Now for the personal side of the Adobe/InterAKT story :)

I feel happy and sad in the same time. I put the bases of InterAKT in 2000, and it was a hell of a ride. Let's start with the beginning.

I'm a kid - 13 years old or so. In the communist Romania, computers were scarce. So I stood in front of the computers club, sneak-peeking through the keyhole at - "Casa pionierilor" (Kid's house, yes, that's a long story - click here to jump to the InterAKT era, and here to jump to the conclusions :). I see orange on a TV screen. And some movement. Orange is a nice color (and color TV's are rare in the communist Romania) so I continue peeking until the door opens and the teacher invites me in. Someone was playing a computer game - "Gunfright". I was very shy as a kid, so I stayed only because of the orange on the screen and that's how my life was change by a color. (the screenshots that I found don't actually show orange, but that's what I recall :) 

I've started to love computers and quickly become addicted to them. I was waking up at 5 am to stay in line and get the best computer (HC-85. Sinclair Spectrum compatibles). Then, my mom bought me a Russian equivalent of a Sinclair - Byte. We bought it from the market, directly from the Russians, and we haven't checked it. When we got home, it was broken. I cried for 2 days J. Then mom managed to have it repaired and I was the happiest block in the world.

Then I've met Bogdan, our parents knew each others and he had his own Sinclair spectrum compatible. We've started learning computer science together. Algorithms, contents, competition and a lot of fun. I remember one week we went to his country house and we've build a Windowing system in assembly code for Z80. Pretty cool, using a simple joystick instead of the mouse. If you're bored, click here to jump to the university.

As I was in love with computers, I choose a computer science high-school (communism was over when I've entered the high school so things began to modernize). Soon I found my first computer, a 386 DX. That was cool, it had everything but a co-processor.

Highschool was fun, I was always the second to first computer science guy in my region, so I never got to the national contests. However, some of my advice benefited Bogdan and he actually won the nationals, so I felt very happy. I had Mr. Bazon as my teacher, he was really into assembly code so we were doing a lot of assembly stuff. He was a good teacher, however he never liked me for some reason) (Hi Mr. Bazon J

We've also managed to write a vocal recognition system. It was quite fun - as we didn't have a sound card so we were forced to read the sound in binary form through the bi-directional printer port. And then re-program the 16385 URT timer (or something) to get the right sampling. And then implementing the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) without a co-processor, in assembly code. I did the engine, Bogdan did the 3d isometric representation of the frequencies (similar to what you get by default in winamp right now). We were close to recognize actual words through pattern recognition but we had other stuff to do.

Highschool was quickly over and then I moved to Bucharest. By a chance, I was admitted to the French and English streams, and I chose the French stream. They told us you have bigger chances to go out of the country if you were at the French stream.

Fortunately, we had a great dean, Mr. Fluerasu, and a very good teacher, Mrs. Sabac, who taught me a lot of stuff about life and who believed in me. They've sent me out in my first internship in Toulouse. Java 1.0 programming back in 96, that was cool.

In the meanwhile, I've joined my first startup as a CEO: Contextus. You've probably haven't heard of it because it died pretty soon. We were very, very young, and selling websites to Romanians, in 1996, wasn't such a great business. By December 97, I left with a sore taste in my mouth.

I got Bogdan in the French stream (his French skills were inexistent, but he was a brilliant computer scientist and Mr. Fluerasu always liked folks like us) and we've joined our second startup: Tradenet. It was supposed to be a Romanian e-Trade, but it failed to succeed because many reasons.

Bogdan got his internships in France. I got hired at Starom, a division of Romanian Data Soft. I was doing Java programming and other stuff, working on a VMWare clone. I wasn't very successful there, but I've learnt a lot about programming. Still, I was maturing and I've used a lot of the experience gathered here in the InterAKT era.

Which reminds me. Bogdan was doing overtime in France, and he managed to save 2000 EUR. He returned to Romania and was wondering whether to buy a car or to start a company with me. He made the right decision and borrowed me 1,000 EUR, and then we've started InterAKT. (I paid him back 5 years later J)

Our initial plan was to do some outsourcing for Bogdan's French friends. And we've started in the Politehnica university dorms. Unfortunately, we've stated InterAKT inside the dot com crash. So the contracts fade away quickly and we were left in the sun, with some ideas and no actual contract or commercial experience.

