2HousePlague

For working so much on Java things at IBM, I was traveling out to the West Coast more and more, to visit the IBM Java and Sun MicroSystems (Java partner) HQ's, in Cupertino, CA.

My first time staying in San Francisco, I stayed at the beautiful Mark Hopkins Hotel, and a seed was planted.

This was near-peak-size for the DOTCOM Bubble, and the offers I'd been getting (without much interest on my part till then) became more and more interesting when they were connected to Bay Area companies.

I finally accepted a postion with (then) AltaVista subsidiary, Zip2.com. My title was "PR Manager/Marcomm WebMaster". This happened about the same time AltaVista had just been purchased by CMGI.

It was a time of enormous ambitions and unchecked spending (see answer to question 12, below).

One of the first things CMGI did was undertake a floor-to-ceiling revamp of the AltaVista.com search site, creating a Yahoo-esque "portal", instead.

There were also 2 new sites to be built -- Shoppping.com and AltaVistaLIVE.com (a customizable, multimedia news-delivery portal).

They hired USWebCKS for branding and Seattle agency Weiden & Kennedy for the ad campaign, which included 3 spots on the SUPERBOWL!!

Within a month of being hired by Zip2.com, I met Charles Rashall, the brilliant man who'd just been named VP of Marketing. Charles tapped me for his direct team and made me Director of User Experience -- one of those Bubble-esque titles that always left people thinking -- "WTF do you DO?"

Things were so crazy during that time that I had a hand in all sorts of things coming out of the marketing department -- it was a real Dream Team of some of the smartest, most talented, most ambitious people I've ever met.

Among the projects I worked on was the info-architecting of the AltaVista.com and Shopping.com sites, creating a branding guideline document for use by all designers in the company, a co-branded credit card and the PR and logistics for the HUGE launch event on October 25th in NYC, to name just a few.

This was the day I oversaw the "burning" of a $2million budget, which included such things as the rental of the Jumbotron in Times Square, the hiring and "motivation" (by me) of 600 actors, the production of more than 4,000 pieces of marketing collateral (ranging in size from a postage stamp to a 9-story banner), a Cirque de Soleil style stage performance we put on for the media and analysts, and a Lauren Hill concert -- yes, we hired her.

Here's the first paragraph of the Launch Day press release I wrote:

"NEW YORK, October 25, 1999 ? AltaVista Company today unveiled its plans for enlarging the power of the Internet as a medium for the exchange of knowledge. A dynamic new media MegaPortal, the Web?s most powerful and comprehensive search engine and a revolutionary new approach to online commerce put more within the grasp of users that at any other time in Internet history..."


This was easily one of the most exciting days of my life.

We really pulled off something amazing that the world may never see again.

It's too bad the market lost confidence before we could IPO.

I was a really rich guy for a little while -- on paper.


j-

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tada!