We ended up working at a rather boring company that sold SaaS applicant tracking software for higher education. Because the day job was definitely “meh” the entrepreneurial drive in us grew…
At some point Damon Clinkscales started an informal breakout group of hackers & entrepreneurs called Cafe Bedouins. We all worked our normal day jobs but on Tuesday nights we gathered and hacked on ideas until 2 or 3 in the morning.
Brian, Barry Cox and I started Bedouin Labs. We worked on a bunch of ideas on those Tuesday nights:
It was fun and we motivated each other. The passwords for everything were the same: tuesdaynights. Eventually our work on TweetRiver started to pay off and it became what we worked on for the next 10 years in the form of Mass Relevance, Spredfast and Khoros.
Fairly Fantastic is the 2024 incarnation of Bedouin Labs. The way we see it, we have the time and space to work on ideas and we have a couple that we’re already working on. At the outset Brian may not love the idea I’m working on or vice versa, but we like helping each other out and contributing our respective strengths. Just keep working until something works!