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Tell me where your vision came from.

2
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Where did your vision come from to come out of corporate

3
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and to go into cyber hinge and then to move forward?

4
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Well, that wasn't vision.

5
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That was happenstance.

6
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I was working for a defense contractor in the 90s.

7
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We were working on the B-1 bomber.

8
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The B-1 bomber had a couple crashes.

9
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In the meantime, the Soviet Union had collapsed.

10
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Congress decided we didn't need the B-1 bomber.

11
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They canceled our contract.

12
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A third of the company got laid off.

13
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Oh, wow. Okay.

14
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Including me.

15
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And so I looked for work

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and looked for consulting opportunities.

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And a friend of mine who was a deep computer guy

18
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was having an identity crisis

19
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because the headhunters had stopped calling him as frequently

20
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and he was trying to figure out what to do.

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So we said, well, this internet thing is interesting.

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Why don't we see if we can build a company

23
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that will support the ad agencies and the PR firms

24
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that now need to build websites for their clients

25
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and have no clue?

26
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Okay.

27
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And we would be their support staff.

28
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Okay.

29
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And we would teach them and we would host their websites.

30
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And we couldn't, that didn't work.

31
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But I ended up becoming a website designer

32
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in the process.

33
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Wow.

34
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And I liked the craft and I liked helping people

35
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and I liked the interaction

36
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that is involved in doing it well.

37
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And I am in the greater New York metropolitan area

38
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and I went to an art show.

39
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Okay.

40
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There were a hundred art dealers.

41
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50 of them had websites.

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Of the 50 websites, 25 were dreadful.

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So there were 75 people who needed good websites

44
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and they were selling things that were expensive.

45
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And I said, this is a niche.

46
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This is, you know, the Google is,

47
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if you're an art dealer, Google is your friend.

48
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Yes.

49
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The art dealers weren't that sophisticated about it

50
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and they weren't as interested as I expected them to be.

51
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But as I was going to art fairs, dealer based shows

52
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and then started going to antique shows

53
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and then I started going to craft fairs

54
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and I could go to five in a weekend if I was crazy

55
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because there's some of them not in greater New York.

56
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That's not true anymore.

57
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An awful lot of shows have stopped.

58
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But in 2003, I could go to a hundred art shows a year easy.

59
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You know, one on Saturday and one on Sunday

60
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and most people didn't have websites.

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So you'd say, I build websites for artists.

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I build websites for art dealers.

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If you have any interest, let's make a phone call

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and they'd say yes.

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And so I built a business around that.