Urchin
Urchin Software Corporation was a web analytics company based in San Diego, CA. The founders of the company were Paul Muret, Jack Ancone, Brett Crosby, and Scott Crosby (yours truly). In April 2005 the company was acquired by Google, and the Urchin product became “Urchin from Google,” then later simply Google Analytics. As the 10th anniversary of the acquisition has recently passed, I thought it was a good time to get the history of the company down for posterity. I don’t expect this to be a riveting read for those not directly involved; it’s more of my attempt to close the book on that era.
The predecessor to Urchin Software Corp. was originally started by Paul Muret and Scott Crosby (me) in late 1995. Prior to then, Paul had been working in the Space Physics dept. at UCSD, where he was exposed to HTML 1.0 after being tasked with putting the department’s syllabus online. Paul and I were post-college roommates at the time, living in the Bay Park neighborhood of San Diego. One night Paul came home from work and announced that he saw a business opportunity in building websites for businesses. To prove the point, he showed me his bright-blue-text-on-grey-background site for UCSD. Maybe some of the text even <BLINK>ed. I agreed and we started work on a business plan. This was presented to my proverbial rich uncle (Chuck Scott), who agreed to invest $10,000 in the “company” and provide a desk in a corner of his office at C.B.S. Scientific. It would be quite awhile until he saw a return on that money.