We've also sold few shares to Mihai Pricope and Cristian Marin - for several hundreds bucks the percent. They made a significant ROI now :)

After the dorms, we've been working for a French company that offered us free office space, and then when it went bankrupt we've moved to a rented apartment (the Romanian equivalent of a garage). It had 400 square feet, and there were 6 of us working there.

We loved PHP, and we didn't have a good editor to work with. Based on the recommendation of a friend (thank you Ovidiu!), we took a look at Ultradev, an IDE that didn't support PHP but supported everything else. So we've started to work on the PHP support in Ultradev. Later, we found out that a guy from Macromedia was working on something similar, but was less powerful than ours (Dan Radigan, he's no longer with Adobe). He gave us some good advice and that's how PHAkt - our PHP server model for Ultradev, was born. It was an instant hit, and I think that it was downloaded a million times from our website since.

On a side track, Mr. Fluerasu introduced us to Swiro, a Swiss-Romanian company that was developing an ERP for the textile industry. We've worked through the first year really hard trying to implement a fully fledged ERP - and that's still working despite the lack of actual maintenance.

Fortunately, in a strike of genius, we understood that the Dreamweaver extensions are actually a much better market than doing outsourcing - because they are a business that has a weak relationship with the size of the team, as compared to outsourcing, that required a large team in order to have significant revenues. So we've split the company in two with Bogdan, he was doing outsourcing to fund the R&D expenses and I've started the products division. We've released ImpAKT and NeXTensio and start selling products over the Internet. I think we've sold 200 licenses in the first year

Then we've decided to move to a bigger apartment, and we took one that was almost double. We've started to organize our sales, both for outsourcing and the InterAKT website was growing slowly.

In terms of relationship with Macromedia, we were making ourselves known at a steady pace, but it was a hard process. When you're a completely unknown company from Romania, it's hard to get anyone listen to you. However, we've started building the dream that will be bought by Macromedia some day. It helped me a lot during recruiting and motivational times J.

The company development continued in the following years with Krysalis - a platform for content publishing over the Internet using XML and XSL. Krysalis was the foundation for Komplete, our Content Management System, and we had several successful implementations of this, the most important one being www.mcti.ro (the Romanian ministry of IT&C). The technology was great, but it was too complicated for people to really grasp the concepts, so it died in about 2 years.

As the current apartment was small, we've decided to move to some new offices. By chance, we found this office building that was quite inexpensive - Ayash Center - so we've moved in and that's where we're still staying now. We initially got 1500 square feet for roughly 20 people. Now we have 4500 square feet and everything is much nicer.

Business was great, we were tripling or doubling each year. However, we've realized that the Komplete consulting business wasn't the best thing to do. So we've decided to focus on Dreamweaver instead of doing consulting work.

In the same time, we had some infusion of talent in the company. Sebastian, a San Diego law/CS graduate, came in and started to tech us everything about people skills and empathy. We realized that, even if we were very good programmers, and successful businessmen, we weren't great people managers. With Sebastian's help, we've started to change and I think that his contribution was great and shaped our future. Another significant help came from Cristi Cheran - a very direct and rough guy that was in love with interaction design (IxD) and website usability. His books and reviews of our products helped us improve MX Kollection to a level that wasn't achievable before. Both left the company for various reasons, but we owe them a big Thank You!

Then the MX Kollection era came up. MX Kollection was a product built for the customers, by skilled sales, product managers, programmers, testers and doc writers. It wasn't a code feast, but it was really designed for usability.

The rest is modern history so I won't get into details (yes, even I got bored of this :)

The most interesting stuff that happened in the last year was the acquisition. It all started with an e-mail asking us if we can talk, roughly one year ago. Then all the normal steps in an M&A process followed, and we've managed to convince Adobe that we're the right company to acquire in the region.

And today is day 1. We've signed the papers yesterday, transforming from entrepreneurs to employees. But that's a different league, and I hope that it will be a very fertile ground for me.

That's my story. I had several mild failures at the beginning, mostly caused by my naiveté. However, I never went back and always took new challenges - and that's my advice to you. If you're smart and want to succeed, you will, if you invest enough time and energy.

However, it's weird how emptiness replaces enthusiasm when your dreams come true. I have to find a new dream soon :)

Alexandru - InterAKT founder