Carl Mercier's blog » Defensio

Lessons learned: How I founded, bootstrapped, grew and sold my web startup

Carl Mercier — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:27:21 +0000

On April 6, 2009, I gave a presentation at MeshU in Toronto, Canada. I was surprised to see how much buzz it generated on Twitter and in the blogosphere. If you missed it, here’s your chance to judge by yourself…

HD Video on iTunes (missing the last 20-25 mins unfortunately):

MeshU - Part 1

MeshU - Part 2

A quick recap of what I said.
And Jonathan Keebler live-blogged the event at ScribbleLive.
My slides:

View more presentations from cmercier.

I guess this is as close as it gets to being there in person! Looking forward to your comments!

StartupCFO interviews me

Carl Mercier — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:11:23 +0000

Mark McLeod of StartupCFO interviewed me. We talked about startups, bootstrapping, lessons learned and the recent acquisition of Defensio by Websense.

Here’s the link… http://startupcfo.ca/2009/02/startup-lessons-interview-with-carl.html

Defensio acquired!

Carl Mercier — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:13:13 +0000

It is my pleasure to announce that my latest venture, Defensio (Karabunga Inc), has been acquired by leading Internet security company, Websense, Inc (NSDQ: WBSN).

I’m not quite moving to the Caribbeans just yet as I’m now employed by Websense as Director of Software Development. Needless to say, this is an exciting challenge for me and an amazing opportunity to further protect the web from all the malicious content that’s being posted nowadays. Our users should rejoice because we have a lot of amazing ideas already cooking!

Read the official acquisition announcement here for more details...

Podcast: Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs

Carl Mercier — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:41:08 +0000

If you’re interested, the podcast for Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs @ SxSW was just released. I was on the panel with Avi Bryant (DabbleDB), Leah Culver (Pownce), Ari Steinberg (Facebook) and Ben Vinegar (Freshbooks). Not a bad line-up!

Here’s the podcast

Irony: Spam on our TechCrunch article!

Carl Mercier — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:47:36 +0000

I just noticed that a spam comment made it through on the article about Defensio’s launch on TechCrunch. How ironic is that? TechCrunch doesn’t use Defensio; they use a competing product instead.

Here are the obligatory screenshots:

Clicking on the author name takes you to this blatantly spam page:

Bottom line is: use Defensio!

But seriously, shit happens… can’t blame TechCrunch for letting this one through.

Presenting in Montreal and Toronto

Carl Mercier — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:40:23 +0000

I’m happy to be speaking not once but twice next week…The first one will take place on Tuesday the 4th during our monthly Montreal on Rails gathering. The topic will me “Where to deploy your Rails application on the cheap?”. I’ll primarily focus on VPS and Amazon EC2.On Thursday the 6th, I’ll be at StartupCamp Toronto to present my startup defensio.com. It’s been a while since I’ve been in Toronto and I definitely look forward to meet new people there.See you soon!