Onscreen Systems

Onscreen Systems is now long gone as a legally incorporated company, and lives on only as a domain name and a series of memories:

A product concept that was ahead of its time.
My first virtual company, and learning to live on IM and collaborate over the web.
The delight of doing a startup with other parents who wanted to be active parents as well as crazy startup workers, and who found balance together.
Family gatherings after the quarterly in-person business meetings were over, with tons of rug rats running happily around in the park before crashing on couches and floors of that quarter's host.

Working with some of the smartest people with the best values that it has ever been my privilege to work with:

Chris' sense of humor. The emails.
Andrew's incisive wit, which punctured many highfaluting balloons.
John's speed. At everything.
Jeff's enthusiasm. About everything.
Donna's tolerance for and amusement about being surrounded by geeks.
Tony's calm through the craziest bits.

The crazy bits:

Picking the TVtopia product name.
The Dancing Vegetables.
People who didn't watch TV (and some of whom who think TV is actually evil) making a product for TV watchers.
Watching TV as homework (and learning to like The West Wing).
Discovering the sub-culture of TV fan web sites.
Hiring U.C. Berkeley English grad students to catalog TV fan sites.
Building a game engine, and hiring a game designer.
Meeting the miserable excuse for a human being nicknamed the Rottweiler.
Looking for a second round of funding after the dot com crash

the highlight was a surreal visit to Hollywood to talk deals with one of the biggest Hollywood agents.
the low points were having all the people at the media companies who were excited about our product getting laid off, usually right after we talked to them, and laying off 12 people in one day myself after a promised payment was withheld.

The next startup: E-books 10 years too early.

Thanks, it was a great learning experience, and mostly lots of fun.

Tim Bishop

P.S. If anyone is interested in buying this domain, it is for sale, especially if you are going to do something fun and interesting with it, or if you are going to pay me anything like what we spent for it during the dot com days. The email addresses on this domain are dead, but Google around and you can find me.