How to Stay on the Move ... When the World Is Slowing Down

If Owen can quash the rumors and assuage the worries, AvantGo's employees can focus on the company's objectives: Support all of the new handheld computers being introduced, run pilot programs for prospective customers, and double revenue from $16.3 million last year to just less than $33 million in 2001. But it's important not to ignore the challenges or gloss over the problems, Owen says. "The number-one question that people ask me is how we're doing as a company, and if I were to tell them, 'Wow, we're landing men on the moon. We're going to be the first $10-trillion-cap company,' people would think that I was totally delusional. You have to be candid and honest."

Both Owen and Felix Lin, AvantGo's cofounder and vice chairman, also take care to convey to employees that fretting over the business environment or tracking the decline of other tech companies isn't the most productive use of time. "The biggest message that I try to get people to internalize is to make things happen here, not to watch things happen or to ask people what happened," says Lin, 37. "We think that we're solving a problem that no one else is solving." Owen backs up Lin: "You've got to remind people that we're not victims of circumstance. Our destinies are in our own hands."

Lin, Owen, and other AvantGo executives speak about their corporate goal of becoming a software heavyweight in the universe of mobile computing. They don't seem overly occupied with the bankruptcy of the week. And they benchmark themselves against such companies as Dell, Microsoft, and Oracle, rather than startups in their own weight class -- many of which didn't manage to go public and are now not only scrambling to find customers but also hunting for additional funding.

"I tell a lot of stories about the early days of Dell, when it was 3,000 employees and not 40,000," Owen says. "We also have guys at AvantGo who were at Oracle in the early days. What we're trying to do isn't unusually difficult, and it isn't unusually easy. This is what every company faces."

Fly High After a Crash

Walking the halls of the Washington Convention Center, I can't help but notice the satiny, orange-and-black Iridium banners that hang overhead. Satellite 2001, one of the satellite industry's largest conferences, has descended on the nation's capital for the week, and inside the exhibition hall, Iridium Satellite LLC, which I had assumed was defunct, occupies a large booth. On display are phones, antennas, and pagers that work with the 66-satellite network, along with stacks of glossy brochures.

For Jerry Farrell, the 65-year-old cofounder and CEO of AssureSat Inc., Iridium is the failure that won't go away. When I mention the booth and the banners to Farrell, sitting in his hotel suite across the street from the convention center, he replies with a frown, "All they did was poison the market." While Motorola shut down its Iridium venture last year for lack of customer interest (after spending more than $5 billion to develop it), Farrell tells me that a new group of backers has jump-started Iridium after buying it for just $25 million.

Farrell isn't exactly thrilled that Iridium is hanging in there. "It reminds investors about the $15 billion they spent on the low-earth-orbit networks like Iridium, Globalstar, ICO Global Communications, and Orbcomm," he says. "That's money they'll never see again." Farrell had nothing to do with Iridium; if anything, in his prior job as president of Hughes Electronics Corp., operator of the world's largest private fleet of satellites, he was one of its earliest skeptics. But now, as Farrell pounds the pavement to raise the $540 million he needs to get AssureSat off the ground, Iridium -- the industry's highest-profile flameout -- has everything to do with him.

AssureSat proposes to be "the Hertz Rent A Car of the satellite industry," as Farrell explains it. A satellite operator can buy insurance to guard against the possibility of a launchpad explosion or a 22,300-mile-high malfunction. But while an insurance check is nice, it doesn't help the satellite operator serve its customers -- which include TV networks, Internet-service providers, and newspapers. Until a replacement can be built and launched, operators who pay a monthly fee for coverage would get to use one of AssureSat's three satellites in the interim. By having three large, versatile satellites that would be able to play the role of utility infielder, AssureSat hopes to fill in for nearly any other kind of satellite.

Running a fleet of substitute satellites isn't an idea that anyone has pursued before, but Farrell says that with about 200 geostationary satellites currently in orbit (that number doesn't include the 100 or so low-earth-orbit satellites, or LEOs, launched by companies such as Iridium and Globalstar), AssureSat will find a reliable source of revenue among their mishaps and malfunctions.