In a short stretch of time, from the mid 90s to the early 2000s, a relatively small group of people started playing around with this thing called the World Wide Web. They had the audacity to think they just might change the world. This project introduces you to the big players from those hallowed days, and let them tell you what it was like and how you should have been there.
All right, welcome to episode zero before the beginning. Today, we're gonna have a conversation with Bill Blum. ritesh. Good to see you, sir.
Hey, Kyle. How's it going, man? Happy Friday. Happy Friday. 20 2013. This is gonna go perfectly then. Exactly.
Hey, first, before we get started, what kind of hair product you're using these days? Some of that?
I know. It's cool. Don't wash it. All right. So
bring bill on, we're gonna bring him on. But while he can't defend himself, anything you would like folks to know about Bill blue bill, Blue Man,
gentlemen, a scholar, a legend, a guitar player, writer. Right now doing lots of haikus. I think on everything related to Donald Trump in the DRC in the White House. So Gosh, he started when I think 95 and no 97. Maybe he ran the team. I mean, you know, I think the big projects were merits travel. I remember him going to St. Louis quite a lot. Where is it?
I just found the merits. pitch deck. deck. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, well, let's bring him on. Bill bloom,
Bill bloom,
the one the man the legend. So do me a favor. Why don't you because you know, we barely know who you are. So why don't you introduce yourself and just, you know, say, say what you're up to these days, and then we'll kind of dive in.
We can't hear you though. You're on mute. Oh, there we go. Much better.
Is this the spinal tap audition?
You go to 11? Yes.
Oh, what was the question caught? What What have I been up to
just just introduce yourself? What do you do?
I am bill Blum. I was there when agency was booming. I think it was 98. Actually, it's hard to remember back.
87 bill when you find my memory serves me right?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was. It was in the late 90s. For sure.
What do you do today? What's your
market research company that has a mobile app that helps companies get market sentiment really fast. We work with packaging, we work with Citibank, we work with restaurants like McDonald's if that's a restaurant, and a lot of CPG brands. So, you know, Kyle and ritesh we always talk about all the things I learned that agency are being brought forward. Obviously, the technology's changed, but I wouldn't be running my own technology company, if not for agency and subsequent, you know, some skills I picked up along the way.
Well, that's cool. why don't why don't we dig in there? Why don't we? You know, give us your your your.com origin story, like I know, a part of it. started@agency.com like what were you doing before that? You know what got you to talk about those earliest days, the you know, what made you the superhero you are today?
Yeah, and the other thing is how the hell did he find us?
Yeah, exactly.
That is the whole story is just incredible. Actually. I I was a music guy had a recording studio. While I while I had the recording studio, I started working on sound and music for CD ROMs I didn't know what they were and started to work with some CD ROM companies. And this was this like late 80s, early 90s. It was mid to early 90s 92 to 95 I had my music business, but I was doing music for CD ROMs so you know, for me the.com bubble started there because they said, Oh, I can do one of these CD ROM I don't know what that is, but no one in the room does. So I did one about a world made out of junk. It was an animated adventure game and it got bought by Time Warner interactive, like right out of the gate. And then I worked on that and it's a place that was making that was lorado stanovich
Really?
Yeah, it was called learn technologies but he wasn't the rod stanovich of agency. He was Lauren stanovich of LTI. He was like the senior producer on my project. We fought a lot because he did. He knew somewhat what he was doing. I knew nothing. Three quarters of the way through this project, and it made Disney sees it and says says In fact, a mutual friend of ours now, Jeff Selzer, and he got this job at Disney. So he sees my CD ROM, he pulls me out at the end of the project, and I go to Disney. Okay, and I make Aladdin's bath quest $5 million CD ROM with Robin Williams. Now, my manager I was a consultant was a guy named Leonard Mlodinow off you following me? Leonard was Heather Ballade. No,
I'm not following you. Time out! So far, just to catch you up. So wild partitioner nodding so so Heather was a big player in agency.com. As was Laura, which will become clear, but wow. So okay, I actually yeah, connecting all these dots. It's really
a small world of CD ROM and internet kind of merging. Yeah, I'm working for Leonard. I'm making this big project, Leonard leaves, and, you know, middle of the project. So I fully take it over. I mean, 150 people, 100 of them were Disney animators. I didn't know how to make animation. You know, we were digitizing their animation. We did a beautiful job. It was 3d. I didn't know how to make 3d. But since I went through agency comm where I didn't know nothing. When I started and had to learn every day. These were the skills right? Yeah. So Leonard starts inviting me over to his house in near Glendale, California. And I knew his wife, Heather mlodinow off, right. Yeah. And just let her its wife, I knew the kids. I knew the family. We went on a retreat with Disney once. So then I'm finished with Disney. I was on a contract doing and I was out there. And I come home, I have no idea what I'm gonna do. I was with Disney for two years, I was just totally focused. And Leonard says, Well, you know, my wife's at this place. And, you know,
she said she would hire you. Because she saw me pretty much the hiring process. The biggest project I did in the world was that Disney project, it was had more moving parts than ever. So they knew I could do shit, not
what was your role in that project? Were you project manager,
I created it. Now. I work my partner from my previous project, who's also a great story because he went from furniture design to Lucas Films, because of that project. Great, a great artist. And so we design the Aladdin world. We were given, like, interactive, you know, all the people we needed to make this. And the skill that I had at agency and brought forward was, I could take a team of super talented cats, agile cats running around, and I can hurt them.
