Coming out of stealth mode

Posted by Walter

Exactly 2 years ago, we came out of stealth mode and launched Corona at the HOW Design Conference. Still hard to believe it was only two years. Feels like it’s been a lot longer than that.

When we told our VC-to-be that we were going to launch at a real bonafide conference, he declared that we had finally become real men — true story!

Deep within the Ansca archives (read: the room with all the disorganized junk) I found the following photos. It barely does justice in capturing the non-stop adrenalin rush that Carlos and I went through, but it’s still fun to reminisce, so here goes:

We had to give HOW a title for our talk months in advance. At that time, we hadn’t even settled on a name for our product, so in the actual printed conference booklet, there’s no mention of Corona!

Same went for our booth. The printer needed it the final Illustrator file a month in advance, so you won’t see the word Corona anywhere on our booth. Ah, those were long nights spent on Illustrator, praying it wouldn’t crash on me… At the office, you’ll see the booth hanging on the wall. It’s still one of the nicest marketing materials we have.

As featured on the booth, our tagline back then was “Design Develop Distribute”. We thought it was getting old so we abandoned it a long time ago, but last last year, we noticed Nokia using the same theme (punks!):

We got a pretty good turn out at our booth, including the very entertaining Russell Brown (pictured talking to Carlos at top left).  He is the Photoshop evangelist (his name appears on the original Photoshop 1.0 splash screen). At the bottom right, the folks at Really Media (Joe and Sean) were in attendance. They were essentially our first real developer (besides my dad).

Besides going out of stealth, I think the best part of the conference was the schwag. So much cooler than the run of the mill tech conference.

Well, it’s been a crazy and humbling ride. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of trying to do something even more insanely great, you forget how it all started. Can’t wait to see what happens next!