Today we were thinking back to the first days of “Team Xobni.”  At that point we were not even sure we liked the name “Xobni.”  Now we love it!  I can’t tell you how many times someone has asked me, “What’s your company’s name?”  I respond “Xobni.” “What?”  Then I explain, “It’s the word inbox spelled backwards.”  After I say that, I never have to tell them again.

Adam and I met by chance in the summer of 2005.  I posted a roommate ad on Craigslist. We decided to live together.  Adam was an intern at Vecna and I was an intern at NASA Goddard.  Each day after work we would bounce technical problems and business ideas off each other.  Six months after Adam and I had gone our separate ways he came to me with the idea which became Xobni.

The first week in the life of Xobni was spent in a single room in the East Campus dorm at MIT.  Adam was living there for his first semester of grad school.  I had flown up from D.C. for a week, as a trial, just to see how we would work together.  We worked great together.

We meant to take a picture of our “office” for that first week.  I wish we would have.   We had 2 laptops, 4 monitors, 2 desktops and 4 servers crammed into a 12ft by 12ft dorm room.  I was sleeping on a couch we had stolen from the common area.  Empty Hot Pockets containers were strewn across the floor.

Our sleeping schedule led us to a nocturnal existence by the third night.  It was at this point that we started resenting the fact that Boston Market wasn’t open for dinner at 4:00am.  We were working so hard it wasn’t uncommon for us to comment that eating, showering, and making trips to the bathroom were “distractions.”

Now that nearly 2 months have passed, we’ve fallen into a sustainable groove.  We have begun to meet the great group of hackers who make up this year’s Y Combinator SFPs.  We’ve also become active with other entrepreneurs in the Boston area.  I passed up my plans to travel the Pacific Rim for the opportunity to start Xobni. I would do it again in a heart beat.  I can’t wait until we release Xobni Analytics.