Life as a Tech Insider (Part II)
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 | Wayne Mulligan
Well, I hope you had a very happy New Year, and I wish you all the best in 2007!
We're back at work over here at Tycoon Publishing - actually, we never really took off - but now that we're back on our regular publishing schedule, I'm going to continue with my Life as a Tech Insider "story".
We left off with me starting my first IT consulting company, and I had just raised some capital, hired my first batch of employees and moved into our new office space...definitely a little overwhelming for an 18-year-old, but I was having the time of my life!
Things were off to a good start - everybody had dot-com fever and wanted to start a web site.
Those were most of the clients that we landed at first - regular businesses that wanted to establish an online presence.
We would call them "Click-and-Mortar" businesses - as opposed to what they were before, standard "Brick-and-Mortar" businesses (businesses with no online component.)
As the company got more and more into developing web solutions, we began to score some "pure-play" dot-com clients - one of our first big accounts was with Gruner Jahr USA Publishing.
They gave us a project to build some community tools (e.g. message boards, polls, etc.) for their flagship young-women's site, YM.com.
I guess we did a good job because after completing that project, we got a call from a group of Executive Producers at Nickelodeon, a division of Viacom (NYSE: VIA).
They were looking to build a new site for a TV show, and we got hired to do some of the work.
Now you have to understand something - the Viacom building is dead in the middle of Times Square here in New York. For the younger "MTV Generation", the building holds iconic status because it's where everybody goes to try to get on some of MTV's music shows (Viacom also owns MTV.)
So here I am, 18 years old - didn't even own a suit to wear to the first meeting - and I'm walking into the Viacom building, of all places, to tell these Execs why they made a good decision giving us a six-figure development deal.
Maybe it was just me being paranoid, or maybe I'm just extremely observant - but, in any case, it seemed that as soon as I came in and introduced myself, everybody in the meeting sort of glanced at each other with an, "Oh no, what did we get ourselves into?" look on their faces.
I was young at the time, but I looked even younger - I probably looked like a high school kid still (I was only a year out of high school at the time, anyway,) and they were about to hand me a deposit check for over $60,000 - obviously not a huge amount of money, but definitely enough to get somebody over there in deep trouble if the project got messed up because they hired a "kid" to do it.
I knew I had to come out swinging in this meeting - not only to gain their respect, but also to put their minds at ease...and that's just what I did.
Within minutes of going over the development plan and our overall strategy, I could tell everyone relaxed a bit, and things went very well from there.
And this was sort of how things went for a couple of years - bigger and bigger contracts, hiring more people, moving into bigger office space, etc.
That was all until March 11, 2000 - the day the Nasdaq took a nosedive!
That truly marked the beginning of the end for my business - and for the technology sector in general - shortly after that, many of the dot-coms that had fueled our growth crashed and burned.
The larger clients we had, like Viacom, pulled back on all of their online spending.
And before you knew it, all of our "Click-and-Mortar" business dried up too.
It was at this point where I had to make one of the hardest decisions in my life...I had to let all of my employees go, cut my losses and close up my business.
I felt like a completely failure. I felt like I had had it all, and now it was gone and I had nothing.
But, I just wasn't seeing the bigger picture. Little did I know at the time, the experience and insight I gained during the "dot-com days" would prove to be invaluable in the next chapter of my "business education".
Not only did I learn more about technology, but I also learned one of the truisms about business in general - "it's not what you know, it's who you know."
And that couldn't be more true when it comes to the world of Wall Street.
As it turned out, some of my clients (who also became good friends) were some heavy hitters on Wall Street - and during the whole dot-com gold rush, would periodically call me for advice and insight on their technology investments.
So by the time I was shuttering my business and wondering what I would do with myself, I was presented with an amazing opportunity to hone my business and finance skills and put my experience in technology to good use.
But more on that next week - that's when I'll give you the final chapter of Life as a Tech Insider.
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Wayne Mulligan
Chief Investment Officer
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