How did you determine what your funding goal was?
ps - thanks for the post - 'from the trenches' insights like these are really valuable.
pps - members of your founding team also created the BASIC Stamp? Neat!
We basically built something like ec2 but with more advanced features like load balancing and clustered, posix compliant filesystems. And we shipped before ec2 came out or was even known about publicly. This kind of system costs $$ to do right so the 120k went mostly to hardware and data center costs to bootstrap us to the point where we could take customers.
We started planning in february of 2006 and shipped in september 2006 and it's been a wild ride since then.
ps - sure, no problem. Let me know if anyone has any other questions.
pps - yeah one of our founders started Parallax who made the BASIC stamp.