Yeah, yeah. That So talk about that. So so in the in those very early days of agency, I think that's one of the hallmarks and I think I even wrote it in the description of the show, is nobody had a degree in this right. Nobody knew what interactive design was, or certainly what web design was. So it it tended to be curious people who were flexible who could do ship was thrown.
Also fearless.
Yeah.
That said, we had no fear. We'd go Yeah, we can figure that out.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So talk about like, what was your experience? You know, the, like, what do you remember most from the earliest days of agency? Like, what what was the what's the thing that stands out from you? For those
who don't know, I want to know how you arrived. Like you just showed up and said I want to work here. Did you
know Heather had to put me through the the very disciplined hiring process. Show off and I met I forget his name. But he was the head of project management before Heather. Yeah. And he had left soon after a nice guy. So I came in Jonathan tan, no. And he's on Facebook with me. I'm just blind. And and so I show up. He says Heather said it she worked, you know with you at Disney. And that's good enough, you know, here's the paperwork. And fill this out. And oh, I know you started two weeks, right? So I'm starting in two weeks. This is a great agency story, which I forgot. I started two weeks and I get a call. I wasn't Eric porras. But it was someone in that area where I worked. Like a week before I start, can you come up to Unilever with us? Well, why we want you to run the meeting.
We don't have started yet.
It's a week before I started, and we want you to run the meeting. And with ginger Scott ski, Jerry bavaro. And so Jerry, Jerry's running? Yeah, we need a project manager, we hear you're coming on, we don't have one. I'm like, all right. up to you to leave with this small team of people from the Unilever team at agency and these suits. And I haven't seen anything, I show up at the office that I meet these people and I go up to Unilever. And they say this is our project managers gonna run the meeting. Yeah.
You know, it's amazing bill is like, because we've, we've been talking about some of these things on the Facebook group, and they're very similar stories. And I think, I think maybe one of the hallmarks if you survived that agency.com. You you probably had to survive a moment like that, right? Where you're just like, Well, what do you mean, I'm, I have to salvage we heard from Drew tomiko. Last night on Facebook, he's like, You threw me into the dust project. And they hated us, because we hadn't delivered in a year. And I had to salvage it. It was like my first day.
So and he was at that meeting, he was really funny with the sales guy. I think
I drew was our Biz Dev. Yeah, yeah. That's right.
So if you talk to him again, please thank him for
it. Now. You're an agency. Right? That's it. You've joined your full time.
I was a little astonished. You know, and, and I didn't do very well at the meeting. I mean, I don't think I pulled it together. But I didn't know what they were talking about. So then I came to agency and I was a senior project manager under Heather for a while. And I had Unilever, I had Colgate I had Food Network. So I would say if we're going to talk about interest, there's a bunch of interesting projects. Food Network was, was interesting in that we were putting up like 500 recipe videos. In those days video was crazy. You didn't see it.
And this was 98.
Yeah, 9899 they were you were
there at some part. You know, you came in during this. I know, because Mitch got the problem here. So here's the thing, they were gonna stream 500 videos and have this beautiful site, which Oracle, we were talking at the highest levels of Oracle up the chain? How do we get all this video streaming? Right? And it was hard because no one knew about. So the punch, there is a punch line to every agency story. So we're doing all these videos, Mitch Golden's pulling his hair out. And there was a guy in New Jersey who I forget, but it was very helpful. And we were we were working with Oracle, we're trying to get the videos flowing. And as we're moving into this and still having problems they tell us, you know, it's November 2 Food Network is going to do a lot of advertising for Thanksgiving. Our our traffic's probably going to go up 20 fold in the next two weeks. And so that night I go home and on my decamp bus to to home with ritesh knows well, it says food network.com on the side and I'm just like this thing is going to crash and burn
Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna crash and burn from the from the from the traffic forget.
