Ever the proud father, Chris MacAskill screens 20-year-old home movies of his sons — Ben singing about a stegosaurus, Mark getting a mohawk — on his laptop.
“This is the negative of working with family members,'' a red-faced Mark, now 26, says before retreating to his cubicle.
Meet the MacAskills, Silicon Valley's version of the Waltons: seven members of a close-knit clan, ranging in age from 23 to 63, who run SmugMug Inc, which helps families share their Kodak moments online.
They are holding their own against photography services on the internet run by corporate giants even though they have never taken a dime from outside investors.
Budgeted beginning
They started on a shoestring budget in 2002, not moving into real offices in Mountain View, California, until last year.
Before that, the MacAskills and their employees set up shop in the five-bedroom home of Chris and his wife, Toni.
Engineers bunked two to a bedroom. Blow dryers and vacuums routinely blew circuit breakers. Barking yellow Labrador retrievers chased tennis balls up and down the stairs.
Toni, the SmugMug matriarch, referees family squabbles. When things get out of hand she jokes she'll send everyone to their rooms for a time out.
The MacAskills blend business and family — a radical concept in the youth-obsessed internet industry, which admits adults, particularly of the grey-haired variety, only reluctantly.
The company now employs 28 people — MacAskills, family friends and SmugMug customers they hired — in five countries.
The MacAskills have signed up more than 100,000 paying subscribers despite mounting competition from free services, in part by emphasising their family-friendly approach.
Loyalty rewards
They post their family photos and home videos, spend hours chatting up their users in the company's online forum and send customer service e-mails.
They also reward customer loyalty. Two years ago, when SmugMug raised its prices, it grandfathered in all its customers.
Every year, SmugMug organises “shootouts'' for its customers: roving expeditions to national parks with expert instruction on how to get the perfect shot.
Once, as payment for services, the MacAskills accepted livestock.
That personal touch has won over customers, some of whom travelled from as far away as Boston to attend SmugMug's recent fifth-anniversary party.
“Google went to great lengths to create a dorm atmosphere,'' said Don MacAskill, the 30-year-old chief executive and “chief geek''. “We work in earnest to create a family atmosphere.''
At the head of this Mormon family is Chris, 54, a Stanford-trained geophysicist and shutterbug.
After a stint at Steve Jobs's Next Software Inc in the 1990s, he caught entrepreneurial fever.
With his family pitching in, he built Fatbrain.com, an online bookstore for geeks and took it public in 1998. Barnes andnoble.com bought the company in 2000 for $62 million (Dh227.7 million).
The entire money was distributed among the many stakeholders, with most of it going to outside investors.
Start-up
In 2002, Chris became the first to join his son Don, a programming prodigy then working on his seventh start-up, which soon became SmugMug.
Together, they recruited Toni, 56, a motorcyclist like her husband. In addition to helping customers and coining the company's name, she handles SmugMug's finances as she did in the early days of Fatbrain. She calls herself the “countess of cash''.
Before long, Don's brothers dropped out of college to lend a hand: Ben, now 28, who was going to school to pursue a career in biotechnology, and Mark, who was eight months away from a degree in actuarial science.
Ben, the “czar of testing'', hunts down software bugs in new features. Mark, the “stats geek'', is in charge of figuring out to improve SmugMug's site.
They were followed by their sister. Anne MacAskill Bean, who is 23, provides customer support from her home in Columbus, Ohio.
Chris's sister, Robin MacAskill, 63, works as a part-time customer service representative.
The ties that bind families such as the MacAskills can lead to great fortune and great friction, experts say.
“Families have the advantage and disadvantage of a bond for life,'' said David Russell, director of California State University, Northridge's Family Business Education and Research Centre.
For the love of it
Don acknowledges that at first he wasn't sure whether the MacAskills and the people they work with at SmugMug would be able to separate family and business.
“I worried that new hires would feel alienated,'' he said. “Now the fears are evaporating.''
The company runs on what it calls “collective onsciousness'', with everyone getting a say.
“We love the business,'' Chris said. “We would not want to do anything else.''
