Grand Plans

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Actually, it helped. They had an extraordinary resource in where they were living. With free, unlimited access to their universities' T1 lines to the Internet, they created a Web site with a message board where their friends could chat about stocks. In the back of their minds, they hoped to generate revenues by attracting advertisers to their site. They didn't have to spend much money. They plunked down $75 for a New Jersey partnership fee, $70 to register their Web domain name, and $30 for the first month's hosting fee for their Web site.

Wright oversaw the operational and technical aspects of building the site, relying heavily on his roommate, who was studying computer science. "He learned a lot about Web applications, and he'd come back and apply that to our site," says Wright. "He once did a page design and then handed it in as a class project."

Meanwhile, Martin was drawing on his contacts at the University of Virginia to develop content for the site. As a member of a student investment club --which John Griffin, the founder and president of Blue Ridge Capital, a hedge fund in New York City, had funded with $100,000--he met students who shared his interest in Wall Street. Fellow club members were happy to contribute financial articles and company profiles for the fledgling Web site, called Raging Bull. One club member who was particularly jazzed up about it, Rusty Szurek, was quickly enlisted as Martin and Wright's partner.

The site enjoyed modest success for the first few months. It attracted a few thousand or so daily hits, or page visits, and drew a sprinkling of paid advertisements. But compared with such high-traffic, investment-oriented sites as the Motley Fool, Silicon Investor, and Yahoo Finance, the business remained bush-league--until the partners conceived of an "ignore" button. "We noticed that the biggest problem with message boards was spamming: people being vulgar or just dumb," says Wright. "We wanted people to enjoy what was valuable without worrying about the other stuff."

So Wright recruited another Rutgers student to devise an "ignore" feature that would allow users to block out messages they considered to be dull or offensive. The reconstituted site attracted so many users that it galvanized @Ventures, a venture-capital firm based in Andover, Mass., to invest $2 million in the start-up.

Wright, Martin, and Szurek don't have to mooch off their universities anymore; in fact, they dropped out of school to devote themselves full-time to Raging Bull, now a multimillion-dollar company based in Andover, Mass. And now it's the academic community that's tapping the Raging Bull partners for their expertise. A Rutgers professor invited Martin to speak to a finance class, and Szurek recently lectured at Boston College.

WALK THE PLANK

Whether they are sacked owing to "downsizing," "reengineering," or some other business or economic trend, many employees have come to know the '90s as the Decade of the Pink Slip. For some it's been a blessing in disguise.

In the spring of 1996, Neil Sater, then 40, and his brother-in-law, David Zasloff, then 25, were laid off from their jobs as carpenters at Barron Development, a construction company in Santa Maria, Calif. The reason for the layoffs was a downturn in residential construction in the area. "I was in pretty dire financial straits," says Sater, although his situation could have been worse. His wife's salary as a teacher would afford him some time to look for the right business opportunity.

That idea presented itself, oddly enough, at a local greenhouse, where an unusual fountain consisting of "a monolithic slab of slate with water running over it" caught Sater's eye. A lighter, more portable version, he reasoned, might have commercial potential. He spent the princely sum of $50 on raw materials. "David and I started fooling around on my back patio, gluing pieces of slate together and leaving the inside hollow," Sater recalls.

Among the objects they fashioned from the slate cubes were fountains and furniture, including side tables. In exchange for a fountain, Sater bartered with a local photographer to shoot a portfolio showing the prototypes. On the strength of the portfolio Sater secured orders from several gallery owners in Sedona, Ariz., a spot known for its artists' community, while he was on a trip there.

Soon Sater and Zasloff were crafting more designs, building five fountains at a time, packing them into Zasloff's Isuzu Rodeo, and showing up unannounced at galleries in the San Francisco area. Their big break came in February 1997, when their company, named Water Wonders, "put everything on the line," in Sater's phrase, and spent $2,500 for a booth at the San Francisco International Gift Show. It paid off: Water Wonders received $50,000 worth of orders over five days, with Sater's 13-year-old niece scribbling down specifications on the back of business cards.

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Donna Fenn

Inc. contributing editor Donna Fenn is the author of Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Both this blog and the book examine the ways in which GenY is changing the entrepreneurial landscape with new approaches to starting, growing, and managing their companies. Learn more at http://www.upstartsrock.com/.

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