Yeah, so that you know, that was typical. It was like, everything was converging my bus home had my project on it, you know, we were in time. So
yeah, there was a similar the the first project we did as a company was the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit site. And we kept saying to the IT guys at time in case this is going to crash your server, and then like, Nah, we got plenty of bandwidth and then we put like a total of two minutes of videos of supermodels and sure enough
Less every adolescent boy in the in the US logged on all at once. And us Yeah,
yeah. Right. So talk to me about the, like your time at agency calm if like, we can talk about specific projects in a second, but just talk about like, you know, what are the highlights? What are the like, like, either like, you know, what were the people interactions that you remember? Or what are what were some of the things that that stick in your mind about? Just your experience working? You know, in that time?
Yeah. Well, it was the most incredible culture. And it was the most in densely populated talented people. Yeah, for the most part, were at the beginning of their career. I mean, it's easy to look back now. And all the people have done so many great things, or so many people who
most everyone at agency has gone on to do amazing things, Kyle Kyle still doing.
It's really sad.
Though, I mean, the culture fostered some amazing, you know, it was that fearless, go try it, I think, what was your favorite saying call, you know, figure out what sucks? And don't do it? Right? Well, that was the
original corporate model. There was some seriousness in that right, which was, like, what I knew was that nobody knew how to do this. I mean, in the very early days, right? And but but like, I think I feel like even in this whole five year period, from kinda like 95, to the 2000s. Like, we were all figuring it out. So to figure out what sucks don't do that is you just have to be good enough to, to be at not horrible. And you were better than most people. Right. And so, so I don't know, I guess that there's a maybe a humbleness that you have, you had to come into that environment with because you couldn't come in acting like you knew everything. Right. So I think it kind of attracted people that were kind of curious and driven. But then yeah, that they had to have some skills that were, you know, came from a lot of different things. Like I would say, you know, someone who had a filmmaking background was every bit as interesting of someone you know, who had an accounting background as someone who had a writing background, like, it almost didn't matter where they what the origin of their skills was, but they had to be willing to sort of incorporate lots of different things.
Yeah, well, I just gotta say, I was I keep up with a bunch of people. And, you know, just what popped in my mind. There was a guy, Frank Sulia, Frank Johnson, Frank, Sulia Johnson. And, you know, he joined my team, right? And I said, Okay, what are you? He says, I'm an information. I called me an information architect. What have you done before? I'm an architectural draftsman.
I mean, you put rooms together, right. And, and fray.
I talked to a few people like Ronnie Kim, who really, you know, kind of knew her stuff, at least compared to most of us. Yeah, there was this thing called information architecture. And I think she sat down with a once and said, okay, you draw buildings, and we draw our pages. And Frank was like, I'm good. Yeah. Yeah, the information architects were just one example of, Oh, my God, they came from every What did you do before this fashion? You know, it was and but everyone was ready to teach and learn and allow us to fall and break. And thankfully, the clients had no idea what we were doing at first. So they thought this was all. All the way it should be also, until you know what, as the client started to catch up and scored, we had the mature and and that was that was actually more painful than the prior. Yeah, that
transition was interesting. Yeah. You know, that was one of the lessons that I learned back then was I would go into client meetings sort of deferential, like, what do you want to do, and very quickly learned, they wanted us to come in and tell them what to do write the thing they wanted us to lead. And that was something that took me a while to get my head around. It's like, Oh, we actually do no more like, you know, especially once we were past the first three sites where we literally didn't know what we were doing. We started to know enough that we actually did know more and be out walk into a meeting. And I think that was another thing that, you know, maybe just, you know, hubris or, or fearlessness as ritesh puts it, you know, we were always willing to walk in, it didn't matter if it was the chairman of MetLife or, you know, the head of this company or that were like, Well, here's what's going on. And, you know, here's what we believe. And I you know, I think ultimately that served as well.
You know, it was interesting, it also is I think it was Julia groves in ba who said you we will magicians. She didn't know how we did what we did. But the result was just amazing. So she just called her magicians if I remember correctly. It's interesting. Yeah.
