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….

I spent an hour today with Carsten Schloter and Daniel Ritz, the CEO and Chief Strategy Officer of Swisscom, the telecom giant inside which we developed coComment.

We met after Mr. Schloter participated in a TV debate (video here, in french), and we agreed we would meet again to review the (numerous) lessons learned on the project.

Obviously coComment was a very interesting experience, a frontal collision between two very different worlds: a fast paced, creative, crazy and unstructured web 2.0 project exploding inside a massive, structured and established organization. We all learned a lot, sometimes from our mistakes.

We talked about that today, with the two persons who can change things. And both guys left with a full page of notes about how the new economic conditions demand quicker decisions, a more participative approach, better preparation in case your idea becomes hotter than the superbowl, etc…

It was the final chapter of an amazing experience which, despite ending up with the fathers of the idea (myself and Nicolas Dengler, now head of product development at Netvibes) leaving the project, taught as a lot (check my lessons-learned presentation here) and took us around the world, from Sandhill road to Shibuya. A lot assets for the next adventure.

I was with Nicolas today, and we discussed a few ideas. Maybe we will have something else coming to your screen soon, stay tuned (and call if you are looking for investment opportunities ;-)

Today is my last day of work for coComment, the end of almost eleven months of hard and passionate work on one of the most exciting projects of my professional life.

It is both unsurprising and… surprising!

Since May my mission was to take care of coComment during the transition between a 100% Swisscom owned project and a fully independent company. I moved the project to Geneva, rebuilt a team, and focused all our energy on the relaunch. I was still an external consultant, and my official title was “Interim CEO”, so there was a sense changes were looming on the horizon.

On the other hand, Nicolas, Marco and me (aka the “founders”) tried hard to be part of the future of coComment and strike a deal with Swisscom on the establishment of a new company. Unfortunately we could not agree on satisfactory terms for all parties involved. Spin offs are really hard to do as anybody with experience in that kind of situation will tell you. So, as it stands, I will not be back on the project when I return from holidays.

coComment has been such a wild ride. It all started on an email from Nicolas Dengler, who was then working for Swisscom Innovations (the R&D arm of our national telco). He was asking for my opinion on an idea he had, a kind of Third Voice with a twist of Web 2.0.

I was immediately seduced by the project and its potential, and promptly joined as a consultant. My role was to help refine the concept, and make it fit the different constraints we had (budget, development capacity, location, etc…). By the end of 2005 I had logged countless hours of commuting between Geneva and Bern, where the project was then being developed in-house at Swisscom by Peter Balsiger and his team.

I stepped down a little in early 2006 to put the final touch on the organization of the conference I founded and that some of you attended; on February 2 and 3 LIFT was here, and on the ensuing week-end I ended up showing the small web project I was working on to some bloggers, among them Robert Scoble.

A-listers are magicians: they can transform your private alpha in public beta. It is both a good and a bad thing. If it happens, just be sure you have more than your development server when they start talking about you ;-)

So one of the craziest weeks of my life started. From the Swiss chalet of my friend Pierre Devos – where we had taken all the LIFT speakers who had no plans for the week-end – coComment spread all over the web: second most bookmarked site on delicious, fourth most searched term on technorati, articles all over the press, most notably in Wired, tens of thousands of people trying to reach the site. The buzz was completely overwhelming. Solve a problem for passionate internet users out there and they will reward you with a free buzz surpassing your wildest dreams. As Don Dogde said:

We now live in a meritocracy. Money, VCs, and the press no longer decide what will be successful. Great products/services with intuitive designs that solve a real problem win.

Link

So my post-conference vacation turned into helping deal with all the craziness that started in February and just ended this week.

I met thousands of passionate and interesting people, went to the silicon valley, got introduced to the world of venture capitalists, held meetings in more than 10 cities (let’s see: Zurich, Bern, Paris, Bucharest, London, Munich, Boston, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Tokyo, Barcelona, Zaragossa), managed a great team to deliver the best ever version of what I believe is an indispensable service for all those participating in the global conversation… What a ride.

