The Start-Up Diaries: The Player
Why would Richie Powell, a college student and talented athlete, ditch the sport he's worked his whole life to master? For the dream of an Internet start-up and the wealth it may bring.
A college student ditches the sport he's worked his whole life to master for the dream of an Internet start-up
Richie Powell is getting impatient. He's just heard from one of his nine full-time employees that a key recruit has yet to accept what he regards as a generous offer. "He's getting a nice equity stake in this place," Powell proclaims. Let's get the deal signed today, he tells Kofi Kankam, vice-president of business development. By this afternoon, if possible. Before 4, actually. "I want to leave early," explains the cofounder, president, and CEO of FÚxito Worldwide Inc. "I have a lot of homework."
In that regard, at least, the 20-year-old Powell resembles any other college student. But Powell, a junior economics major at Harvard, recently ditched his spot on the varsity soccer team -- his playing skill earned the native Jamaican a scholarship to Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass., and helped him get accepted by Harvard -- thereby disappointing both his coach and his father. "I have priorities," he says. "I have a company to run."
That's a fact anyone around him can't easily forget. Every few minutes Powell's cell phone beeps out Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," kicking him into high-pitch mode.
The year-old company's new headquarters consists of three freshly painted rooms in Cambridge, Mass., sandwiched between Harvard and MIT, institutions from which FÚxito draws not only employees but also its many interns. Powell wants to have his desk in a corner so that he can gaze out the window, fueling his fantasy of occupying "a big corporate office in New York." For now he's standing there, yakking on his cell phone. "I'm not worried about a couple of extra points in here," Powell announces. "I want to see this thing go public by 2001 or be acquired in nine months."
In a less speculative era -- the Roaring '20s, say -- FÚxito's tender-aged team might have been dismissed as pretenders, merely playing at business until they get called in for a reality supper. But, then, isn't this how a modern windfall-in-the-making is supposed to look? A gang of smart, focused, and energetic young folks (in this case, guys) who have taken an oath to rule whatever Internet "space" they've marked as their own. Sure, they're in a hurry, but they're not rushed. Powell knows, for instance, that it took another recent Cambridge-based entrepreneur, Warren Adams, almost two full years before he could sell his Internet start-up, PlanetAll, for $100 million. Powell has studied the get-rich-click set perhaps as diligently as he's studied anything. "I really should study more," he admits, suffocating a yawn.
But, hey, Powell didn't choose Harvard for its curriculum. A stock trader since the age of 12 who started an export and investment-management company after high school, he spied a more precious, and lasting, commodity on campus: contacts. "Harvard, to me, was all about the networking," says Powell, who spent his freshman year crashing entrepreneur-related events.
The plan for FÚxito is as much the product of Powell's grandiose ambitions for himself as it is of anything he absorbed at those outings. Still, it was a nugget he picked up during a class led by an accomplished entrepreneur -- "know your market," the guru advised -- that got the idea of a soccer-related start-up, appropriately enough, "running around in my head," Powell recalls. Powell knew firsthand that in soccer "a lot of recruiting right now is by chance." His venture, he decided in October 1998, would "drastically improve" that process, using the Internet to enable coaches to view demographic profiles and video clips of players. Two months later, Powell says, "everyone was excited" when he presented his five-page plan to 30 attendees of the Harvard Startups group. Oh, they did suggest that his pricing structure, which called for coaches to pay as much as $10,000 a year for access to an international database, might benefit from further market research. Powell had no trouble accepting their criticism because he hadn't finished his market research. Nor had he really started it.
"Richie understood the soccer market from the point of view of being a very good athlete, but he didn't have a good foundation in business," recalls John A. Clendenin, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who attended that presentation. But Powell rightly believes that "the passion I exude is an asset." And one highly valued by Clendenin, who is also a sports psychologist. "There's no substitute for enthusiasm, drive, desire, and determination," Clendenin says. "Richie's idea didn't have any structure, but it was a good dream."
The dream of being part of an Internet start-up, any Internet start-up, has captivated the members of FÚxito's management team nearly as much as its ever-evolving mission has. Sanjeeb Bhuyan, the company's 22-year-old chief systems administrator, joined FÚxito in late June. A month later he was having dreams in which "we had sold the company for a lot of money, and we were all sitting around and talking about how we did it," recounts Bhuyan, who is also earning a master's degree in computer science at MIT. Powell says he'll feel satisfied if FÚxito "gets sold for only $20 million."
Granted, it's hard for anyone involved in such a breed of business to ignore the possibility of what Powell calls a "financial hit," given the stories that are all around: Netscape, PointCast, Yahoo. Last summer those very companies were literally right around FÚxito, near the Sunnyvale, Calif., office that nine of the start-up's staffers occupied -- and more than half of them lived in -- for two months. Once, at 5 a.m., Bhuyan suggested that Powell get some shut-eye. No, Powell replied, I'll go to sleep when we do an IPO. "It felt like we had been taken away from everything and we were living in a FÚxito world," says Bhuyan.
It may have felt that way because FÚxito's mission had expanded so grandly. Three months after Powell's presentation, he contacted Daniel M. Hoffer, a Harvard senior who operated his own technology consulting firm. Hoffer heard the idea -- and the magnitude of the technological challenges -- and "within five minutes I was sold," he says. "He had a great idea." Powell believes that the idea was only part of the allure. "Once again I infected somebody with my passion and vision," says Powell, who gained in Hoffer a cofounder and a chief operating officer.
The two founders' market research made Powell feel even more strongly that the site needed to have broad appeal, since an on-line soccer-recruiting tool was "not something you sell in 15 months for $150 million," he says. What FÚxito needed to be was a venture aimed not at 3 million soccer coaches but at 3 billion soccer fans. (The company's name combines the Spanish words for soccer and success and offers the added bonus of "sounding obscene, if you pronounce it wrong," Hoffer says.) Given the scope of its aim, FÚxito also needed to be in "the heart of the start-up community," as Powell says. So he and his team moved to Silicon Valley -- briefly, anyway.