Talk talking about like, just how the level of access we got. And ritesh I think you were there. This was to that 1999. We were called in we were Colgate was paying us. I don't want to say the number millions of dollars. It was large for their corporate site. Yeah. Right. And it was like the the investor part was, like $500,000 for the investor. But we had to meet with the teams and very high up people. It would, we met three times with the CEO of Colgate, which was at the time a $20 billion company, his his senior VPS and executive VPS of all the different sections of the website were in his boardroom. And I think it was me and Stacy sclerotic and Arthur Surya finished fitting with Reuben marks the big time fortune 100 company, and the head of each department. So we could explain how we're what we're doing for each of the web. The sessions.
Crazy. How did you fare? Did you? Did you do better in that meeting than your first meeting?
Yeah, I was there. I was there at least a year by then. And maybe two? Well, the incredible part of it was there was some battles going on between the groups and us, like about the quality that this and our thing was, you're not delivering, you're not telling us what to do. So we made our case in front of him. And I remember at least the first two meetings, he was scolding his team. He was saying, they're making sense. And you're not. Now on a very practical level, you know, not he didn't know anything about the internet. But I think what he saw was so much politics, you know, so much power politics of building a website, right politics of who's going to have the bigger section with the most bells and whistles, the the investor services or the brands, right, that guy, and we're sitting there going, we don't, you know, just tell us what to do,
yet. You know, that's retest it, you and I've talked about this a lot, that that the very least we would come in, and we would say, okay, based on your goals, what you're telling us is your website should do this. And then what we've learned is, in order for the website to do that division, a has to have a conversation with division B. And very often, the response would be like, well, they haven't talked in 15 years, that's never gonna happen. Like, we were very often in the middle of these big structural things that were just, you know, crazy.
What's that for? ritesh? I think I was retest short or you Oh, ritesh is nodding. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah,
yeah. Yeah. I remember, you know, I think, well. No,
we're losing ritesh. No, no. Yeah. No, no, we're losing you from a bandwidth perspective.
Oh, I'll pick it up. Yeah,
you take it from there. Yeah,
it that's where we started to go into like, the grown up waters. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, in our own little plate pens, you know, US 2030s and early 40s. People were inventing the world. Yeah. And, and then we matured, right, then it matured up like, okay, the C suite or high ups want to see this. And all of a sudden, we're in a room with the suits. And that's where it got a little wonky sometimes. Yeah.
So talk to me about that. Let's, let's, let's switch gears. So we were doing a lot of stuff back then that, you know, was super innovative, which if you look at it today, you're like, well, that's not very innovative. Like, that's just how we do it. Right? Or, you know, like you said, we were in rooms, we didn't necessarily have the business to be in. Can you think of like a project or, you know, something you did there that you felt like, you know, holy crap, I can't believe we pulled that off or, you know, like, just talk to me about something that you feel kind of represents. Yeah, you know, sort of the the the outsized, I don't know, stuff we were up to, you know, in spite of not really knowing what We were doing it and it was amazing. I'm gonna give you three or maybe pontificate.
One of them I think, but yeah, well,
with this show, it's like, you know, every episode is gonna be, it's gonna be too. There's too much to talk about.
I'll concisely tell you some amazing snack. All right. So early on one of my first projects with Unilever, where I was a senior project manager working with that team. We did these things, well, brisk mates, which were animated, we made the animations, they were animated little things that were going to come on to the websites, and they were kind of they look like art crumb. You know, they look like really funky, interesting little animations that were digital commercials. 20 seconds, 15 seconds for brisk. And we worked with some third party team and made them that was pretty cool. We were in
those we're gonna they were gonna walk on to like third party websites, right? It wasn't on the brisk site. Those were Oh, yeah,
yeah, they were gonna kind of troll these different websites. Yeah, they were advertising for brisk. And we made animation that streamed on on the web, which was super fun. I I just come from Disney. So yeah, I got that. Yeah. Sirius radio. Oh,
okay. That's a good one. Yeah, we there's, there's lots of stories there. So yeah, what do you what's the what's the big thing you remember from that one?
Well, first of all, it was super cool. Like, we are going to fly satellites around the world so that you can listen to the same station across, you know, their country. Yeah. So I was excited about that. I go up and I meet David Margolis, the CEO, right. He's, I get invited up because the internet and I go up there office and and I go up, there was Midtown and some like high rise, you know. And I go into their office, it's totally remade, and in the lobby, is this big glass booth with the people flying the satellites. I mean, there's people with headphones on going keep, I don't think they're flying them, they have to make sure they stay. So I'm thinking this is pretty cool. And then there's all these music and, you know, like stations where people are recording their stuff. And what was interesting, besides just an amazing company, is that it started to become e commerce. Yeah, we were, we built subscription into the site, and we were getting them to a cart. And that was the first time I did anything close to e commerce. That's cool.
