Digium’s Mark Spencer on the history of Asterisk

Mark Spencer recounted the history of Digium / Asterisk at a linux users group meeting recently.

Check it out http://socializedsoftware.com/2008/03/16/digium-founder-mark-spencer-recounts-the-history-of-open-source-asterisk-pbx/

Money was tight at Digium until one day a salesman from DeltaCom (a southeastern competitive local exchange carrier) walked in to sell Mark and Jim a T1. After understanding what Mark and Jim had built the salesman offered to help them out gratis. From that point on they started seeing a steady increase in sales, and ended the year with a profit. After living on a meager income for so long Mark was able to grow the business without dipping too deep into the profits. 

I am a big fan of Asterisk, especially the much underappreciated IAX2 protocol. Mark’s journey has some lessons for Indian grassroots entrepreneurs such as myself.

• Make code. Didnt Mao say something like “First, build a strong base” ?
• Entrepreneurship is a journey. Not only should you be able to ride out periods of heavy work and low revenue, but also be able to enjoy it. If you grin and bear it, your heart is not in it. 
• Do not look at VC funding as a way to get into “salaried mode”. It rarely works that way.
• There is room to innovate in the linux / embedded / server / 64-bit / multicore and networking areas. It is intriguing to see so many ads from startups advertising for “challenging” PHP/Joomla/Google SEM jobs in the fledgeling social networking industry.

 

 

Author: Vivek Rajagopalan

Vivek Rajagopalan is the a lead developer for Trisul Network Analytics. Prior products were Unsniff Network Analyzer and Unbrowse SNMP. Loves working with packets , very high speed networks, and helping track down the bad guys on the internet. View all posts by Vivek Rajagopalan