Yes, that's where Scott Capdevielle and Jamie Cohan, Andromedia's chief financial officer put together Andromedia and its product, Aria. Capdevielle, 31, and Cohan met at U.C. Berkeley, where Capdevielle was an undergraduate between 1983 and 1988. He majored in economics, with a heavy emphasis in computers on the side. He and Cohan, who went on to receive an MBA in finance from Columbia University in New York, met in a computer science class.
After Berkeley, Capdevielle founded several small and short-lived computer-related companies, raising capital by developing Websites. In 1994 he was doing contract work for Pacific Bell, working on a site with several large databases. The project head, says Capdevielle, wanted statistics on what people were doing on the site, who was using it and so forth. It was a real pain in the ass for the systems administrator to retrieve the information, because he had to keep the systems running, and my job was applications based, so I didn't have the time either. What they needed was software that would automatically capture the information, store it until it was needed, and then report it graphically, using a common web browser.
When he put together a preliminary mockup, other people on the project got excited about it, and Capdevielle saw another business idea. So he got in touch with Cohan, who by then had worked at JP Morgan Securities and ECAD, Inc., and gone on to start his own software consulting business, James Cohan & Associates, in New York. Jamie and I put together a prototype and took it around to ad agencies in New York and got their feedback, Capdevielle says. Then it was back to the drawing board, another prototype, another round of shopping it around, and putting together a team.
The Andromedia team now includes Kent Godfrey, president and CEO, who has done strategic planning and business development in many high-tech markets, including Sequent and Pyramid Technologies; Epoch Systems, and IA Corp. Sales director is Patrick Mayer, who previously was in sales with Sony Electronics and Apple.
Capdevielle and Cohan formed Andromedia in May 1995. Cohan moved to Berkeley from New York, and for the first few months of development, they worked out of the garage of Capedevielle's house. They incorporated in December 1995, and now work out of offices on Mission Street in San Francisco.