Well wait before you move on to the next one. You've got you always tell a really good story about how we started with Cirrus so. So till the beginning of that story, because it was a remarkable project, but it's almost more remarkable how it started.
Yeah, usual story. agency.com serendipity, you know, I think nobody was around. And Liz calls from the front desk and says, and we just moved, we moved to 20 exchange, right? We're up on the 15th floor or whatever. And, hey, there's a guy here who wants to hire us? I'm like, Are you nuts? Nobody come to a building. You know, what? I don't meet this guy. And that's him. You know, my goal is so cuz nobody else was around or something I can't remember now. And then I remember telling Aaron and Chan, the sky came in, he wants to hire us and he wants to put satellites in the air and dream radio, radio, and I'm like, he's gonna charge for it. But it's free. I just don't understand the model. I don't know how this is gonna work, and why people would pay for this. And chances with me and it goes away. I guess you'd made some phone calls. He came back call the guy we've got to get this job. Finally, it called a couple of banker friends and say, ally, you met David then yeah, we given him some money to launch the satellite. So Chad was like, buddy, oh, this is serious. We should call this guy back and get this work. And you know, the, I think, who's a David Boardman check or Chris Stetson said you want to do what what did you promise them because I was notorious.
I don't remember that.
Like, you're going to scream radio, how are you going to stream radio on to IE, to like Netscape? And and how's it gonna work? Like on the PCs, you know, so there's all these questions. And we built including
sorry, including the branding or branding.
You know, funny I think finally ran ran that that whole workshop where the guy's wife used to come in to the office with the dog every day to
remember that he hated the dog. He was hated the dog thought it was stupid, but his wife loved it.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
That was my way. Yeah. Your wife, your wife loves it. Yeah,
yeah, we've had a couple of those. I remember, you know, a designer too, that got you know, canned because someone was like, you know, the VP doesn't like green, say, Oh,
well, I'm going to tell a little mini one. And the third one you're going to tell more about, Okay, a little bitty one was on merits. They, they paid us at first, like $200,000 for they want us to create their e logo, you know, they're very established company. And so Ethan bloom and Strauss and Mitch was, as they Mitch Grossman, right, huh. Where did like hundreds of logos consume a lot of money, you could do a lot of logos. And, and the client flew into town. And the client started doing this a while back, whenever they sort of mentioned Ethan, you'd look at all the logos, and they'd be talking about the chakras and the essence of the logo and the Gestalt, and this
we're talking about
was way out there. And every time they would turn to me, and they'd go. So that was that. And the third one that you should talk about, because I, I was on the project, but the technology, the Gucci site, that which was something HTML, I forget, where you could drag around the product was amazing. It was all flash This was in Flash was just coming out. And I remember cuz, you know, the creatives had some wacky ideas. And then these two youngsters, there's a Dutch fella folkert.
Jason, right. Yeah, they go up to two, I think it was Nick lane, or Penny or somebody and say, This is a new thing. Flash, it's gonna be amazing. We're gonna go away and do something. And people were like, Oh, here we go. Right. And off, they went, and they came back with this. You can move stuff around on the screen, you could like hold it and move it this way. And you could make it go up and down. And you could stream it back and forth. And we just all went, Whoa, this is cool. And that's the first flash site we made was on Gucci, Gucci.
A little context. I mean, you know, CSS sites today with with, with all their animation, um, you know, the first, you know, sites that we built in HTML, like the earliest ones we did in 9495. The the center tag for HTML didn't even exist yet. Right? So we had to invent little images to be able to. So it was you know, those those very early days leading up to that that flash thing was everything was fairly static. Like, I think there might have been animated GIFs at some point in there, so you could have a wiggly logo. But that was about it. Yeah, it was very, very rudimentary stuff. So yeah. Talk about the the beginning of the the Gucci project to the point where all the the creatives were distracted. Remember that day? Oh, yeah. I
don't know if you remember this bill. But I think Aaron came round one day looking for somebody and there was like, nobody around in creative light. And he said, Where is everybody? And like, Tom Ford's here briefing us on what was a small team words, but very quickly that Tom Ford was in the building. And the creative department just disappeared into the meeting room?
No, I missed that.
