Today is the 20 year anniversary of Renegade Solutions. This was the very first business I started after finishing my Ph.D.
Renegade Solutions began as a scientific instrumentation company. We sold sophisticated measurement and analysis equipment (still do!), but we also we wanted to go BIG with free-software and have 1000s of customers, not just 10s. So we built and offered a clunky Linux conversion kit for PCs based on re-purposing hard drives. Unfortunately, we didn’t anticipate how quickly CD-ROMs would wipe away our competitive edge and thus we failed in the commercial space pretty quickly.