By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com
As I mentioned my previous post, the initial Seattle Internet development companies were among the first in the nation to seize upon the idea that money can be made from the web.
My guiding philosophy in those days was that the rush to get a presence on the Internet was like the Yukon Gold Rush - there was precious little gold (initially, at least), but fortunes to be made supplying the pots, pans, and supplies for the miners. In a sense, that sums up the ethos of the entire service industry, and has a particularly Seattle-y flavor too ... it was the Yukon Gold Rush that established Seattle itself as a major city.
Those of us who started the first companies-again, this was before the vast sums of speculative cash came into the market, before the Internet was used as anything other than file sharing and a little bit of marketing-we sensed that a sea change was coming and abandoned our day-to-day software and marketing jobs.
When I left FRM after only a couple of months, I was convinced that Microsoft would move rapidly and affirmatively into the Internet space and, along with partners Ben Thompson and Pete Gerrald, pitched a thousand dollars into the investment and got underway. Saltmine Creative, Inc. was founded on April 1, 1995-a fitting date indeed.
I reduced my "lifestyle" to a bare minimum. I moved into a basement studio apartment, plugged in my 28K modem and lived, ate, and breathed Internet. Like my partners, I was a builder, a designer, a project manager and a business manager all in one.
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.
We couldn't afford to hire the best "Internet" people available because none existed. There were no businesses or schools turning them out. Everything was, in effect, homespun. We found bright ambitious young people (many of them the musician friends that my partners and I had known in our previous lives. They were particularly adroit at learning development skills, and understanding the bare-knuckle brawl of business. We used to joke that many of us had gotten our MBAs on the street hawking records and trying to get gigs.)
Growth was rapid in early 1995, and by sheer cunning and force of personality, we were able to establish relationships both with Microsoft, and (the other leader of the time) CompuServe. We paid ourselves nothing; we expected long hours of work doing things no one had ever done before. We were rewarded for our hard work with clients such as the PGA TOUR, BP, C-SPAN, (wow, that's a lot of capitals!), and of course, Microsoft, which had indeed realized the potential of the Internet.
