Most of the founders of Federated Computer come from an earlier company that worked on decentralization called "Joyent". You can read some of that story in a blog post I wrote when Joyent was sold to Samsung at [this link](https://davidpaulyoungdotcom.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joyent/).
The picture above shows the first few engineers and designers who worked on Joyent, including the now tremendously successful Apple, Dallas Cowboys, and other topics blogger and podcast [John Gruber](https://daringfireball.net/) in the red shirt.
At Joyent, we started with a project to bring office and productivity applications to the world using browsers (before Google drive and mail were a thing), and we ended up inventing a way to programmatically sell parts of a datacenter (cloud computing) because that is exactly the product we needed to work on our office suite.
So a few of us from the Joyent days, after some detours into ice cream, BBQ, oil well services, and professional hockey, decided we needed to work on another company that would provide Customers with an opportunity to use cloud applications and services without the constant surveillance, privacy invasions, extreme prices, and confusing or non-existant integrations of the current "regime". As Herb Kellher the founder of Southwest Airlines said at the beginning of that Customer friendly company "this ain't right" and so, like Herb, we sat down and drew out our plans on a Nextcloud-self-hosted "napkin".
David, Blake, Barry, and Derek started this company, and we are fully committed to pringing the best of the spirit of decentralization and personal and team liberty to our Customers and Partners in everything we do. (Psst. There's no picture of us together, yet, since we've never all been in the same place. The realities of a fully decentralized, distributed organization.)
1. It shouldn't be hard to self-host and get away from the "centralizers". But it is. We want to solve this. Your keys, your computer.
2. If Customers are on their own infrastructure, VMs, whatever, we must provide ways for developers to offer solutions to them that interoperated with the other solutions used by those customers.
3. Open source allows us to offer high-value for a sane price. The price always needs to promote maximum adoption.
4. Every Customer or Team will, in time, become their own financial institution as the centralization of money continues to break down. Bitcoin is the key to that solution and we will deeply and fully integrate bitcoin, and the side networks helping with bitcoin adoption, into every facet of our take of Customer solutions.
5. Connect our digital self-sovereign efforts with a broaded cultural urge towards self-sovereignty. No global reset, instead a sovereign reset.
