A final word on coComment
Tonight at the LIFT Nouvo debate (I had a great time by the way, you should really come next time if you weren’t there!) I got a comment from an entrepreneur who proposed his company in the LIFT venture night, and he asked me to clarify my role in coComment. As coComment - a company I helped get off the ground - won a spot in LIFT’s prestigious venture night, he was wondering whether I had any conflict of interest in the whole process.
This made me realize that since I left everyone’s favorite comment tracking system, I haven’t really talked about it much, so here are some needed clarifications:
- I was a cofounder at coComment in the sense that I am half of the idea, Nicolas Dengler being the other half. At the time coComment happened I was a consultant hired by Swisscom, Nicolas an employee, and coComment was not a company. So actually nobody was a founder in the real sense of the term. But we were considered founders.
- I left coComment in August 2006 (18 months ago…) without having ever possessed any form of equity. Cocomment formally became a company months after I left. Since then I have not been involved in coComment in any way, nor I have received any form of salary or payment from coComment.
- The fact that cocomment is present at the LIFT venture night is a testimony to the objectivity of the whole process;-) Seriously, I had absolutely no influence of the choice of this or any other venture to be selected by the panel. coComment is there by its own merits and the fact that the panel voted it there.
The coComment story has been both amazing and tough. Amazing for all the people I met (a special thought for Nicolas Dengler & Marco Chong here) and all the lessons I learned, tough for having to leave my baby after months of hard work. I obviously had other plans for the service I helped start than leaving the company, but that is now part of history, and this decision involved so many elements and people it would be a mistake to judge it quickly and draw easy conclusions. I wish great success to coComment, mainly to be able to keep my bragging right about how creative I can sometimes be ;)
I often do so many things that I forget to pass important information, and this was one very unclear situation since August 2006. My apologies for that, and now stay tuned for more cool web projects coming soon….
January 30th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Laurent, thank you for this entry. Things are clear. Even though it was not the case, I would not have been thinking that it was a bad thing. Lot of people are more open minded that sometimes we can think.
Your last night LIFT presentation was impressive. It make me willing to follow it.
Have a great day, Roman
February 3rd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Laurent - thanks for clarifying. Partly to satisfy our curiousity with CoComment, but also to make things transparent about the venture night. I also had the same questions about conflicts of interest, but I think the benefit of the doubt is always the right option A. In this case, it proved to be correct. I wish CoComment (and all its founders ;-)) much success.