Brett’s girlfriend at the time (Julie, now his wife) also worked in “the industry”, for Rubin Postaer Interactive (“RPI”, a subsidiary of RPA; A=Associates). RPA was and is a prominent advertising & web development shop in LA, and they managed the Honda.com account. Sometime in late 1997, it was learned via our RPA spy (Julie) that Honda.com, which was using WebTrends at the time, was unable to process each day’s Apache access log before the end of the current day, dooming them to fall ever more behind. After some effort, we obtained a few days’ server logs to process as a demo, and the task was completed in ~30 minutes. We became the web analytics solution for American Honda from that point forward, and it became clear a business could be built on this log processing technology.

One of the earlier Urchin t-shirt designs, before we corporate-ized the logo. Cabel from Panic was mad at us for that.

Around this time Jack Ancone joined the company as (initially) CFO and moved to San Diego. We moved into our office at 2165 India St. around the same time (Note: The Ballast Point tasting room is now located directly across the street from our old office; suffice to say we would have never achieved anything had they been there in the late 1990s.) The company was then known as Quantified Systems, Inc., and work was divided into web dev, hosting, and software dev. Be divided and conquer yourself, to paraphrase Caesar.

Classy awnings right? The big Ballast Point tasting room/restaurant is now in the building barely visible to the left. They have since become a legit unicorn. So much for software being the way to get rich.

In January 1998 we received our very first order for the “Pro” version of Urchin, for $199. [Side note: why does “Pro” always mean “lame” in the software world?] Anyway, shortly after, we made the decision to jettison the non-software parts of the business, and all hosting/webdev customers were rather abruptly “sold” ($0) to another local webdev shop. We were now a software company (high-five!).

As such, we needed to raise some money. Tapping our family “networks” and one boutique VC (Green Thumb Capital, of NYC, who Jack brought on board*), we raised $1m, bringing our total outside capital to about $1.25m. We would never raise any further money (with the exception of ~$400k in debt, which was repaid with interest and warrants). Not for lack of trying… more on that later.

[*to their credit, Green Thumb never once hassled us nor apparently had they any thought of recovering their investment; I can only imagine their dumbfounded shock when they found out Google had agreed to acquire us.]

As we struggled to figure out how to sell “enterprise” software in the late 1990s, we decided to try an advertising-based approach to grab market share. For some reason, we were always more concerned with popularity than money… go figure. Internet companies of the era were often valued most highly if measured by “eyeballs” and we thought we could get lots of those by giving away the software for free and showing banner ads at the top of each page. So we released Urchin ASAP, the free counterpart to Urchin ISP. Both were designed to be used by hosting operations. We thought we could make some significant fraction of a cent per click on these ads, on top of some infinitesimal CPM… (reminds me of a classic SNL skit… Q: “how do you make money at the Citiwide Change Bank? A: Volume!”) We never made anything on those banner ads, but we did get exposure. And the software was pretty good, for the era. Good enough to make our first real breakthrough.

One of the Urchin ASAP banner ads, which advertised itself when no one else wanted the space. Meta.

Before Tumblr, before Blogger, and contemporary with Geocities, there was something called Nettaxi. What-Taxi? Right. But at the time they claimed something like 100,000 “sites”, and we viewed them as a fantastic source of eyeballs for our advertising-supported version of Urchin. They claimed to have no money for such a luxury as web statistics (glad that term got retired), so we “negotiated” a deal: Urchin would be 100% free for them in exchange for the anticipated ad revenue we’d get from all those eyeballs. How much money did we make? 4¢ or so maybe, I don’t recall ever actually getting a check. But that’s beside the point. From then on we claimed 100,000 “sites” were using Urchin, and that got us places.

Another “innovation” we came up with mirrored what Google does with its logo on special days — we created a dynamic Urchin guy in the upper-left of the interface called “the Urchin of the Day.” This was straight silly, but we thought it would endear us to customers. Maybe it did. It definitely occupied our design guy Jason Collins for the better part of year, as he got so into it he forgot about his more important work. The images he made still make me laugh. So good! We even had our then-friend, the pre-famous Shepard Fairey, do one, the “Power to the People” version.

7'4", 520 lb.