As of today, coComment is a successful web service used by thousands of people, hosting hundreds of thousands of comments, making global conversation useful and helping individuals deal with a growing problem: managing their participation all over the web.

One day I will go into more details about all this, and maybe even write a book about that whole story as Bruno once suggested ;-)

But now is finally my turn for a bit of rest.

Before I publish this post and head to Brittany for three weeks of well deserved disconnection, I want to thank all those involved in this adventure, starting with the great team who worked with me for the last three months (ben, chris, christophe, guillaume, hugh, juan-luis, leif, nicholas, pierre-alexandre, raph, steph, steven, the namahn folks and the netage folks); all our users, friends and coworkers who provided advice, ideas and challenges; and last but not least my two “co-founders” Nicolas Dengler and Marco Chong, two people with whom I think we were forming a very balanced, creative, and effective team. It is really a shame we built that chemistry on a consulting project ;-)

I will be back with a fresh mind in September, working on the preparation of LIFT07 and looking for a few new challenges (maybe even in the commentosphere… who knows…), . Enjoy your month of August folks, see you soon :-)

We finally put weeks of hard work online. I believe the new coComment is much, much better on numerous aspects: more complete, mature, usable, stable, pretty, etc… Check the list of new features here

Right now we are still running after the buzz, checking if our users find new bugs. So far so good, let’s hope we can get a few hours of sleep tonight after the Californian TechCrunchers wake up and invade the service…

Hugh Macleod is here in Geneva for a few days to help us brainstorm on the coComment roadmap. We’ve just had a great fondue together, discussing in no particular order the death of branding (“markets are about what people do. Branding is about what people feel”), how Skype is crap, and that the future of web 2.0 is very likely in that small device 95% of us have in their pockets: mobile phones!

Hugh also caught the Nseries virus, shooting everything that comes in sight with his brand new phone.

Nous avons discuté coComment avec Nicolas Dengler et Mathieu Chevrier autour d’un café au Starbucks de Vevey (j’explique car ça permet de comprendre certains des gloussements qu’on entend en fond sonore). Le résultat se télécharge ici, sur le site de l’émission multimédia de Couleur3: Pointbarre

I will be in Tokyo on Saturday 15^th to continue the coComment VC tour. If you are in the area and have a bit of time to introduce a french tourist to Japan please contact me (laurenthaug [at] gmail). We know the system has hundreds of Nippon users, so if by chance one of them is reading this post please contact me.

While I was in California I got an sms from David Dueblin – a Swiss reader of this blog working at Yahoo – and we ended up meeting him on the Yahooplex, touring the facilities and getting a demo of the new Yahoo mail. Oh, and Tom Cruise was in the building, exciting day!

It took me two bubbles to make it to the Silicon Valley but here it is ;-) I will be in San Francisco from the 18th of March to meet tons of interesting people and talk about coComment. Any info on some Californian geek diners/techcrunch parties while we will be there?

I’m proud of it, the list is quite prestigious with apps like Google Desktop or Campfire sharing the spotlight. Check the full article here. But my Swiss side – the one that tries not too get overexcited – remembers this quote from Lee Hopkins:

The challenge for any company or individual that creates something which far exceeds their take-up expectations is that they are then victim to the hype and hysteria of others, over which they have very little control. […] It may well turn out that coComment’s unexpected windfall of users may be its Achilles heel and the meme-spread a Pyrrhic victory.

Now back to work, harder!

Il n’est plus nécessaire d’avoir un code d’invitation pour ouvrir un compte coComment. L’inscription se passe ici, et si vous cherchez plus d’informations sur le service rendez-vous sur Wired qui vient de nous consacrer un article.

Wired: A New Way to Tame Chaos of Flames
Loads of people post comments on blogs without running one of their own. Now services like coComment let serial opinion slingers round up their stray rants. By Joanna Glasner.