Arnaud, Guillaume and I are leaving in a few minutes to go have a beer somewhere in Los Gatos - about 30 or 40 miles south of San Francisco (closer to where our offices are). Anne-Laure is probably not is shape to join us, but we’ll make sure to have a little event in the next few hours to relax and go have some drinks.

This is May 3rd, 2007. Today, after many many many months of intense product work - we are finally releasing our first product, called Swapper. I’m not gonna write anything more about Swapper than what’s already out there on the homepage - and I’d rather focus on giving you guys a taste for what the last few weeks and months have been like, and share my excitement!

Arnaud, Guillaume and I first met as international students at Stanford, in 1999. Guillaume and I attended the same engineering school in France (Ecole Polytechnique) - I’m only one year older, so the connection was probably made at one of these Escondido Village barbecues on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Guillaume was a computer science student at Stanford, with Arnaud. I met Arnaud at a party sometime in 2000. He too, comes from an engineering school in France called the Ecole Centrale.

After studying together at Stanford (more or less since they were CS and I was EE), they worked for NASA for a few years. On my side, I founded a startup in the web acceleration space called Fireclick. Along the years, we continued to be close friends and went out together every week end. It was clear (at least for me) that we had a common dream of starting our own business as friends and launch a successful product. To this date, I vividly remember the countless brainstorms - trying to find an idea. These would go for 3 or 4 hours of back and forth. Yet, the Wambo idea only came about early 2005 - and not from one of these exhausting sessions. It just came up on Castro Street, Mountain View. At Pasta (if you are familiar with the place). At lunch. After a good plate of Pene Al Calabrese.

Fast forward 6-8 months, we were lucky to find good investors who believed in us and allowed us to get out of our “startup garage” (we worked for a few months from a tiny office at Stanford). We used the money to buy real computers, some servers, rent some nice office space and of course, build a business. All of 2006 was dedicated to building the core technological platform - something I believe we did amazingly well, with the help of family, friends, and real users who spontaneously joined us in our adventure. We hired a few people to help us - in engineering: our team in India (Mumbai) helped us develop a large part of our current product - graphic design: we have a designer in Estonia who’s been amazing (Hi Hannu!) - and we also recruited few college students at UCLA and UCSD who volunteered their time to help run our pre-alpha program. Late 2006, Anne Laure joined the marketing team full time - a great hire.

We started 2007 with the ambition to open up to our users and release a few experimental ideas in the area of messaging. We were so committed to learning what users wanted that we spent 3 entire weeks in January on campus meeting students (and going to parties too). We learned a great amount and truly refined a lot of our features - as well as fixed hundreds of bugs. We also met great people from outside California - Vivek in New York, Gianni in Italy, Max and Sim in France, Carlos in Mexico, Alvaro in Spain — to name but a few. All of them patiently gave us valuable feedback and truly, shaped our future.

Early April we felt like we had all the ideas and tech we need to start working on the actual first product (Swapper) - having learned that the two most important features for users were SPEED and EASE of use for our file sharing service. With the help of a few partners (to be announced soon) we continued to refine the feature set and narrowed it down to a handful of them. With the help of the users, and the best designer in the world (Hannu Livaar), we crafted the first Swapper interface. A few weeks later, we had a working version of Swapper in English, Spanish and French (Oui). and just a few days ago, enforced a true feature freeze to only focus on bug fixing. Today we finally spent a few hours tweaking the system, and testing testing and testing again. We were all smiles today. Yes, there are still a few issues that need to be fixed, but the product is robust and gets the job done.

I certainly hope the months ahead of us can be as awesome as what we’ve lived since Wambo was incorporate September 22nd, 2005. Today is a milestone, one very special day we’ve been looking forward to for soooo long. The future looks bright, and we’re going to continue to work hard for all of you. THANK YOU AND LET’S GET ROLLING.

Xavier, Arnaud and Guillaume