He also did several promo posters and ads for us in exchange for free web hosting. Really nice, humble guy. Of course, now he gets presidents elected and such.

My favorite Urchin of the Day — Jason Collins (graphics guy) was a car nut and master of animated GIFs.

In 1999, Brett Crosby, VP of Sales and Marketing, was casting about trying to get Urchin 2.0 noticed. He had zeroed-in on Earthlink as our dream customer, mostly due to their vast reach and name recognition. Heck, they were almost as big as AOL! Of course, we had no idea how to reach anyone important at a place like that, so Brett did the natural thing and filled out a web form. Again, and again, and again. He must have submitted that thing 20 or 30 times. Finally, he got a response. Rob Maupin, VP of hosting (or something similar) agreed to a meeting. We were stunned. The all-powerful Earthlink would meet with a bunch of idiots like us? We could hardly believe it. So we piled into the fanciest car we had, Brett’s old Mercedes 420 SEL, which he had bought for $4,000, and drove up to Pasadena. I stayed at the office to “manage” and because I was scared of Earthlink.

Rob didn’t seem very impressed. He immediately dismissed the Urchin 2.0 interface as (and I quote) “too blue blue blue blue blue,” which I had to admit was true.

Rob Maupin: We’ll try it if you make it less blue.

But he agreed to try it, and the tests went well. Urchin was perhaps not the most full-featured web reporting tool in the world at the time, but it was fast, and that’s mainly what web hosts cared about. It also managed log files and helped sysadmins run things more easily, so the ops guys liked it. After we made some changes as Earthlink requested, we negotiated a pretty lame deal that ensured our eventual success: $4,000/month for unlimited Urchin software across all Earthlink-hosted websites. We were ecstatic.

Jack, Brett, and Jason Senn (head of Channel and carpentry), looking tough.

This photo (and the above) were for an article in Fortune in 2000 (“Traffic Aficionados”). Thanks Suzi Koudsi!

In 2001, the company was rechristened Urchin Software Corporation. Product and sales were sufficiently far along that we thought it would be a good idea to raise more money. Anyone who’s pitched VCs knows it’s a long, distracting slog, and the business really suffers during the months the leadership is preoccupied. But things went pretty well, and after dozens of meetings and plenty of travel, we finally secured term sheets from two respectable VCs — Ampersand and JMI. The closing was scheduled for late August, but then Labor Day rolled around, and a few more days passed, and finally the capital call to the LPs was supposed to happen on… September 12th (2001). Uhh, no. Suffice to say, the world had bigger things to worry about that day.

By that point, having anticipated a capital infusion of approximately $7 million, we had ramped up hiring and infrastructure spending, as one does. We had leased two additional office spaces in the same building, and built out the interiors. So without the funding, we had little choice but to pare back down. On a Friday not long after, we laid off 12 people and shortly afterward relinquished one of our office spaces. We called it, somewhat unimaginatively, Black Friday. Our financial situation was bleak (like, we couldn’t make payroll in two weeks), and we saw no alternative but to borrow money from our rich uncles — Chuck Scott and Jerry Navarra. They saved us, and got interest and warrants for their trouble. But Thanksgiving was uncomfortable for a couple years.

2001 and 2002 were very difficult years for Urchin Software Corp. — I remember walking down our hallway, praying to the acoustic ceiling tiles on more than one occasion, “please, just let it die” — but it wouldn’t. Costs were cut way back, and some employees took voluntary pay cuts of up to 60% to help with cashflow (this “back pay” was eventually repatriated, thank goodness).

We always had stickers, because we were juvenile and liked sticking them on competitors’ booths and airplanes. Surfer Urchin is the rarest of the lot. Shepard Fairey designed a few bits of schwag in exchange for hosting obeygiant.com.

Tech spending was slow in the early 2000s post-bubble, and while things were gradually improving, revenue was uneven and not growing as hoped. Until 2002, our major source of inflow had been large annual licensing deals that were complex and long negotiations. Our biggest deal, at over $1 million, was negotiated by Jack Ancone with Cable & Wireless, a major global telco/host/ISP.

Urchin 3.0’s interface, cobranded with the now-defunct Worldport, of Dublin. Urchin 3.x still runs on more than a few old servers in dusty corners of the internet.