Crazy time
to think about it, Tom Ford comes up. He came to our building the top people, David Margolis. Five times that web teams don't sit with the CEOs anymore.
I'm amazing. We had with the CIO of Colgate. We went up because we were we were trying to convince them that a content management system would be a good thing to do. Yeah, we're up to around 200,000 pages or something crazy. And he wasn't listening. So somebody says, Hey, you need to go up there. It was me and Chris Stetson who went up there in the end. Yeah. I was literally when I got out of the camera, said Chris. We're gonna go meet the Chief Information Officer of Colgate who pioneered SAP globally But why he needs to put a content management system in?
Question, did they put a content management system?
Yeah. Yeah, the whole vignette thing came around. Yeah.
Right. But also Food Network. Yeah.
Cuz like Lawrence Lawrence and who was it? Tom and Lawrence were the vignette gurus, right. We had bought the chair can. And some of the guys in Boston were all interwoven guys. But most of our stuff was all vignette. Because, you know, we were the Java j to E shop, whereby Boston was very Microsoft. And it was fascinating to see that going on. Politics. It's all about internally.
It was tribes when I when I was a Tim came on with Flexi texture. Yeah, remember that we like
where you go. I just found like, we had our little, little graphic graphics or channels. At the bottom. Found a bunch of old stuff. So crazy stuff,
but it is It was amazing. I mean, look, you know, when you when Esther and Kay are meeting with the CEO of British Airways, yeah. You know, in 1999. And he says to them, you know, I want 30% of my sales online. What? Then he come back and Ralph's even goes, You want me to do what? I don't know how to access that thing. And you want to display fares and tickets? What are you nuts?
Yeah, that was one of the one of the things where you know it. You know, there's there's politics in big corporations. And that's one where it was like those computer systems did not talk and it was like, the in the data was all incompatible. And it was a mess. And yeah, that was that was some. That was some pretty deep digging. That was
IBM 3090. like seven floors under Heathrow Airport. Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And there was something about it not being real time, it was like, we were we were like, well, it needs to update in real time. They're like, well, it only updates every 24 hours. That's not gonna work. Like how we do. They're like, well, that's not our problem. Like, just totally.
I always loved that. I loved that, you know, we get in these situations, and the client couldn't do shit. Now they blame it on us. All right, our systems will not do that. Yeah, but we want you to do it.
I'll tell you. When this was super early on, we had Columbia house records, like you may not know them, they were, you know, for a penny, you could get 12 albums. I was
a subscription guy.
Yeah. So we're This is very early in agency days. So we we get hired by them, we build this really cool interface, like, here's how you can, you know, find records and listen to music and do all this, like, we've designed it all, you know, visually and, you know, information architecture. And then the project stagnated because the IT group wouldn't give us access to the database. And so months were ticking by and all of a sudden, the client goes, you know, we're about to fire you. So they called an all hands, you know, come to Jesus meeting. And we're sitting in this office, and we're saying, well, you want the site to be e commerce. Basically, we didn't they didn't have that term at the time. But it can't do that. And at one point, the the CTO stood up and slammed his fist on the table. He goes, do you mean to tell me that if you don't have access to our database, that site can't do that? And we're like, yes, that's exactly what we're telling you. Check this out and fired us and then ultimately gave someone access to the database. But yeah, those are the days.
I have a quick idea for a guest host. I don't have to do with a project. That wasn't my project. Right. But all these years later, here's your big score. You want to get the daymond John's from fubu. Ah, yeah, that would be a good cause.
We talked about this Kyle and I sent him an email. Yeah. Okay.
All right. I barely remember him. But I remember fubu was a big thing. Yeah. roster. Yeah, that project that was run by my boss who I won't mention, and I would just hear about it. I'd go Yeah, not mine.
We're getting out of the tail end and stuff was starting to get more real it was as much fun but that was an interesting one. Yeah. So let's let's shift gears I so one of the things that I can I consistently hear when I'm when I'm talking to people about their experience. At agency.com was, you know, what an amazing time it was and how, you know, it's it's sort of fed into their professional career since then. But it was this unique thing. So I'd love for you to just, you know, sort of talk about your time, you know, you know, from when you left agency.com are, you know, sort of your transition from those early days, like, what did you learn from it? What was your experience? You know, what did you carry forward? all that sort of stuff?
Yeah, as I said, I started out as a music guy, right, I was doing music production, music production towards the tail end of what I was doing, it was becoming more digital. So I had to become a little more tech savvy, right, because you had to run Pro Tools or these different programs. Right. And that helped me so a lot of studios
were going direct to digital anyway.
