Quick-fire decisions

It all happened so quickly – five years and six months in Singapore came to a close in two months. We working away in Singapore looking for support for an open source play and not getting very far when we contacted OTBC. As the world’s first incubator for open technology companies, it seemed like we had a good shot.

I lined up meetings with Holly Files, the interim ED at OTBC and booked a seat at OSBC West in San Francisco. In short, the message from the whole trip was obvious; move to Portland. Holly made a convincing argument, Portland is a, if not the, centre of gravity in the Open Source Universe: ODSL, OSL, POSSE, OTBC, IBM’s Linux research group, Intel’s Linux research team, and a whole host of companies plugging away – JanRain, OpenSourcery, to name a few. Added to that legal counsel that knew about open source frameworks, IP and licensing – none of which existed in Singapore.

As Stuart put it, “we were in Singapore looking for open source opportunities with a candle and saw the huge bonfire that is Portland in the West.” So we headed West and named the company – HeadWest Software, Inc. Truth is though – we flew east – don’t let that bother you though.

That decision was in March after we’d come back to present to OTBC and were accepted as an incubee. It all went pretty quick after that.

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