The original idea behind TeamOn was simple. Ever since the Hotmail acquisition, I had been enamored with the Hotmail value proposition and the tremendous success that it had achieved in the consumer space. So I asked myself why the same concept couldn’t be applied to the small business market. Essentially, add the group collaboration features offered by Microsoft Exchange but without the expense or hassles of managing your own Exchange server (this was before hosted Exchange became viable). Given the large size of the small business market, it seemed like a great business opportunity.

We raised a total of $15 million from Internet Capital Group and Madrona ventures and a number of prominent angels such as Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail founder) and Pete Higgins (former Group VP at Microsoft). Fortunately for us, we were able to do so at the height of internet boom. Unfortunately, the internet economy collapsed soon, thereafter. Our strategy was to partner with leading broadband providers, ISPs and portals to deliver our service offering to the small business market. However, all of our potential partners were in a world of pain making it difficult to strike the partnerships we needed to build our user base. Despite the challenges we did manage to strike partnerships with leading companies such Earthlink and OfficeMax.com and build a reasonable user base.

It became clear, however, that our original idea was not going to be a viable business proposition – at least not in the business environment that we faced. Fortunately, we were very careful with how we spent our money. We didn’t go crazy hiring hundreds of employees or advertise in Superbowl (which one of our competitors actually did). We had built some great e-mail technology so we started looking at other markets where we could profitably apply our technology. The market that we identified was wireless – this is where we ultimately gained traction leading to a successful exit through an acquisition by Research in Motion.