They were starting. I mean, I had a one gigabyte drive. Yeah, that would crash out. You know, if I had too many microphones going in a session, it was early. And yes, but I had to think about software, I had to have a computer. And then the game thing started. So I started figuring out, you know, what interactive was, it was, you know, I learned more from Game Design than almost anything because you had to immerse your digital viewer into a world, right. But you know, that was games, that was kids, and it was a thing, and it was very valuable. So when I got to agency, I had a foundation of interactivity. In fact, I had a deeper foundation than most people that agency isn't, you know, because games are more complex, but the medium of the internet was totally new to me. And the fact you're working with brands, not with kids playing games, was the whole other language, right. And then as we got into deeper and deeper technical problems, I got to learn a little bit more about technology, you know, because we were solving stuff. And I was just in those meetings, right. But the big thing about agency, as we all probably know is we were innovating fast, and we were learning fast, and we were failing fast. And we were that thing which is now in vogue now. Right? fail fast, innovate fast learn
agile,
agile. We were doing we didn't know what it was.
And I don't think we were willing to admit it was failure either. Anyway. Oh, yeah. That happened. We don't talk about that anymore.
Wait, well, no, no, we did. We used to learn from it, though. Like it was like, let's not do that one again. Right. Don't do that. Right.
You know what funny it actually those kinds of mistakes became sort of mythic lore. Right. So yeah, you kick off a new project. You're like, okay, don't you know? Dragon? Right.
We'll come and find you Vlad. The Impaler he was right.
You know, we would know, I don't think we we had time to feel bad about it. Yeah. Right. And at one point, we mature and we said, let's have a post mortem every day. We you know, we basically, let's find time for all the different post mortems going on about a part of a project. But that we were so resilient. I mean, we were so resilient. I don't remember I mean, retest You and I, just on Food Network, we're pulling out our hair and drowning and merits. All my projects either had, if I could get ritesh ritesh or Mitch, you know, who was very strong. And it was a brotherhood and a sisterhood. And oh, and that's why we're all together these days because trial by fire that we get.
So you know, when you when I think the last the last projects you worked on, bill before you I think you and Jeremy were tied to the hip a little bit right, Shapiro on some of these things before you left or was it after you left agency
now Jeremy was on Colgate? I think he left a little bit before me. And the interesting part talk about sequences so I, I left agency, I did my own little boutique II thing for a while, and Jeremy's at another Omnicom agency doing SAS big time SAS for HR. And so when you talk about what did I do after to get to my latest company, which is a mobile SAS solution, I spent 12 years building SAS technology. I was sort of a combination of head of tech, head of delivery, and I've worked with folks and we were building a very big SAS solution that had cost 30,000 people on it every day, which was a whole different thing. And it's
a standalone company. Are you part of some bigger organization what was called
Bernard Hodes group? And, and they were part of Omnicom. And I think we went to their office after 911. I think that's what Jeremy said. Because he was up there. Yeah. But So Jeremy, are they the ones that
hosted us when we couldn't get
in our office here? Well, no, no, no, that was we were at Fleischmann for a while when we couldn't after 911. Yeah. We were in the Flashman building on on 42nd. Right.
A building it was a it was the news building, right?
Oh, yes. Yes. Same bullet? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So anyway, Jeremy hot, you know, so I went from Disney with Heather. I went from LTI with loron. Got to agency did my thing for a little time. And then someone from agency hired me for my next 12 year gig, you know, so it all kind of converges back at agency?
And what, how would you compare sort of, you know, life after that time to that time, like, you know, what's been your experience life sort of in the world? When you're in that madness?
Well, I would say, Bernardo diskgroup, was the opposite. You know, it was very dry type of work. We didn't really do much creative, except we know, corporate sites, but the corporate sites emulated you know, not corporate, the HR recruiting sites, right, the corporate side, it was very businesslike, it was more of a grind. I saw retention on the bus a whole bunch of times during that time. And, and we were both pretty tired. And we had
from the port authorities or Montclair, New Jersey.
Yeah, yeah. And that was by ritesh. Time for about 10 years. And, you know, my business now that I have one, and, you know, I bring a lot to that, because I want to it's a little company, you know, we only have five people, but how we worked at agency plays a lot. And and we're much more, you know, the creatives and the strategist and the data sciences, we're all one little team. And we're
like, Yeah, what, what is what is the thing from the agency experience? You're trying to replicate? What are the things you're trying to keep there?