Similar deals were negotiated with Winstar, KeyBridge, and Ireland-based Worldport, all VC-backed hosts with seemingly limitless resources. As it turned out, they were indeed limited. All of them expired before we got paid.

So to jumpstart sales, the decision was made to radically simplify our enterprise deals to hosting companies, even though it meant less money in the short term. Essentially, we made the financially-puny Earthlink deal the standard, but included some potential upside, at least. The Site License Model (“SLM”) was about as simple as it gets: $5,000/month per physical datacenter, all the Urchin software you want, 1-page contract, no legalese, and nothing really to negotiate.

The accurséd Winstar blimp flew lazy circles around Jack’s house in Bird Rock while he negotiated a $400,000 deal with them, which was finally executed; we never saw a dime. Beware of customers with blimps!

The SLM was immediately a hit, and we signed deals with many of the largest US and European hosting companies in the ensuing year. Rackspace (now part of IBM), Everyone’s Internet (aka EV1 Servers), The Planet, mediatemple, and many others signed on, with several agreeing to multi-datacenter deals. By around fall 2003, we were cashflow-positive on these alone, and we were also selling more and more individual licenses to self-hosted organizations including much of the Fortune 500 and many university systems.

We had released most of the sales team during our near-death experience in 2001, but the few who remained — Paul Botto, Nikki Morrissey, and Megan Cash— worked for nothing and slowly, fitfully started selling our way out of the doldrums. Once we finally figured out a workable commission model — low base, high commission with fully retroactive kickers — these three positively rocked. Paul and Megan went on to work for Google for years (Nikki declined to move north in 2005, in favor of having kids.) Paul is still the best sales/BD guy with whom I’ve ever worked.

Paul Botto accepts the Employee of the Month plaque, March 3rd 2002; note the drum kit in the background.

After a failed attempt at running an international office in Tokyo (the moneys did not come[2]), we launched a channel program, which ran in parallel to direct sales. I still think for certain markets where English isn’t the primary language, it makes sense to have a local partner. Japan in particular generated strong sales for many years, and for this we can thank Jason Senn, our channel guy and chief office builder (we were too cheap to hire contractors.) Japan is also the most fun place ever to party it up in the name of business. On-sens and fire festivals? Yes please.

If Urchin 2 got us in the door, and Urchin 3 didn’t suck, Urchin 4 was actually pretty respectable. It had the then-Apple-esque brushed-aluminum look, some fancy-for-the-time interface elements, and most importantly, it had the UTM. The UTM, or Urchin Traffic Monitor, was an early method for augmenting Apache (or IIS, etc.) log files with cookies, such that unique visitors could be established. This method entailed a line of javascript in the <HEAD> of each page on the site, and a small modification to the webserver’s logging behavior. Most of our competitors at the time used either logs only (old school) or javascript/cookies only (WebSideStory, etc.), and both necessarily missed out on a lot of available information. Urchin was the first to use both data sources in one unified collection method, neatly contained in augmented access-log files. Nowadays pretty much everything you’d want can be had via the cookie method (á la GA), but analyzing logs still has its advantages.

Urchin 4 had an easter egg that no one ever found, to my knowledge. If you clicked a random “rivet” in the sexy brushed aluminum interface, you’d be treated to a photo of the illustrious Urchin dev team: Doug Silver, Nathan Moon, Paul, Jonathon Vance, Rolf Schreiber, and Jim Napier. Most of these guys are still at Google (as of Aug. 2016).

Urchin 4 continued our tradition of supporting way, way too many random platforms (Google still has Urchin 4 help: check out the OS support… ever heard of Yellow Dog Linux?). I had this idea that platform-carpet-bombing might get us into some big corporations or universities running AIX or HP-UX, but no, everyone bought the Linux or Windows IIS versions. I guess I just liked buying random servers off ebay and getting Apache and a compiler running. We even compiled a NeXT version at one point, if I’m not mistaken. But no DEC, at least (I couldn’t get the machine to boot up).

Paul, looking here like a cartel drug lord, withdrew something like $53,000 in cash for our xmas bonuses in 2004. Funny thing is, Google also gave out actual cash money bonuses for years after we joined — millions of dollars in currency. Great minds think alike I guess. Anyway, it was fun and no one got robbed. This was December 17, 2004.

