Free-Agent Clubhouse

"Most of the time, all I needed was a phone and a computer," van Zanten explains. "I had a cell-phone, and Baby had Internet access, so I used Baby as my office. In that first year, I would sometimes be there from 9 AM until midnight, seven days a week."

Van Zanten also used the space for meetings. "In the early days, many people in Amsterdam hadn't heard of Baby," he says. "They would come for a meeting, and they'd be shocked. The space has tremendous impact." Other early members who spent a lot of time at Baby became trusted advisers. It was at the club that van Zanten met the person who would become the first to advertise on his site, as well as others who offered useful advice on how to handle investors.

The good counsel paid off. Last year, FortuneCity.com came to V3 looking to advertise. But when the potential advertiser discovered that V3 had 800,000 members (it now has more than 2 million), it decided instead to buy the company -- turning van Zanten into a Baby-enabled millionaire. "If you're an Internet entrepreneur, Baby is the best place in the world to be," he says. "If I were to start another company, I'd come here. In the future, a lot more people will work this way."

At the moment, Baby has 5,500 members, who are all hoping for similar success. At first, members paid between $150 and $300 a year. Today, local trade groups pay Baby a flat fee so that professionals in their fields have access to the space. All creative types are welcome -- everyone from journalists to models to entrepreneurs such as van Zanten. Members, who are mostly between the ages of 25 and 35, come to eat lunch, to do some off-site brainstorming, and to celebrate. People also rent the space for everything from fashion shows to fund-raisers for babies in Africa who have AIDS.

Build the CyberSpace

While the space has clearly appealed to scores of creative professionals in Amsterdam, the premise of the enterprise invites a big question. Given that Eller launched Baby against a backdrop of Internet frenzy a few years back, why didn't he attempt to build a virtual community instead of a physical one? "I thought it would be difficult to build a network that had such a wide range without first establishing a strong physical presence locally so that people could see that it made sense," he says. "I don't think that the people who run most Internet communities get to know their customers very well."

That doesn't mean that Eller lacks an Internet strategy. Indeed, one of his biggest projects right now is WorkBaby, a searchable, Web-based portfolio that will allow members to post samples of their work online. While many members leave paper portfolios on bookshelves in corners of the club, those portfolios do little more than collect dust. Eller hopes that WorkBaby will make it much easier for members to find one another and to make connections.

Eller readily acknowledges that lonely club members could use WorkBaby to seek mates, but that isn't his goal. "Most of the time, the way that we connect with new business partners is old-fashioned, inefficient, and clumsy," he says. "People who are new to the film business spend more than half of their time finding the right models, sets, and lighting designers. They waste time just finding people and getting things to work, when the best way to operate is to have everything lined up long before you start a project."

Eller figures that if the database works, it will be the first place that anyone in Amsterdam goes when launching a new company or starting a new project. "If it works," he says, "it will truly maximize what a network is supposed to be."

Build the Brand

The space may be real, but a conversation with Eller about his many other ideas is like a high-speed trip through fantasyland. On the walls are blueprints for the 18 hotel rooms that he wants to build on the top floor of the building. Eller and some friends, disgusted with the lack of "cool" computers, are building a prototype for a touch-screen machine that members could use to access WorkBaby. He's about to open two furniture stores, one in Amsterdam and another in Berlin, for which he plans to design the furniture himself. And earlier this year, Eller launched "Baby" magazine, complete with ads for MTV and a collection of dotcoms. (He recently hired an editor and plans to publish quarterly.)

Of course, such experiments cost money. Eller claims to have invested about $4 million so far. (He still spends about 10 days a month shooting commercials and videos -- work that pays extremely well.) As Baby continues to grow, the potential uses for that money continue to grow. Like any good brand, Baby seems ripe for global franchising. But since Eller doesn't have the $50 million it would take to launch the club in London, Los Angeles, New York, and a few other select cities, he's on the lookout for outside investors. The brand seems to have developed its own allure: In the past year, Eller has been asked to lend the Baby name to everything from an old resort on the Italian coast that needs freshening up to a series of wacky adventure tours for people who want to meet Madonna or to fly in the back of a MiG fighter jet.