In ancient times (and warmer latitudes) May 1st meant the beginning of summer. In the modern era it began to symbolize communism, and continues to celebrate the international labor movement. But for us, it’s the day we sat down to found Spry Hive Industries, the company behind the Fizzik browser.
It’s not entirely a coincidence that we chose May Day to start Spry Hive.
In early 2009, Grant and I had both been working at Microsoft for nearly five years, and had put in time with software companies large and small for many years before that. We valued our time at Microsoft, having had the good fortune to work with smart folks and accomplish some cool things along the way for ourselves.
But we wondered if we could do better for ourselves and for others if we were out on our own. We wondered what a small company could do, one composed of a few souls motivated by the desire to work together and build great software for a deserving public. And we wondered if we could make a living working for such a company.
We imagined it could be a sort of collective - a “hive” if you will - that could operate more nimbly than the large corporate software publishers that dominated the landscape. So we called it “Spry Hive,” which made sense after all, and tacked on the word “Industries” for reasons I can’t quite remember, but probably so that we would never take ourselves too seriously.
And no day could more symbolically launch an inspired collective of software developers than May Day.
So here we stand at the end of year one, and the dream is still alive. Our last year was about pulling together a group of great folks who loved to work together. This next one is going to be about taking you along for the ride. If you expect and want more from software and the Internet, tell us. Help us build it. We don’t have it right yet and we might never get there, but if it’s anything like the last year, we’ll have a great time working on it together.