Urchin 4 was the first release I really felt could compete against anyone, and not just with regard to back-end performance. But Urchin 5 was superior in every way, and I’m sure thousands of instances still run to this day. If anything, Urchin 5 was just too much of a good thing. Almost every menu item had submenus upon submenus. It was pretty overwhelming and dry, but analytics nerds dug it.

I’m embarrassed to see that “hits” was still part of Urchin at the time. Avinash is rolling his eyes right now.

Urchin 5 had e-commerce/”ROI” tracking, the Campaign Tracking Module, and multiserver versions that could all conspire to get the price pretty high. But the real killer feature IMHO, which was released in Urchin 6, was individual visitor history drill-down. If this sounds potentially, um, sensitive, that’s because it is. Google wouldn’t touch this feature and it was summarily axed, never to return.

Individual visitor history drilldown — potentially controversial I guess. But at least there wasn’t a “composite sketch” of the visitor. That would have been SO COOL. This is Urchin 6.

Up through Urchin 5, we’d been a traditional licensed-software outfit — you pay us money, you own the software. But by 2004 it was obvious we needed a hosted version (“hosted” would later become “cloud”, but we didn’t know that yet.) So we bought a bunch of servers, upgraded our T1, and released Urchin 6, which was available in on-premises (you run it yourself) or hosted by us, for $500/month(!) We didn’t have much time left as an independent concern, but businesses were surprisingly willing to pay up for the privilege of not having to run Urchin themselves. That business was a winner from day 1.

Paul Botto, me, and Brett at Search Engine Strategies 2004, San Jose, where we first met the Google people.

By Summer 2004, Urchin had the largest installed base among web analytics vendors on a number-of-websites basis[3]. Tradeshows had become fun again, and we planned our biggest spread yet for Search Engine Strategies 2004, in San Jose. It was there that two Google people, Wesley Chan (PM) and David Friedberg (Corp. Dev.), went “shopping” as they put it, for a web analytics company. I guess they weren’t overly put-off by what they saw.

The Google Dance was a big party thrown in conjunction with the Search Engine Strategies tradeshow for a few years. During the “Dance” in ’04, Paul, Jack, and Brett, iirc, were off doing some sneaky corp. dev. work.

A few weeks later Google had made an offer for the company. By then we had interest from other quarters too — remember WebSideStory? They were actually a public company at the time and offered us more. But I think we made the right choice.

Brett, some dude named Al, and David Friedberg, in 2006

Sidebar: Friedberg left Google in 2006 to start what became The Climate Corporation, which was acquired for over $1 billion by Monsanto. Now that’s an exit. He also started Metromile and Eatsa. Legit!

By 2004, we were feeling pretty smug about ourselves, despite still being puny. Design by Merrick.

Selling the company was a needlessly rough process. It should have wrapped up just after the Google IPO in late 2004, but frankly the Google lawyers were prickly CYA types, demanding all kinds of IP-related protection — the four founders were personally on the hook if we were later found to be violating anyone’s patents etc. As we were now part of the big G, it seemed distinctly possible that WebTrends or someone would see fit to sue us. In hindsight, probably all boilerplate, but it was scary to risk it all like that. By the time we finally got it done, it was April 2005, and Google’s stock had doubled (half our payout was in stock). Oh well.

Brett prepares to “fax” the signed acquisition agreement back to Google. By this time we were sufficiently profitable that it was a tough decision to sell. Brett signed the actual, final paperwork in a tuxedo about 30 seconds before walking down the aisle at his wedding.

The still-young Google of 2005 was, I think, a lot more fun than the Mature Google/Alphabet of today. It was small enough (~3,000 employees) that everyone could get together for one (awesome, incredible) holiday party. And MC Hammer was always around. That was cool.

Jack, MC Hammer, and Chris Sacca, circa 2005.

The day we joined, Eric Schmidt took time out of his day to hang out with us and learn about our flavor of web analytics. He immediately saw the potential with regard to Adwords spend, and was ever after helpful and available. I really liked the guy. Years later, Brett (then Sr. Director of Marketing) had an office right next to Eric, and they were bros. Kinda. I mean, billionaires are not like the rest of us.

