Although public admonitions apply chiefly to serious lapses, Tullman is a proud sweater of the small stuff. "I always try to spend a portion of the day micromanaging something," he says. "Just to let people know I'm interested. ERNIE!" he barks out the door to Flashpoint's senior vice president of operations, Ernesto Paras. (For a guy so loaded up with communications technology, Tullman sure shouts a lot.) "I was just saying to Leigh that you and I are going to go into the screening room and bring up the lights on the chairs and the carpeting. Because I think I saw some spills and stuff." Paras informs his boss that someone is already on the way to clean and freshen the fabric. "I think I've communicated my enthusiasm on that subject," says Tullman with satisfaction.
("I catch a lot of things before he does," Paras, another Tullman loyalist, tells me later. "Because he does so many tours around campus, I know he's going to catch everything. We each want to be the one to notify the other of a problem. It's like a game.")
That desire to win on matters large and small was bred in the blood. Tullman is the oldest of six children, raised by an apparel-salesman father and a homemaker mother whose quixotic pursuit of a city council seat (she was a Democrat; the district, in New Providence, New Jersey, overwhelmingly Republican) modeled perseverance and competitiveness for her brood. Sibling rivalry raged intensely, especially between Tullman and his youngest brother, Glen, who is now CEO of Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, a public company with revenue of $1.4 billion, also in Chicago. That's CEO, not founder, Tullman points out. "My brother certainly regards himself an entrepreneur, too," he says. "Only in our darkest and closest conversations do I remind him that he's never started anything."
Tullman developed his nose-to-grindstone ethos in the 1960s at Northwestern Law School, where he assembled defense testimony for the trial of the Chicago Seven and presided over the law review. After graduation, he spent 10 years helping one of his professors and a partner build a law firm. It was while organizing class actions representing tens of thousands of plaintiffs that he succumbed to the imperative and allure of information management.
A lot of Tullman's stories from his entrepreneurial career start out, "A couple of guys came to see me." The first two guys approached him in 1980. They had an embryonic idea to make money on the spread between how much auto insurers were willing to pay for replacement cars—based on often-inflated book value—and how much car dealers charged. Tullman swiftly changed up that model: He wanted to do a database service that would help insurers assess the actual value of cars as determined by real-time sales in the market. He agreed to launch the business, but only if his co-founders raised enough money to make it worth his while. Thus was another Tullman tenet born: The entrepreneur's stake in a start-up should be his time, and only his time. "This idea that you have to go into hock and mortgage your home and starve is bullshit," says Tullman. "I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. If these VCs come along and say, 'Would you work for $5?' find different partners."
Tullman named that first business Certified Collateral Corporation. ("It was completely meaningless but sounded like an insurance kind of thing.") In 1983, he took CCC public, then sold it for $100 million and segued into a company he had already started to exploit underutilized resources. While running CCC, Tullman had observed how quiet the offices got after 4 p.m., when the firm's insurance-adjuster clients went home. So he paid employees to stay late conducting customer-satisfaction surveys for car manufacturers, hospitals, and restaurant chains. "You could do all the verticals except hotels," says Tullman, "because you didn't want to call some guy's home and ask his wife how the night at the motel was." He sold that second business, Original Research, in 1990.
Listening to Tullman recount his biography, I start to experience that time-lapse sensation again. So many ventures. So many stories. So many battery changes for my microrecorder. If I were a Tribeca Flashpoint student, I would chronicle the entrepreneur's next decade in a dazzling multimedia presentation. But because all I have are words, and a limited number of those, I'm going to condense the '90s into something more utilitarian: a timeline. Imagine what follows as a series of slides illustrated with artful photography. Hell, imagine video while you're at it. And a soundtrack. Maybe something anthemy, by Queen.
1990: Eager Enterprises, a venture fund investing in early real estate and employment databases
1991: Information Kinetics/Career Network, a service aggregating college-student resumés on CD-ROMs, for distribution to employers
1991: ICOM Simulations, a developer of computer games
1992: COIN, an automotive information systems company (this was a turnaround rather than a start-up)
1993: Monumental Art and Events, a marketing firm producing paintings and memorabilia commemorating major national events
1993: Imagination Pilots, a developer of computer games based on entertainment properties, such as Where's Waldo? and assorted action movies
1994: Information America, a database and legal-data aggregation company
1995: Swinging on a Star, a Broadway musical Tullman produced
1996: The Cobalt Group, a provider of e-commerce and Web services to car dealerships
1996: JamTV (later tunes.com), originally a producer of live-music webcasts, later a cluster of sites for prominent entertainment publishers, including rollingstone.com, thesource.com, and downbeatjazz.com
Which brings us to the Education Decade. (End soundtrack.)
We are tooling around Chicago in a black SUV, on a drive-by tour of past triumphs. Rolling around in the back are stacks of the 64-ounce plastic cups Tullman brings to his local 7-Eleven every morning for Diet Coke. The store downsized its Double Gulp to 62 ounces a few years ago, but Tullman keeps bringing in his old cups and insists the proprietors serve him the extra 2 ounces for the same price. (They also supply him with special tokens so he doesn't have to wait for change.) We collected the vehicle from a parking garage, where it occupies a first-floor space with no cars on either side. The garage owner created the space especially for Tullman, who didn't want to climb stairs or squeeze past anything to get to the driver's door. "My rule of thumb is that someone is going to have the best seat in the house," says Tullman, as we shoot past Stop signs with an air kiss. "It may not be me. But shame on me if I don't ask for it. In every speech I give to entrepreneurs, I ask them not to make it easy for other people to say no and not to compromise."
