Tell me where your vision came from.
Where did your vision come from to come out of corporate
and to go into cyber hinge and then to move forward?
Well, that wasn't vision.
That was happenstance.
I was working for a defense contractor in the 90s.
We were working on the B-1 bomber.
The B-1 bomber had a couple crashes.
In the meantime, the Soviet Union had collapsed.
Congress decided we didn't need the B-1 bomber.
They canceled our contract.
A third of the company got laid off.
Oh, wow. Okay.
Including me.
And so I looked for work
and looked for consulting opportunities.
And a friend of mine who was a deep computer guy
was having an identity crisis
because the headhunters had stopped calling him as frequently
and he was trying to figure out what to do.
So we said, well, this internet thing is interesting.
Why don't we see if we can build a company
that will support the ad agencies and the PR firms
that now need to build websites for their clients
and have no clue?
Okay.
And we would be their support staff.
Okay.
And we would teach them and we would host their websites.
And we couldn't, that didn't work.
But I ended up becoming a website designer
in the process.
Wow.
And I liked the craft and I liked helping people
and I liked the interaction
that is involved in doing it well.
And I am in the greater New York metropolitan area
and I went to an art show.
Okay.
There were a hundred art dealers.
50 of them had websites.
Of the 50 websites, 25 were dreadful.
So there were 75 people who needed good websites
and they were selling things that were expensive.
And I said, this is a niche.
This is, you know, the Google is,
if you're an art dealer, Google is your friend.
Yes.
The art dealers weren't that sophisticated about it
and they weren't as interested as I expected them to be.
But as I was going to art fairs, dealer based shows
and then started going to antique shows
and then I started going to craft fairs
and I could go to five in a weekend if I was crazy
because there's some of them not in greater New York.
That's not true anymore.
An awful lot of shows have stopped.
But in 2003, I could go to a hundred art shows a year easy.
You know, one on Saturday and one on Sunday
and most people didn't have websites.
So you'd say, I build websites for artists.
I build websites for art dealers.
If you have any interest, let's make a phone call
and they'd say yes.
And so I built a business around that.