Relaunch!

Rob Fulop

Founder and President
Perchance Inc.
San Francisco, California

No one wants to relaunch a company. You want it to work the first time. But that doesn't always happen. So if you're starting up a technology-based company, make sure that your core technology has multiple uses. That's something that I didn't understand clearly when I cofounded PF.Magic Inc., a multimedia-entertainment company, in the early 1990s. We had sunk our money and our time into creating a product for AT&T -- a hardware-software system that allowed kids to play games like Street Fighter over a phone line with their pals. (Think pre-Internet.) But, at the eleventh hour, AT&T pulled out of all multimedia projects, which left us high and dry.

With little left to lose, we created a virtual pet that would live on a computer screen and would behave just like the real thing. This was 1995, three years before anyone would ever see a Tamagotchi. Our target market? Eight-year-old girls. Over about a year, our office cubicles (once decorated with "Terminator" posters) transformed into cute, flower-filled shrines to My Little Pony. Our relaunch required a shift in our mentality: Good-bye guns, Hello Kitty. The result? Dogz, our first product, became a surprise hit of the 1995 Christmas season. We sold half a million retail products, without any advertising.

Rob Fulop (rob@robfulop.com), a former professional poker player, has been designing and developing interactive-entertainment applications for 20 years. Perchance Inc. is an Internet-entertainment company that is developing a series of branded "online-flirting" environments, which includes a Web site that is expected to launch in the fall of 2000 (www.princecharmings.com). Fulop cofounded PF.Magic Inc. in 1994, which was acquired by the Learning Co. in 1998.

Kent Amos

Founder and President
Urban Family Institute
Washington, DC

How do you know if it's time for a major life makeover? You have to read the signs. But that idea means different things to different people. For me, the signs became crystal clear about 10 years ago: A series of tragedies made me wake up and realize that I had to do something to improve the lives of children.

At the time, I was an executive at Xerox. My wife and I had already been taking kids into our home for many years. We had a simple policy in our house: Any child could bring home any other child at any time for any reason. We'd feed those children, clothe them, house them -- give them whatever they needed. And children kept coming through our door, the numbers growing every year. Dozens and dozens of our kids went on to college, and several of them earned master's degrees.

But some of them didn't fare so well. Some went to jail. Some were killed. Some killed themselves. I had to recognize that, no matter how much we invested in those kids, we were not immune to feeling the pain of violence; we still buried children. That was a turning point for me. I was forced to see that there were bigger issues in the world than what my wife and I could fix -- that our society's routine neglect of children, on all levels, wreaks enormous damage.

There I was, a learned, successful adult. I thought, If not me, then who? So, in 1988, I quit my job at Xerox and, about three years later, started the Urban Family Institute in my basement, as a nonprofit organization aimed at changing the lives of children. My point is that life will provide you with signs. But you have to be willing to see those signs and to follow whatever path they take you on. And whatever path you follow will lead you to your happiness.

Kent Amos and his wife, Carmen, took into their home more than 87 teenagers before he founded the Urban Family Institute in 1991. Begun as an after-school effort for children, the nonprofit organization today includes 29 Kids Houses in more than 20 cities across the country, where local adults volunteer for such activities as helping youths with their homework and sharing family-style meals with them. Amos's latest initiative, the Urban Family University, is a curriculum-based model for adult development in a dozen public-housing sites nationwide.