How I Got Here

I really need to preface SocialStorm with a little background. How did I get into this whole high tech thing anyway? It all started in 1980.  There I was, at Illinois State University sitting in my apartment. I saw an ad in a magazine for a personal computer based on the new 8080a chipset, 16 K or memory, and included the basic programming language. WOW! I cut out the order form, dropped it in the mail and anxiously waited for my shiny new computer to arrive. A couple of weeks later I was completely hooked. This was definitely the wave of the future! After a few weeks of fiddling around my craving for more far exceeded what my little mail order computer could provide. I found myself driving 40 miles away to Peoria, Illinois where I found one of the very first Apple II computers for sale. Virtually every day I was engrossed… my appetite for more grew with each passing day. I signed up for a microcomputer class on campus and hooked up with a classmate by the name of Jim Kohs to see what we could cook up. We came up with the name Microlab, got a business license, and printed up some business cards. While doing laundry at a local laundromat, Jim put a business card up on the cork board. I chuckled and told Jim that he had wasted a perfectly good business card. The very next day we received a call from an Executive from Country Companies Insurance in Bloomington, Illinois. It turned out that his washing machine had broken down and he was in the laundromat doing his laundry. The next thing we knew we were writing and distributing software for practically every Country Companies insurance agent for the state of Illinois. Unfortunately my new business took so much time away from my studies that I had to extend my stay for an entire year to graduate. Over the next 3 years Jim moved to Texas. I took the business forward by creating a company called Interdac Computer. I expanded beyond programming services to include entire computing solutions for various vertical markets. My medical vertical became so lucrative that I closed Interdac and started Medcom, a company focused entirely on the development of medical software. My first program was called Antibiotic Utilization Review (AUR) which was sold to Eli Lilly in Indianapolis. Eli Lilly distributed AUR to virtually every hospital in the United States. I then went forward with my next major piece of software called IV Manufacturing. While completing my second product offering I was offered a chance to move to Silicon Valley, to be a part of an incredible startup that was going to revolutionize communications across the world– Tsunami Technologies. Although my business was booming, I couldn’t turn down such an opportunity. I sold my business and moved to San Jose, CA.

Tsunami Technologies was the first company I worked at in Silicon Valley. We were building the future– a broadband network that would simultaneously carry voice, data and video, something we refer to today as hybrid fiber coax or more commonly cable modems. You know that little box you get from the cable provider for high speed internet? In 1986 we were demonstrating a complete solution in a box that would deliver it all. The work was tough as technology was a bit more primitive than it is today– and we actually had to create just about everything– hardware, drivers, protocols. Today we take the layers forgranted. Everything below the application layer is simply a blackbox– somebody else’s problem. Back then there were no black boxes. Memory, processor speed, latency– it all mattered and it was tight. But we did it.

After a few years of very hard work and going public I decided to leave and join Sun Microsystems. While at Sun a friend of mine, Jordan Graham and I started a little company called Bioaccess. I had come up with this idea to mount a miniature thumbprint scanner on a gun so that only the owner could fire the weapon. As we zipped along toward demonstrating our idea we quickly discovered that the barriers to entry (NRA, Consumer Protection Agency, etc.) were just to high. And even though we could achieve accuracy of 99.99%, the risk of a false positive or false negative reading were far too high. Jordan went on to become the CEO of a little startup called Electric Classifieds and started soliciting me to be his Vice President of Engineering. I was perfectly content at Sun and didn’t want to leave– but the pressure mounted and the offer and opportunity was too lucrative to pass. In 1995, only one year after joining Sun Microsystems I became the first Vice President of Engineering at Electric Classifieds, Inc. the first company to bring classified ads to the internet. In order to demonstrate just how great our classified advertising engine was, Gary Kremen, the founder of ECI decided to launch a proof-of-concept, a branded personals category called Match.com. Match quickly grew by leaps and bounds– outpacing the operational gear we were running it on. We had to move fast to get our servers out of the basement at ECI and into a new professional hosting facility at a little startup called Exodus Communications. Like ECI and everyone else at that time, Exodus was experiencing growing pains. Growth at Exodus was outpacing the amount of real estate they had to offer. Exodus was building out facilities as fast as they possibly could. During my first year at ECI the CEO and I went on a roadshow to push our classified advertising engine to some of the biggest media companies in the country, including Time Warner, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Toronto Star, Washington Post, Disney Interactive, Microsoft, AOL, Compuserve, Cox Interactive, etc. What we discovered from our interactions were that our little demonstration of a single classified category, personals, was where the business was at. What we didn’t realize at that time was that this was one of the early social networks that would demonstrate the power of connecting people through the Internet. Unfortunately our board of directors didn’t share that same vision and believed that the classified advertising engine was the future. The board sold Match.com to Cendant Corporation for $7 million in 1998 as a means to fund the continued development of the classified advertising engine. One year later Electric Classifieds went bankrupt. The original founder, Gary Kremen realized a whopping $50K from the creation and launch of Match.com, one of the Internet’s most successful services to date.

In early 1997 my father was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I left Match.com to be with him during his last three months. Regardless of the outcome of Electric Classifieds, I was smack in the vortex of where and when it was all happening… in one of the earliest social networking plays in Internet history– I was hooked.

My passion was and always has been about leading people and creating great product. In 1999 I was handed an opportunity to consult for a couple of very large venture capital firms (and a few smaller ones as well)– Chase H&Q and Warburg Pincus. My job was to travel around the country performing technology diligence, turnaround and M&A work on pre-investment and portfolio companies. I can’t even begin to tell you what an incredible experience this was. I was visiting the hottest (as well as the ‘nottest’) internet ventures in the market, meeting with the founders and teams, and either helping determine their ability to be funded, or to help accelerate and/or fix their business. The money and notoriety was beyond what I could have imagined. And during this period I was able to step back and visualize just where everything was headed, both from a marketing stance as well as a technology stance. It was obvious that the market’s immense growth rate was going to spin down at some point… and 9/11 pretty much sealed that fate, both for startups as well as my consulting engagements. But beyond the pain of a decimated web marketplace, something far more important came out of this period… a return to the ‘roots’ of the Internet… what it was originally designed for… for connecting people. Sure, it’s a fantastic information tool, but beyond the information component, the one thing the market had lost its way on was exactly what the web did best– connect people– but in a different way than the business of dating. Social networking was right there, right in front of our noses.

Around this time (2000) I had been attending these little parties in the South of Market (San Francisco) called the Web of Finance. A friend of mine, Adrian Scott would host these little parties from his live-work loft. You’d find all types of young entrepreneurs wandering through his flat, talking about this idea and that… but the one I remember most was Adrian talking about his social networking idea called Ryze (http://www.ryze.com). Ryze was truly the first of its kind, incorporating the concept of a user profile with the ability to peruse members of a site, post your picture, communicate with others, and form groups. WOW! So far before its time. I noticed that when Ryze first launched it was fantastic. All of my friends were there and we were having a blast. And then it happened. The network started growing by leaps and bounds. Who were all of these people and where did they come from? So many groups, so much information. Some of the people I enjoyed meeting, but there were a whole lot of others I really didn’t want to meet. Social entropy had set in. And as other social networks emerged, once again social entropy occurred. Until finally LinkedIn launched. Social entropy had seemingly been curbed with LinkedIn. Social networking with a purpose– interesting concept. Hmmm…

This all set me on a mission… how to control infoglut and peopleglut (aka spam) to generate (at least) a sense of value… how to create relevance in the belly of social networking and social media… a seemingly endless journey that to this day continues to consume me.