6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

I have, over the last year, been immensely tempted to explain a number of things here, but have mostly kept my keyboard shut as a means to hide certain truths. But today there seems to be little reason for any of that now.

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Nearly eight years ago, I signed up to work — pro bono — with a group of men who started a company almost by complete accident. For me, it started as a nighttime obsession in the middle of 1999, when I got called in to expand and replace what was then little more than a snub at a particularly conspicuous online retailer, an adolescent poke at a company whose below-wholesale pricing quickly got them into trouble with the buying public.

I worked two jobs at once while spending months on the road, running up exorbitant airtime charges absorbed by the folks at my day job (who would let me hear about it, in no uncertain terms) for calls back to my co-conspirators, staying up late over a borrowed laptop until I had to finally get sleep. And then in the morning, back to the paying gig, putting in 16-hour days for months at a stretch. Sent all over the U.S. for Year 2000 remediation jobs, at one point, I found myself working in my underwear in a Decatur, Georgia hotel that had lost its air conditioning in July and August, literally sweating over the code that was the life or death of the site.

That December, they found enough money to pay me full time.

I quit my other job, took a pay cut, lost all my benefits: what the hell, it beat train control by a mile. We were doing everything new, and the Internet was the untamed West. Any idiot with a domain name could make a fortune by reselling the right one, and companies — often, little more than vague ideas — popped up by the thousands. The Internet was suddenly the new television, radio, and newspapers, all rolled up into one, and everybody was gonna get rich. Silicon Valley venture capitalists quickly found themselves with more dollars than companies, and IPO valuations went through the roof.

That was the good news. The bad news was that our competition had deep, deep pockets. One company, backed by Time-Warner's immense purse, had a bankroll of $400 million at one point. We, on the other hand, were operating out of a termite-infested concrete tiltup on Santa Monica, and the landlord wanted us out. On the weekends, you could hear the "lawyer's office" at the end of the hallway busy with the sounds of a porno shoot. Our internet presence amounted to a single PC running Linux, attached to a mostly-working DSL line; the networking gear was a consumer-grade office switch.

By early 2000, we had moved out of the rat-trap office and, as an emergency measure, into a single room in another office park, subleased from a former co-worker who had started out on his own with a different startup. Six people crammed in to the tiny space, cheek by jowl. I telecommuted for the first four months, refusing to work in such cramped conditions.

We leased a big office downstairs in the same building, hired salespeople, some of whom were friends from college, hired more programmers. The race was on. Our roles quickly became settled: I ran the database. Cory designed site appearance and flow, and with Dan, the USC Film school student, was conscripted into writing unbelievable amounts of PHP. The results often made my eyes burn to read it — but they got it done quickly, and in the end, it worked. Corey, the technical genius whose ability to see deeply into problems far exceeds my own, provided architectural and networking advice. Christopher, our networking savant who we spirited away from a friend's failing ISP, worked his way up from waiting tables to maintaining a far-flung fleet of Cisco gear at 99.99% uptime. Graham was the genial Democrat-turned-sales manager, with whom we had many spirited yet friendly political debates over late night takeout. Above him, Kamran, constantly encouraging and motivating everyone, and planning, planning, planning, improvising a business model every single day.

But the core, in my mind, remained the two brothers, Tamim and Omar, sons of a Lebanese immigrant. Tamim was the trader, the perennial negotiator, a Plantronics headset permanently attached, always making deals. He was never a huckster or a con man, but he could spot a fat margin a mile away and know just how to knock down the other guy's asking price. Getting good deals on everything was second nature to him, like breathing. There was an apocryphal story that a sales rep for one of our vendors, a colo, broke down in tears during talks with us because she knew she'd been beaten so soundly. And yet, I've known few men so easygoing, or smiled so readily and genuinely. His undimming inner optimism was to be our north star.

Omar, on the other hand, simply did everything: making sales calls in the early days, handling customer service, managing customer feeds, generally keeping the site humming, and along the way, morphing into the company's memory bank. He became our Argus, the giant (despite his diminutive stature) with a hundred eyes — albeit one with a penchant for manufactured malapropisms that recalled Yogi Berra. Marathon games of Quake ruled the office at 6:00 PM every day, often started with his call of, "Dude -- you down?"

Yet despite the qualities of the team assembled, my doubts about our enterprise persisted; our bigger competitors spent tons of money on promotions, and here we were, a tiny speck in the online sea with a fraction of their traffic and revenue. Once, after a late night session in the new office, I remember talking things over with Graham in the parking lot, telling him, well, it's a fifty-fifty chance the company's even around in three years, but I planned on riding it out until the end. Even if the company failed, I'd learned a lot.

We stayed with open source: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, with PHP for the front end, the classic LAMP stack. Our competition outspent us by orders of magnitude for back end hardware, too, dropping millions on Sun servers running Oracle databases on Netscape webservers — all top-of-the-line stuff, all name brand, all very pricey. At one point, we thought we needed a "real" database, chased an Oracle solution for a year — and rolled back when we realized how bad it was, and how many millions in consultants' fees it would take to make it go, even on top-of-the-line multiprocessor Dell servers stuffed to the brim with memory. We dropped it, went back to MySQL, and stayed there. It worked. It still works.

For the first few years, traffic doubled every December. We kept a close eye on the daily referrals, clickthrus in our parlance; when other sites were blabbing on about "stickiness", we wanted to get people the hell off our site as quickly as possible, and on to our customers'. As a result, we were cash positive almost from the start, financing expansion internally; no venture capitalists behind us also meant no venture capitalists breathing down our necks, demanding answers, dog-and-pony shows, or accounting tricks to pretend we were making money. In March 2000, the NASDAQ hit its highest valuation; shortly thereafter, it went into a two-year-long tailspin. The big guys with their big overhead and big budgets took huge hits to their specious valuations; our traffic continued to grow, and revenue with it. Dot-coms wilted like flowers in a frost, and from their remains we scavenged furniture, office space, hardware, and employees. (I have half-jokingly said that we're the hermit crabs of the dot-com world, now having occupied expensive customized office space from two failed online businesses.)

And still, we kept meeting our numbers.

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And so yesterday was Tamim and Omar's last day, bittersweet but not final, something like, goodbye until the next company, retirement but not really retirement, more like a sabbatical to wait for the next big idea. There is the temptation — which I barely suppressed while writing this — to go all St. Crispin's Day in this space. However rousing the speech, it's a weak analogy; we none of us have wounds to show on rolling up our sleeves, yet we know the elation of victory despite long odds.

Tamim, Omar, even though I know you won't read this, I just wanted to say that this has been the best time of my life, and its greatest adventure. Thank you. Thank you both. And for Kamran (who was secretly responsible for getting me involved in the first place), Dan, Cory, Corey, Steve, Graham, Christopher, and all the others who were also there at the very beginning, thank you too. We couldn't — I couldn't — have done it without you. For your forebearance, good judgment, humor, diligence, and keen insight, I haven't enough kind words. A fellow is blessed, unbelievably blessed, if he gets one such opportunity in a lifetime.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers