By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com
Over time, recollections dim, and we tend to reflexively recast and recreate history. So, to get it all down, as it were, I wanted to respond to a question that I'm frequently asked: "how did the web development community get started in Seattle?"
How did it all begin here, back in the days of gray backgrounds and blink tags?
The first successful Seattle Internet service company, FreeRange Media was founded in 1993 by Mike Samsel and Andrew Fry. Samsel and Fry seized upon the idea of the Internet as a marketing platform for successful brick and mortar companies. This pre-dated e-commerce, web-based communities, all of the familiar Web 2.0 clichés, and yet those concepts, still nascent, were discussed and dreamt of by the founders and staff (a group of expatriate Microsoftees and various other folks looking for new direction. I was one of them, as was Lux Worldwide co-founder Todd Tibbetts. Our third partner, Ben Thompson, did marketing and design work as well.)
FRM grew rapidly and, because of its early position in the market, landed sizable accounts with Time Warner Books, Zenith Data Systems, the NFL, et al. As I have suggested, most of the work was marketing-oriented-essentially creating a site that showed or talked about the companies' attributes, and didn't really "do" anything. But FRM knew that software developers could build online databases, and content management systems, and even, gasp, sell things via the Internet. Alas, the market did not yet exist. There was no Amazon.com, no sense that it was safe to enter your credit card into a computer and that something would arrive at your house.
Two other noteworthy companies pursuing web development in the earliest incarnation were Dan Fine's company Fine.com, and Richard Lancaster's Cobweb.
For whatever reason, perhaps because of the challenges of working with the client, FreeRange eschewed working with Microsoft. Mind you, Microsoft itself had little or no public interest in Internet development until nearly 1996.
So, convinced that Microsoft would enter the market dramatically, a small core of us went on to start Saltmine Creative, Inc, the first in a second wave of Seattle Internet development companies. More on this next time, when I continue the history ...
