Soul Proprietor

"It was hilarious," Andres continues. "But the irony was that Troy was the one who really belonged at Penn. On a purely intellectual level, he was way ahead of us. He still is."

He signed on after graduation with Salomon Brothers, working in its corporate-finance department -- a plum job that satisfied his craving, some friends say, for traditionally defined attainment and respect. But he quickly grew disenchanted. So he left the surety of Salomon and, to the horror of some friends, found line work at Toyota's auto-assembly plant in Fremont, California. He did so, he says, "because I thought that was the most challenging thing that I could possibly do at that point." He is partly "a change junkie, wanting nothing more than really great career challenges as a kind of personal test. And it was totally a Viking boat burning, because the only way that I was going to get out of there alive was to conquer that experience -- to be king."

In two years, the kid from Wall Street learned nearly every job on the factory floor and was promoted twice -- ultimately to foreman in charge of 20 workers. Then, abruptly, he shifted gears once more, enrolling in Harvard Business School. When he left Toyota, his colleagues gave him a laptop case that he still carries today.

He entered Harvard determined to make his mark there. "I viewed myself as the guy with the lifesaver, the one student whom the professor could count on to challenge the discussion. I was the one who was willing to pierce and divide, to spin the cube a different way, to take an indefensible position."

That is, in fact, how some of his former teachers remember him five years later. "He was a great student," says Clayton Christensen, a well-known professor of operations management at HBS. "I even remember where he sat in class -- center section, third row up, on the right aisle. He sticks in my mind because he had a much better sense than the average student of what management meant."

Tyler narrowly missed graduating with top honors -- a "failure" that he and others say gnawed at him. Still, in 1995, after interning there the previous summer, he won a position at Boston Consulting Group, at the time perhaps the most competitive of the management-consulting firms. Once again, he immediately felt as if he was in the wrong place. "Troy wanted to make things happen," says Thilo Semmelbauer, then a BCG colleague and now president of WeightWatchers.com. Tyler grew frustrated with being a facilitator, rather than a catalyst for change. And he was rankled by the firm's inability to see the promise that he saw in the Internet. BCB barred its employees from installing Web browsers and email applications on their computers. Tyler circumvented the stricture by running a line to the jack in the office lobby reserved for visitors' outside phone calls.

It wasn't long before Tyler sought out headhunters in the high-tech field. He wanted to explore the Internet. He left BCG to resuscitate Avalanche, a Web-development firm with top talent but with a poor business sensibility, finally engineering its sale to Razorfish, the big Internet media agency. He landed next at the New York City Investment Fund, financier Henry Kravis's community-development operation, where he analyzed technology opportunities.

But soon "it became so obvious that what Troy was good at was being an entrepreneur," says Katherine Wylde, the fund's director. "His passion was in pursuing all possibilities. He wasn't willing to dismiss any idea." Tyler was itchy. The moment was at hand. He would have to start his own company.

Makings of a Strategy

"Strategy is all about commitment," says Tyler. "If what you're doing isn't irrevocable, then you don't have a strategy -- because anyone can do it. That's why burning the boats is so important. I've always wanted to treat life like I was an invading army and there was no turning back.

"Have you ever seen the movie with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino called Heat?" he continues. "De Niro is the bad guy, and Pacino is the good guy. And at one point, De Niro says to Pacino something like, 'One of the things that lets me do what I do is, there's nothing in my life that I won't walk out on in a matter of seconds. Nothing. So if you're going to chase me, and if there's something in your life that you're not willing to walk out on in a few seconds, you're going to lose.' That's what it's like to be an entrepreneur."

Wireless Internet is hot. It is attracting venture capital and new entrants the way that online retailing did two years ago. There is enormous market potential in wireless technology. Global cell-phone subscriptions are growing at 35% a year, and in the United States, which lags behind much of Europe and Asia, the rate is even higher. The volume of Web transactions that take place on wireless devices will likely grow faster as data traffic overtakes voice traffic.