People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont thing.
I once spitballed with a certain VC at FreshTracks Capital about an idea I had, which lead to him running off with it and burning millions of dollars making it into BRIDJ, which shut down a few years ago.
True, but a little misleading. The majority of the co-founders of Ello, plus nearly all of its staff, were based in Colorado.
Source: I worked for Ello.
I'd say most of the negative stress I felt was from knowing that the user base was growing faster than we could fill in feature gaps that would keep folks engaged. I felt like we couldn't quite catch up, and by the time the money started running out and interest started to wane, it was too late.
A few learnings:
- 7 founders is a lot. I don't want that to sound like a criticism, it just means the company is going to feel a bit different vs a more classic 2 or 3 founder setup.
- Positive feedback loops within a tight team of highly skilled people has a huge impact on getting more stuff done. That's how I would characterize the engineering team, and it was one of the highest-performing teams I've ever been a part of.
- Don't build a startup on a custom, in-house UI framework ;)
I have built many of them to good effect.