By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com
By 1998, Saltmine had become the largest web company in Seattle, and one of the largest independent web companies on the west coast. I say "independent" because the lure of the Internet had attracted a great deal of venture capital by this time, and no fund was complete without having an Internet property, or a roll-up of Internet companies, or anything in any way, shape, or form related to the Internet in its portfolio.
Saltmine's revenue had grown to nearly $10M annually, we were awarded Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards, our subsidiary in London was the first such office opened by a US company in Europe, and I would actually climb up to the roof of our old building on Westlake Avenue on rare occasions, and smoke a cigar...like some kind of ridiculous parody of the tycoons of old. All President Jarmon needed at this point was a pair of striped pants and spats, and the transformation into the Monopoly Guy would be complete.
The sad truth was, of course, that we were still paying ourselves very little and having to scrape, scramble and fight for every dollar. This was because, as a matter of principle, we neither sought nor accepted any outside investment and chose to grow only so far as the revenue would take us. Still, with each new Saltmine baby that was born, with each new house one of our employees could afford, and with each new employee to whom we could offer health insurance, we knew were doing good, if not always doing well. Plus, we were lucky enough to work on some of the coolest projects imaginable at the dawn of an amazing digital revolution. That almost made all of the madness that came later worthwhile. Almost.
Locally, the old horses were falling by the way side or were being rapidly absorbed into large, national chains seeking to go public. FRM had been purchased by Luminant (Luminant had sought us out originally, but we didn't want to join in with them). Cosmix joined with USWeb and eventually became MarchFirst. Fine.com, in a very bold move, went public all on its own. The two largest national players, IXL and Razorfish (not the little, watered-down Razorfish of today, but the sprawling Razorfish of old) came knocking at our door, but we never really bought their pitch that bigger was better, and we weren't sure that our employees were going to prosper under their leadership.
By 2000, there were a 100 of us in Seattle and 25 of us in London, and as far as mergers and acquisitions were concerned, we were the belle of the ball. Our chief concerns were staying rational about money, and keeping the big national players out of our market. As always, we were successful, but certainly undercapitalized.
And then, on the day that the Nasdaq reached its all time high ... we made a mistake.
