A few even responded, and he told them about himself. How he'd started some small businesses while he was in college at Syracuse; how for two years he'd been president of ACE (the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs). He asked them for a half hour of their time.
At the meetings, Mellinger sought advice and asked the executives what "drove them crazy" about their technology. Evidently, it was a line of questioning big-company executives warmed to, for before long Mellinger's mentors included the CIOs of Pepsi, Merrill Lynch, and Chase; the chairman of KPMG Peat Marwick; and the head of international-law practices at Skadden, Arps--the kind of people, in other words, whose secretaries have a secretary; the kind of people that family members make appointments to see. So just how was it that Mellinger got them to devote time--lots of time--to a kid without a business?
"Honestly, I had no intention of meeting with him," says Irwin Sitkin, one of Mellinger's earliest contacts, when he was asked why he or anyone else in his position would have agreed to get involved. Sitkin was the senior information- technology executive at Aetna from 1969 to 1989 and is credited by many with having invented the role of CIO. "He called out of the blue early one morning when I was working at home," Sitkin recalls. "Said he wanted me 'to be his mentor' and 'I'd like to come see you.' I was just trying to put him off, really--dodge a bullet. 'We can arrange a time,' I said. 'No, I mean I'd like to see you today,' he said. 'Well, I'm pretty busy,' I told him, 'and besides, you know I'm up here in the middle of Connecticut, not in Manhattan.' And he just said, 'That's OK.' He didn't actually wait to hear me agree to see him or agree to talk to him if I did. And two hours later there he was, this kid, knocking on the front door of my house. You've seen that look he has." (That look is a lost-puppy-dog thing; Mellinger still has it at 33.) "What're you going to do?"
Well, what they were going to do was have some breakfast, it turned out (mustered by Sitkin's wife when she felt pity for the stray). It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
"He told me his background," Sitkin recalls, "and you had to like him. I was impressed that he was going right through to the CEO or the CIO, in one phone call, to see what their problems were. When he actually got his business going later and started selling, he wasn't a guy who started at the bottom with the purchasing agent. He went to the top. And what was he, 24 or 25 at the time?
"I agreed to see him once a month, for a half day. 'Come see me, and I'll critique your progress,' I told him. And he followed through. You know, a lot of people ask for advice; this kid actually wanted it."
So as Mellinger began to get his fledgling company off the ground--in 1990 it rose to $462,000 in revenues, mostly by brokering computer consultants--he would meet one-on-one with his mentors. The idea of leveraging those relationships into a full-fledged board wasn't Mellinger's; it was Sitkin's. "These people would enjoy meeting each other," Sitkin told Mellinger one day. "Why don't you see if they'd like to get together?" Mellinger asked around, and Sitkin's suspicion was right. The crew did want to meet--but where? One of the mentors offered his place.
Which is how PRT's first-ever advisory-board meeting came to be hosted by John Diesem in autumn 1990 in the boardroom of the American Stock Exchange, of which Diesem was a senior vice-president.
"The thing about Doug," Sitkin says today, "is that people believe him. He does what he says he's going to do. And what he said he was going to do, right from that first morning at my house, was to provide work for a lot of young people, create wealth, and then sell and go give something back to society. I know Steve Jobs and Gates and McNealy and John Akers. I did business with them all, and I consider them friends. They're all extraordinary men. Doug reminds me of them, except that Doug is unusual in the tech field because the technology isn't what it's about. What motivates him is to give something back. It distinguishes him. He's not in it for himself. With Doug, it's always about something more."
Something more. it's a refrain you hear a lot around PRT, but never more than from Vishy, the president of PRT/Barbados. His relationship with PRT began just as so many do: Mellinger asked him for advice. At the time--this was before Mellinger's invent-a-country epiphany in the summer of 1994--Vishy was the highly regarded head of a Citicorp offshore development center in India, dedicated exclusively to Citicorp's internal technology needs. He was an expert on the exploding Indian software industry, and though his company couldn't help PRT, he could direct it to other companies it could outsource to. Vishy became a mentor and enjoyed it. Then, in September 1994 (three months after Mellinger had that talk with his father in the yard), Mellinger ended a breakfast with Vishy at Manhattan's 42nd Street Hyatt by asking him to come create PRT's "near-shore" development center, its proposed alternative to the industry's current onshore and offshore options.
