"We had the best company in the world.
Period. The fastest growing, the most profitable. But I had to learn
about humility. Telling everybody we were the best--that worked really
well in the beginning and then it worked absolutely against us in
the end. If you come off as too aggressive, you risk this backlash.
The time was right to start Razorfish because
people needed the services that we were offering. I was like a shovel
salesman in the gold rush. I didn't care what you were trying to do
with your B-to-B, or whether your VCs were funding you, or whatever.
Just pay me cash--that's how it worked.
The 1990s were about greed, lying, and stupidity.
There was a very smooth system for VC-ing ideas and then taking them
through the banking pipe out to the public market. A lot of people
and a lot of institutions got really, really rich during that time.
The backlash that we supposedly saw was basically institutions dumping
their shares.
But the rules of business never changed.
You have fixed costs, you have variable costs, and you have profit
margins. And that's it. If you don't have a handle on that stuff,
then there's nothing else to talk about. If there is no profit margin,
you're in trouble.
In my next endeavor, I will stay more emotionally
distant from the company. It's hard to describe loving 2,100 employees
so much that you'll do anything. You'll buy $1 million of stock on
the open market, like I did, to show you believe in them. That was
a dumb move, straight up. The stock was tanking. And as a gesture
to my employees, well, a million dollars is a lot of money.
The IT-architecture firm Razorfish, founded
in 1995, had revenues of $260 million by 2000. It was acquired by
SBI in 2003 for $8 million."
Source: Fast
Company, March,
2004; Fast
Talk
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