Everyone's on an even playing on the team. Everyone has, everyone has a voice. Yeah. If you're a technical person, listen to the creative person, although they're going into your fight them, they may have a great idea. And and listen to your customers, and react to them, you know, take in what they need on a daily basis. Yeah. But most of all, it's the Aqa great work with with multi disciplinary skill sets, and bring a lot of energy. I mean, that's the biggest thing, agency was like a volcano of energy, which has never been replicated. And, and I so believe in that, you know, you have to harness it. But you have to get that energy going.
Wow, that's great. I remember my first visit to 665 after I joined and walking through three different areas, including that infamous pit, and it was dark and dingy down there. But that's how they preferred it. And then you go down to the bottom when Lauren centonian those guys were in the basement, and there's loud music playing and the Welsh flag is on. Fire all over the place. And then you go into this, this section over here, and porras is blasting jazz and, you know, trance, to the team. And so the energy was, you know, all over the place. And it was great. You know, you try play music in an office today. And we're like,
Are you nuts? Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. No, it's it was a pretty magical time.
And just want to, you know, to you when the energy Kyle, I just remember 665 You know, I've been around a little while. I just remember you would, you would poke your head into rooms and come in and say, What are you doing? And at the time, I was, I was sort of, you know, you were like the founder of this super cool company. So I was, you know, intimidated is not the right word. But,
you know, I
had reverence and I thought, Wow, you came in in five or 10 minutes. Join the meeting. You didn't do the thing you added all this up. Energy. You talked about it, you challenged us, you went out. And I assume you were doing that a lot, not just, you know, the meetings I was in, and it was, I
can't keep my mouth shut and my fingers out of things. But yeah, it was,
it was very powerful. The whole culture a powerful,
I think that's the biggest thing in all of this is the culture, that culture of and try and replicate it. It's tough to do as you grow. But that culture of we can figure this out, we're fearless, we'll make it work, we'll find the people. And we had no issues. We, you know, we met somebody on in the bar next door, the ice bar, or whatever it was called. And they were really good. Like, yeah, come on, in let's partner with you. It was no, there was no he go about, it's got to be agencies, we've got to do it. Oh, shit, that guy's got the really cool stuff. Let's bring him in. Right. And we'll make it work in an open, transparent environment. That got a lot of stuff done. I think. And it's difficult to even today to replicate that I think it's there were very, very, very smart, driven people from all walks of life that came in and had a common vision. And it was great.
And I think that, you know, the fact that you can get a degree in in this stuff. Now, the fact that there is such a thing as an information, you know, the UX person versus the UI, versus the this versus the there. And and the fact that, you know, sites are so complicated now just you know, just to be able to put something together. So, yeah, I think the requirement of that sort of multi disciplinary thing has kind of gone away, and maybe that's suck some of the energy out because everyone's just keeping their head down doing their thing rather than messing it up in the middle.
But I think it's coming back because corporations are realizing that that's not the way you everywhere I go at the moment marketing, particularly. It's all around agile and cooperation and learn and test and learn and fail fast. Yeah, we were living in daily. Yeah, we were actually real fail hourly, sometimes.
Kyle and I were talking before this, I think that this is one reason why there's many reasons why this is important. But I think this is educational for us. And for people out there. Now. The stuff that we were doing is really starting to seep back in. Yep.
And
we did things that people aren't even doing yet. Yeah, but they will. And I think that's amazing.
Yeah, I show I show to folks, sometimes at Ogilvy, the San Antonio project, where he had figured out how to do something on a Palm Pilot. Create, and I think, I don't know, Elliott, I think or Jamil or I don't know who there was a little team, the mobile team, remember that when mobile coming out with a Palm Pilot. And they figured out to create a database where you could interact with the website, the Palm Pilot, and also voice response. Like you could dial a number and talk and it'll send something back like restaurant in San Antonio. Okay, which one do you want Italian? Okay, here's the three Italian, right? I mean, we were doing that with analog and dial up and all sorts of stuff. And now look at it. They're still trying to figure this out. Right? Look at the sessions. Everybody's still wondering about session management, and we will figure that stuff out with a Palm Pilot a rotary phone and HTML. I think we
had a shoe phone at one point.
Well, Bill, this has been awesome. Thank you for being our guinea pig. Our first guest our guest number zero. Yeah. All right, or the beginning. You can always say that.
I appreciate the invite. I knew it'd be fun. It was more fun than I expected even with you guys. So it was wonderful. Great catching up.
