Soul Proprietor

But few saw that in 1998, when Tyler, Playford, and Kidder first began talking about starting a company of their own. The three had been passing through the same business circles for some time: Playford and Kidder had been running mergers, acquisitions, and operations at Think New Ideas Inc., which is owned by Omnicom -- the same company that owns Razorfish, which Tyler had sold Avalanche to in May 1998.

Playford was a Zimbabwean expatriate who had parlayed a chartered accountancy into a management-consulting job in London with what was then Price Waterhouse, later taking a corporate-operations job at Colgate-Palmolive in New York. Playford hated Colgate. "They had all been there for 20 years," he says. "They would spend their time dickering over how to get more of their expenses cleared. But what really did it for me was the day they told me what my pay grade was. It was 14. I said, 'What does that mean?' Well, there were 34 grades, and at 14 you could make between $50,000 and $75,000, but you had to stay in the grade a few years before you would qualify for the top pay step. I just thought, 34 levels, that will take, what -- 20 years, maybe. So that's when I started looking for something different."

Kidder, the youngest of the three, had chosen a very different course. He grew up outside Albany and studied industrial design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His career epiphany came during an internship at Eastman Kodak Co., when a supervisor asked him to rein in his energy: He was taking on too much. Exactly at that moment, Kidder realized that he could never again work for a big company. Sure enough, by the time he graduated in 1995, he had cofounded his first business, a Web-design firm. That shop was acquired, and when it became evident that the new parent company wouldn't be going public anytime soon, Kidder headed to Manhattan in search of bigger fish. He landed at Think New Ideas, where he began working closely with Playford.

Tyler, Playford, and Kidder started their due diligence in the fall of 1998, meeting weekly in one another's apartments. At first, rather than investigating business ideas, they scrutinized one another. "We wanted to get all of the personal issues out on the table," Kidder says, "right down to the nitty-gritty of our personal and financial liabilities." If they built a company, after all, they wouldn't just have to work together -- they would have to depend on one another.

For two hours a week, this three-way interrogation persisted. On paper, their relative skill sets appeared to fit together nicely: Tyler was the generalist with a strong technology bent; Playford was the finance-and-strategy guy; and Kidder was the product-and-marketing whiz. "But," Kidder says, "we really had to judge one another's character and ask, Are these people we trust? Are these people we can scale as managers? At the end of the day, are these people we can assume will do the best thing for the company?"

After two months of meetings, the trio was satisfied. Only then did they search for a business opportunity. At the New York City Investment Fund, Tyler had worked closely with Swedish electronics manufacturer Ericsson, which had established an emerging-technology center in Manhattan. He heard Ericsson's engineers complain that they had great cell-phones and protocols, but no Web-based services to offer. Here, then, was the idea: a mobile-media network, free to wireless users and supported by advertising and sponsorships. Subscribers would register at a central site, indicating what kind of information they wanted and when. SmartRay would then deliver that data to subscribers' mobile devices through partnerships with information suppliers. At the bottom of each text-based message would be room for paid ads, the revenue from which smartRay would share with its suppliers.

The business model wasn't finalized, but in January 1999, one after another, Playford, Kidder, and then Tyler quit their jobs. They had no income to look forward to; in fact, they would not draw salaries for eight months. By then, Tyler would have to cash out his BCG savings plan and run up his credit cards. Kidder would move to a much smaller apartment and "eat a lot of soup." But if SmartRay were ever to happen, it would require round-the-clock attention -- now. It was time, in other words, to burn the boats.

The three men wrote a business plan, then a second, and they started shopping for money. Almost immediately, they found the going rough. "We had a demo and a business plan," Playford recalls. "But that's all we had, really. We didn't have a company. We didn't have an infrastructure. We didn't have space or chairs or employees."

They learned, ultimately, that such simple considerations were crucial: They were markers of permanence -- and of founders' commitment. As it was, smartRay went nowhere. "There were lots of times when we thought that a deal was in the bag," Playford says. "There would be a meeting, and then a meeting, and then a meeting -- and then no more meetings. Until finally, we couldn't even get the person on the phone anymore."