Soul Proprietor

It's a crisp spring afternoon in Manhattan. The sun is beaming, and Troy Tyler is bouncing up Broadway. Bouncing is what Tyler does, like a Superball, as if his insistent energy isn't quite contained by a standard-issue mortal frame.

Tyler is 35 years old and of medium build. He dresses in a style that one might call SoHo retro -- typically sporting a gray worker's jacket (a Prada knockoff) and an open-collar dress shirt in a muted color. Black rectangular glasses conspire with his closely cropped hair, oddly, to round and soften what are squarish features.

"Something big is happening this weekend," he confides. He has canceled a long-planned vacation during which he was going to visit his mother. "I can't tell you what it is. But you can probably guess."

Probably, yes. For weeks, and with increasing frequency, Tyler has spoken of overtures made to buy his company, smartRay Network. It has been a frenetic, draining time spent hammering out money, legal, and people issues. "This has been maybe the hardest month of my life," he avers.

Since January 1999, Tyler and his two partners, Andrew Playford, 33, and David S. Kidder, 27, have been forging a company from the ground up. SmartRay now has 25 employees; two rounds of angel financing; four beanbag chairs; and a bare-bones, exposed-duct, one-room office overlooking 23rd Street in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. The corporate dining room is a bistro around the corner. When the three principals want to meet in private, they crush into their building's elevator. Up and down they go, plotting the future.

Tyler, Playford, and Kidder have persevered because they believe that they will succeed. They believe that they must succeed -- for their investors, for their colleagues, and for themselves. "It's not enough for us just to play ball," Tyler says. "We have to put points on the board and win the game." The alternative -- well, any alternative is basically unimaginable to them.

It has been a grinding battle from the start, though. Tyler and his cofounders are fiercely smart and resolute, but they are also first-time entrepreneurs seeking traction in a crowded, chaotic market. Their technology works: SmartRay offers a sort of Web editor for mobile-communication devices, allowing users to select information -- stock prices, baseball scores, weather reports, email -- to be delivered for free to their phones or pagers. But competing technology works too -- if not as well, then probably well enough. SmartRay got an early jump, but competitors with far deeper pockets have now joined the game.

Can smartRay compete in such company? Probably not. Tyler, Playford, and Kidder understand that they have a narrow window. They can sell smartRay to one of the big guys, rewarding their investors and ensuring their product's viability. If that doesn't happen, smartRay probably will persist, but it will be an empty persistence, getting by on VC scraps until the founders call it quits.

In the age of the amazing Technicolor dotcom -- an age of unprecedented venture funding, Internet incubators, and business-plan competitions -- it's easy to forget that genuine entrepreneurship is a cruelly difficult pursuit. We are on the verge of making the process of starting companies so formulaic that we risk taking the soul out of startups -- or at least pretending that such a thing is possible. The saga of Troy Tyler and smartRay reminds us that there's no such thing as "frictionless" entrepreneurship.

In its essence, entrepreneurship in the dotcom age remains what it always has been. That is, entrepreneurship is about passion. Entrepreneurship is about malleability, about adapting to change without compromising your core vision. Entrepreneurship is about staying cool under fire. It is also about being an outsider. Entrepreneurs must think differently -- not just from their competitors but from their partners and employees as well.

Most of all, entrepreneurship is about risk. Entrepreneurs must be willing to make decisions that will threaten their wealth and their reputations. They must be willing, as Tyler is fond of saying, to burn their ships on the shore, as Hernan Cortes and his crew did -- to leave everything behind in dedication to the quest.

So it is that, a week after Tyler strolled buoyantly up Broadway, his "something big" has dissolved. The April 14 implosion of technology stocks has crushed the share price of smartRay's would-be purchaser, and this was rumored to have been planned as an all-stock deal. The term sheet has been ripped up.

Tyler offers a characteristically upbeat interpretation. "It's totally okay. The fact is, it's great." The market shakeout, he says, has helped smartRay identify which of its suitors are truly viable. Better that an acquirer's stock plunge before the ink dries than after.

But the reality is that smartRay must start looking for a buyer once again. And now it has a week less than it had before.