Eric Schmidt gets to know the Urchin sales team, plus some others. L-R: Nick Mihailovski, Mike Chipman, Jim Napier, Megan Cash, Eric Schmidt, Paul Botto, Rolf Schreiber, Jason Senn, and Jack Ancone.

Our first office at Google (for some of us) was the “fishbowl” of Building 42, in the nucleus of the Mountain View campus. We were actually really close to Larry & Sergey for awhile. Sergey had this laser engraver in his office with a long air duct snaking down the hall to vent the gases. He’s a nut, that Sergey. The fishbowl was also home to a new Google engineer named Mike Stoppelman, whose brother would soon start a company called Yelp. Mike is SVP of engineering there as of this writing.

Urchin stuff would plague the Google campus for years after we joined. I’m sure some of it still lurks in supply cabinets here and there.

The pervasiveness of Google Analytics now seems kind of a given, but in the spring of 2005, we were fairly panicked that its Google-fied release would be greeted with a shrug. So Wesley Chan, the Google PM who spearheaded the integration effort, commenced a daily “war room” and everyone was given milestones (OKRs, in Google land) with pretty tight timelines. Paul got a bunch of engineering tasks, I got a bunch of sales-ish/adoption tasks around penetrating the Fortune-500, Brett got marketing/PR/branding stuff, and Jack got BD/partnerships.

Camo’ was hot in 2005… this was the last shirt we made pre-Google, and the first we gave away at TGIF once we joined.

It was a fun and hectic time, with much of the effort centered around bringing the rest of Google up to speed — some of us toured the nation visiting the various remote Google offices, small outposts that appreciated visitors from the mothership. By the time we thought we were ready for a public launch in November of 2005, we were sweating it. Would anyone care? Turns out they did. After we announced “Urchin from Google” was now free for any website in the world, the demand was sufficiently high that even Google’s infrastructure (well, the part allocated to us) was groaning, and the SRE team made us shut down signups until we could arrange the server resources etc. we needed to reopen.

Google Analytics was once knows as “Urchin from Google,” catchy right?

This is one of those nice-to-have problems, but a lot of people were still pissed off. Several months later, signups were reopened via the old invitation model, and the GA saturation we know today started happening in earnest.

Alden DeSoto (chief GA tech writer), Jeff Veen, Brett, Greg Veen, Ryan Carver, and Jeff Gillis (GA marketing) sporting the new (2006) Google Analytics track jackets, celebrating the re-launch. A few years hence the Veens and Ryan would start TypeKit, which was later acquired by Adobe. 2nd exit for those guys, nice.

Now, Google buys a lot of companies. Some of these are huge successes, like YouTube and Keyhole (Google Earth), but many just kind of scatter to the four winds, despite being worthy. Dodgeball, for example. I think this happens partially because of the way Google buys companies and partially because of big-company inertia/fog. Under some dollar amount (I’ve heard $50 million) all it took was one VP to say “buy them!” and it was done. Once they get onboarded, that VP maybe had left, or may have just been distracted. Turns out no one else cares, and the corporate soup subsumes the employees and the product melts into a shapeless saltine. In reality, no one at Google much cared about a product if it didn’t generate at least something like $100 million per year. Urchin of course didn’t either, but we were lucky enough to have some powerful allies: Wesley Chan and Eric Schmidt. Wesley was a PM (product manager) who understood Google needed effective analytics to drive Adwords spend. He was also dead determined not to let “his” acquisition be a failure, and he never let up until it could motor under its own power. But of course nothing can compare to having the CEO on your team, and lucky for us, Eric immediately got how web traffic analysis could positively affect Adwords. A few years later, Google did a big internal study with a bunch of “quants” running various models, and they pretty well proved an XX% increase in ad spending across the broad swath of customers studied. That was big money, with a “B.”

Up and to the right! Now that I’ve moved out of San Francisco, I wear Google shirts a lot more often.

In 2006, the Urchin people started drifting around Google, and some left. Today, my guess is about 12–15 original Urchin types are still there, and some still work on GA. Most notably, Paul is a senior VP of engineering, with hundreds of engineers reporting to him. He owns not just GA, but display ads too. Smart guy, that Paul.