About
This blog is about my adventures trying to make money online while still spending time with my family and working a day job. I will post suggestions and give progress reports.
I consider myself an entrepreneur. My first successful venture was co-founding Vantagenet in 1997. Vantagenet started as a free forum provider for webmasters and exploded after I had the idea to start offering free web polls. We were listed in the Media Metrix top 500 sites (in terms of unique visitors) and had over 100,000 user accounts when we attracted the attention of About.com in the spring of 1999. We had huge traffic, but since we were a small company (two people) without any sales staff, we were not getting the best CPM rates for our traffic. About.com had 600+ niche websites and wanted to add our tools to those sites, and monetize our traffic at the much higher CPM rates they were getting at the time. Their first offer to acquire us was a typical lowball offer so we flat out rejected it. They were shocked — they expected a counter offer. We were making great money and had no overhead and loved what we were doing. About.com persisted so we hired a law firm and professional negotiator to help broker the deal. We ended up getting a nice cash and stock deal (though the stock later became nearly worthless after About.com was acquired by Primedia right before the internet bubble burst). We also received some great stock options (at the time), that later did become completely worthless because the stock price dropped below the strike price and never recovered.
My latest venture is co-producing a documentary about the movie JAWS that we hope to premiere at Sundance in January 2009.
You may see some weird stuff in the older posts on the blog — for fun, I imported a bunch of old posts from a personal blog that barely used. I think there’s some good stuff on it, but I am biased …
