The wireless bill was ready.
The email opened with, "Hello BEATPORT BEATPORT."
I do not know why the company name appeared twice. I do know the notice came to my personal Gmail address, not my Beatport address. That was normal enough that I kept receiving it every month.
There was no clean line between startup infrastructure and personal infrastructure. My work email was where production alerts, employees, vendors, and releases lived. My personal inbox caught the phone account, resumes, domain renewals, old client work, and whatever I forwarded because I might need it later.
The sender name was already caught between two brands too. The email came from AT&T customer care, while later notices still used Cingular in the address. The account portal, company name, and inbox did not line up neatly. The bill still arrived.
The phone account was a small system compared with the servers at ViaWest. It was still a system. Somebody had to know who had a line, where the bill went, and what happened when AT&T changed the account portal. A growing company creates these small operational jobs faster than anybody writes them down.
The message itself was automated and boring. It did not say what phone I carried or who paid which line. It just said the online bill was available and used the company name twice.
That is how a lot of early startup history survives. Not in a launch announcement. In a badly formatted billing email sent to the IT director's Gmail account.