Corporate breadcrumbs.
By Andrey Butov
You know those television ads for Ancestry.com?
I saw one of those this evening, and it brought up a bit of corporate history from the back of my mind. Thought I’d share it.
Let’s see now … I’m pulling this out of the part of my mind that up until this evening contained more cobwebs than memories, so the tale may have some holes here and there, but here goes … backwards.
Ancestry.com has some relationship with Geneology.com — one bought the other, or some such. There’s a bunch of these sites that form a family of sites called MyFamily.com if I recall correctly.
At any rate. Geneology.com started as a spin-off division based around a family tree making program that was part of Mattel.
In ‘99, Mattel purchased a company called The Learning Tree.
In the late nineties, a company called The Learning Tree, purchased Broderbund Software.
In the mid nineties, Broderbund Software (Print Shop, Carmen Sandiego, and oh yeah, Myst), bought out a company called Banner Blue Software, which was the original creator of the Family Tree Maker program – for DOS.
Back in the early 80’s, Banner Blue was founded by Kenneth Hess. As all proper software companies go, he started it in his bedroom, and it eventually grew into a multi-million dollar software firm. Kenneth created and sold a program called Org Plus, an organizational chart maker, and a program called the Family Tree Maker. It’s all chronicled in a book called Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch.
And, jumping forward in time, Kenneth Hess, at one point, gave some very useful business advice to me when I was starting Antair.
But I won’t go into that now. 
