Day One: Lift-off

06 Dec 2010

In the last few days, since our purchase of LassoSoft, I have been absolutely inundated with emotional emails, ranging from "Go, man, Go! This is great news!", to "this supports my long standing fear that Lasso has been dying a slow death". I am awash with email, phone calls and IMs - and I begin with an apology for not being able to reach out and talk to you all at once - to share my common frustrations and share with you my aspirations for the future.

I have not shared my plans to take over the world with you, as I believe I have a responsibility to listen to the community of developers first and foremost, and my job is to sift through your intelligent feedback and strike out towards the best path towards success.

There is no one path towards success. But there may be a fastest way to get there.

Several years ago, I was working in Inuvik, with the Gwich'in (http://www.gwichin.nt.ca/). They are some of the most remarkable people I have met in my travels. One thing which truly struck me was their definition of leadership (as explained to me by an elder). Leadership was not a right. Not a religious or hierarchical or birth-right crown, nor was it cast by vote or by riches. Leadership was a function of survival - people merely followed the individual whose vision made the most sense. Which direction is the caribou this season? Nobody really knows. But that guy over there is as likely to guess - or more - than anyone else, because he has listened and collected knowledge from everyone, and made an informed decision accordingly. His decisions are the best choice to avoid starvation.

I realize, many of you are trusting me with your lives, and I do not take the decision of where to go next with Lasso lightly. I strike out towards caribou.

Lasso is going to achieve significantly more than what it has to date, that is my first promise to you.

What I can tell you is this:

• Today we assigned three people to get a number of internal and external systems working - bastions of the old world order. This includes Listsearch, which has been hobbling along for months - and other key components ranging from our bugs system to our old Lasso 8 test suite.
• Today one person is testing and wrapping up better installers for key Lasso 9 production distros - including CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu. This should help people get running Lasso 9 running out of the box until we make big changes.
• Today we brought the Lasso 9 bugs list out and assigned someone to triage and fix the problems.
• Today another person started triaging the Lasso 8 bugs, with the intent of releasing as many realistic fixes as possible in a new release.
• Today a team started working on a new reference system, a better portfolio of marketing materials, a new documentation system and a series of other websites to collect your input.
• Today I started a transparency Blog. :)

Today we had more salaried people completely engaged in the development of Lasso and the business of LassoSoft than in the history of the language. (I am not trying to be a historical revisionist, incidentally, but just looking back through available historical material and find no proof that more people have ever worked for the company at once directly or indirectly on Lasso).

This first day comes with a clear vision for the future of Lasso - a strong and vivacious day which begins the dawn of a new era. I look at my iChat at 10:30pm on Day One and see a half-dozen LassoSoft people still working late into the night on making our new dreams a reality.

I celebrate with you my first day, and hope you in turn celebrate with me in return.

Sean Stephens
CEO
LassoSoft Inc.