Back in the mid-90’s, when I was a NeXTStep consultant, getting a job at OmniGroup was a sort of recurring daydream to me. Like Integrity Solutions where I worked, OmniGroup did NeXTStep consulting, but also commercial application development. Started by Wil Shipley and Ken Case and surely some other dudes whose names escape me at the moment, Omni seemed like Shangri-La compared to my job. Browsing their website, you’d see descriptions of their work environment, which I’d contrast with mine:

at Omni	at Integrity Solutions
all employees worked at omni’s office in a casual, fun atmosphere	many employees worked in windowless rooms at customer sites, crammed to the point of literally bumping elbows with one another
employees working at the office enjoyed no-cost lunches prepared by on-site chef	employees working at the office were supposed to pay a quarter for lousy office coffee
once a month, a professional masseuse came around to rub everyone’s shoulders	once a month, the CEO would give away a set of hand-crafted juggling bags that he made from old swimsuit fabric
had some sort of gaming room with (then-)state-of-the-art consoles, etc	juggling was encouraged
the drudgery of the mind-numbing consulting work was balanced out by being able to design and implement interesting commercial applications	the drudgery of the mind-numbing consulting work was balanced out by dreaming of going to work for a better company

As much as I thought about it, for some reason I never tried to get a job there. Probably partly because I didn’t want to move, and partly because I was at a stage in my life where, for reasons I don’t quite grasp now, complaining about shit seemed like a more useful proposition than trying to actually do something about shit.

Anyway.

At some point (I haven’t followed the twists and turns that well), Wil left the company he founded, and started Delicious Monster, which has had a “monster hit” (yuk yuk) with Delicious Library, an application that, to me, seems like cool technology that I would never have guessed would find an audience. Fortunately for Wil and the gang, it has found a huge audience, earning them $250,000 in its first month, receiving awards, etc.

To top it off, Wil has started blogging, which has been fun. One of the more interesting posts lately is about his Student Talk from WWDC 2005, in which Wil gives newbies some advice on starting their own company. Like Wil, I once started my own company; Unlike Wil, I didn’t really consider doing commercial app development (if you think the Mac market for commercial software in 2005 is small, try to imagine the miniscule size of the NeXTStep market in 1997!), but focused on consulting, and then let it sort of flounder after I couldn’t, on my own, find enough interesting work to do that way.

Three cheers for Wil, the man who proves that nerdery + chutzpah == success.