Media Partnerships
We spent the next few months getting to know each other and working on our plan. By the end of summer we were ready go. I had dinner with a friend, who is a banker, and told him our idea. He loved it and he offered to have his company invest in it.
I was elated, but again, I had no idea the length and the process I was about to go through to get from “yes” to “close”. I quit my job and worked full time on preparing our prospectus. In order to get money from Wall Street you had to prepare a legal offering document which spelled out in detail your idea, the risks, a plan for execution as well as take life insurance policies out to indemnify the lender in a worst case scenario. We finally finished the book, incorporated, and closed in January of 2000.
One of the first things I missed about the corporate world was there was always someone there to take care of things, like office space, phones, stationary, health insurance and the rest of the services that make it so that you can focus on your task at hand. We had none of this, but still managed to find two big connected offices on the top floor of a garment factory on the corner of 38th and 9th Avenue. We got our phones and office equipment, set up our new computer system and started hiring, mostly engineers at first but also sales and office support. That is when I learned about how business is done in Hells Kitchen.
One day, my partner and I let in a representative from a fire prevention company. He pointed out where the extinguishers needed to be and how to keep our office space up to code. He then explained that if we paid his company a monthly fee he would deliver the extinguishers and make sure we didn’t have a fire. We were too busy to deal with him and told him we weren’t interested and we’d get our own extinguishers. He didn’t take it well but we asked him to leave.
Unbeknownst to us, our gentleman caller left the building, got a bag from his car and came back with a bottle of accelerant. He pored it in the mechanical room next to out space and started a fire. One of the other tenants on the floor saw the fire and knocked on everyone’s door. We ran out of the building, and the maintenance guys put out the fire. We explained to our landlord what happened and he said not to call anyone, he would take care of it. Which he did, we never saw the fire guy again. All of the rough bumps in the beginning were starting to get ironed out and we got down to work.
At the time, the term algorithm was thrown around with abandon in any reference to start up Internet companies and what they did, but I had no idea what it really was. I always thought that an algorithm was some giant mathematical formula that only some genius, like my partner, could do. I was wrong. It turns out that an algorithm is just a series of steps that you have to take to get from point A to point B. I could do that, and I did.
In order to build a website to sell advertising time directly from television stations to advertising agencies we had to define every variable and constant involved in the transaction. That included future program schedules, rating information, pricing and forecasting tools, and everything else that goes into a buy.
We secured a television station group and an ad agency as seller and buyer to help debug the interface and point out errors and omissions. We got data from TV Guide’s system to build our schedules but ran in to a roadblock when Nielsen, the ratings company, refused to give us test market data to use in our system. After several back and forths, our station group partner stepped in and demanded it from them They complied and sent us two reels of old IBM mainframe tape, one for each market, knowing full well that no one has an IBM mainframe sitting in an Internet company’s office so they thought they won. They were wrong. My partner and his guys got right to work, found an old machine for sale, took it apart and built an interface with our system, figured the data tables and downloaded both markets in to our system in less than a week. Even Nielsen couldn’t believe when we called to thank them and told them how we looked forward to a long partnership.
We built and designed every piece of the system and were successfully in beta test well before out deadlines, so it was time to our bank, for the second installment of funds promised and build out our small 20 person firm into a fully functioning live system. But that’s not how it happened. The Internet stocks had been taking a beating for a little while and it looked like the bubble was about to burst ,when showed up at our banker and bragged about our progress and asked for the second installment. He said no. The guy on top was pulling all future funding for his startup Internet companies and if we needed more money we would have to find it ourselves. There was nothing he could do. We hired investment bankers, wrote another prospectus, and presented it to anyone that would give us a meeting. Unfortunately the market went bust and no one was looking for a way in, they wanted a way out. We never got more financing and our bank account ran dry so we went bankrupt, sold off all the equipment at auction and shut our doors in August of 2001.
Afterwards, I took a step back and surveyed the landscape and tried to figure which direction to go; back in to advertising or another start up. Unfortunately while I was pondering we were attacked on September 11th and my focus shifted to my family, friends and neighbors while we slugged through the new reality of life in New York City. But after time life returned to normal and I started to think about work again.