If you’re one of the 800,000 curators currently operating a shop on Etsy–the online marketplace for everything handmade–Outright wants to give you a gift. The cloud accounting software company has a new Etsy integration that lets users see all of the costs associated with their e-commerce business. The software is free for Etsy users from now until the end of the year. READ MORE
Jan. 20, 2006 — While the Internet’s reach continues to spread, the majority of small businesses located in rural areas — two-thirds — still do not have terrestrial broadband access to the Internet, according to a new study. The study, released by Hughes Network Systems and Survey.com in January, surveyed 250 small businesses nationwide, to gauge their knowledge of the broadband Internet options that are available to them. HNS, based in Germantown, Md., provides satellite broadband Internet access worldwide – an option that residents and businesses in rural areas sometimes pursue because they don’t have terrestrial DSL or cable access. “There’s no one place to go to learn how to hook your business up to broadband,” said Peter Gulla, vice president of marketing for HNS. He blames the lack of broadband Internet use among small businesses on the fact that it’s difficult for these businesses to learn about their Internet access options. According to research conducted by the Small Business Administration in March 2004, the majority of small businesses use dial-up services to connect to the Internet. Though ordinary phone lines transmit the DSL signal, telephone service providers must add special equipment to their existing phone hubs to enable DSL to transmit. The equipment isn’t cheap, which keeps service providers from upgrading in rural areas. “It comes down to population density,” said Josh Holbrook, an analyst with the Yankee Group, a research firm based in Boston. The smaller the population that would benefit from DSL, the less likely a service provider will invest the money into DSL equipment. Small rural businesses “are at a competitive disadvantage because they can’t use the same applications” as businesses with high speed Internet, Holbrook said. In northern New Hampshire, the Colebrook Development Corporation, a volunteer community organization, is taking matters into its own hands. The CDC is building a wireless broadband network in Colebrook, a border town with Vermont and in close proximity to Maine. Larry Rappaport, a Colebrook selectman and manager for the wireless project, said that the CDC is two months away from launching the five wireless hubs in the area. Funds for the project were secured by Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.) as well as from local private grants. “I’m concerned with the economic direction in the northern counties of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine,” Rappaport said. With manufacturing jobs leaving the community, Rappaport said the CDC wants to make sure residents can use the Internet to start businesses and continue to earn a living. The Lyndon Freighthouse in Lyndonville, Vt., owned and operated by the Paris family, recently hooked up to the Internet with a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Small Business Development Center. The grant was awarded to 12 towns in the Northern Kingdom region of Vermont — part of a two-year study to see how small businesses would improve with broadband access. The SBDC chose the Lyndon Freighthouse because it’s a relatively new business; the freighthouse itself is a historic landmark dating back to 1868. Eric and Cathy Paris bought the building in 1999 that now houses a gallery, ice cream parlor, full-service restaurant, gift shop, and a Starbucks. The grant allowed the Parises to buy the equipment needed to offer wireless Internet in their space, through a DSL line provided by Verizon. Visitors are able to access the Internet free for an hour; unlimited access is available with a purchase of food, beverage, or ice cream at the Freighthouse. The signal reaches as far as the picnic tables outside on the deck. The Parises also purchased three used laptops for people to use who don’t own their own. “It has been bringing in people we didn’t see before, for both business and personal reasons,” Cathy Paris said. Paris has noticed that customers of all ages are taking advantage of their wireless hotspot — families, visiting businesspeople, college students, and vacationers in town skiing. “We wouldn’t have stepped forward to buy the equipment without the grant,” Paris said.
My career from ages 18 to 28: In 1991, as a college freshman, I had an idea for an online service offering “real life” education to college students: practical advice about jobs, personal finance, and health. I made the simple observations that no one was teaching us these subjects in the classroom, and that computers — rather than books or TVs — had become the primary medium of communication and entertainment. During my sophomore year, Dick Sabot, a very smart Oxford-trained Ph.D. in economics and the professor of a class in which I received a B-minus, agreed to collaborate with me on my concept. He did so not because I was his best student, but because he had had a near-death experience during which a higher power advised him to do “something different.” By 1994, when I graduated from college, our project had indeed become something different: an Internet start-up company we named Tripod. Using what little cash I could raise from friends and family, I hired a team of computer programmers. I did this because I did not know how to install a web browser on my own computer, which is a significant barrier if you plan to run an Internet company. Unbeknownst to me, and surely with some sort of anarchic motive, these lawless, long-haired, multi-pierced, tattooed, incredibly charming and smart hacker hooligans built a piece of software on Tripod that had nothing to do with offering practical advice to anyone. Instead, this software gave individuals the power to publish their own “personal homepages.” By 1995, the popularity of the Tripod Homepage Builder was growing rapidly and had far surpassed my original idea to offer college students “practical advice.” It occurred to me that I might have a business on my hands. Having never written a business plan, I went to the local library and checked out a book called — you guessed it — How to Write a Business Plan. In August 1995, Netscape went public and proved that Internet companies had value. Or at least proved that Wall Street investment bankers had convinced the stock-buying public that Internet companies had value. One month later, I was able to convince New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the world’s most respected venture capital firms, to review the Tripod business plan. They agreed to do so only because Dick’s wife’s brother’s college roommate knew someone who knew someone at NEA. NEA liked the plan because it mentioned the Internet several hundred times. It provided $3 million in financing. By the beginning of 1996, one year after it was launched, the Tripod Homepage Builder had fundamentally changed the nature of consumer media. For the first time, anyone with access to a computer and a connection to the Internet could publish pretty much whatever they wanted; and anyone else with access to a computer and a connection to the Internet could view it. By the middle of 1997, Tripod had attracted nearly one million registered members. Tripod never posted a profit. Tripod generated barely any revenue. On December 30, 1997, in the middle of the stock-market bubble, I was offered $58 million for Tripod. On December 31, 1997, I agreed to sell Tripod in exchange for $58 million in stock of a publicly traded company named Lycos, which at the time was an Internet company only slightly more stable than Tripod. I agreed to a “lockup” that forbade me to sell all of my Lycos stock for two years. Over those two years, I watched the value of my Lycos stock increase tenfold. By December 31, 1999, at the height of the bubble and just a few months before the market crashed, I had sold nearly every share of my Lycos stock. I invested the majority of those proceeds in bonds and real estate because they were the only two investment vehicles I could thoroughly understand. And because I needed a house. By now, I hope my theme has become obvious. Luck is a part of life, and everyone, at one point or another, gets lucky. Luck is also a big part of business life and perhaps the biggest part of entrepreneurial life. At the very least, entrepreneurs must believe in luck. Ideally, they can recognize it when they see it. And over time, the best entrepreneurs can actually learn to create luck. Luck in business is different from regular old luck, like when you find $20 on the sidewalk. First of all, being lucky in business has an intoxicating underbelly called believing you’re smart. No one actually believes that he should take credit for finding $20 on the sidewalk. But when people get lucky in business, they are often convinced that it is not luck at all that brought them good fortune. They believe instead that their business venture succeeded thanks to their own blinding brilliance. The big challenge is that everyone — the press, your shareholders, your colleagues, your significant other, and your parents — will work hard to convince you otherwise. They will tell you, over and over again, that you are in fact a genius and should take complete credit for all the great things happening to your company. Why? Because to them, you are one of the following: A source of professional gain A source of financial gain A boss A lover Their pride and joy None of these relationships provide incentive for any of these people to tell you the cold hard truth about your entrepreneurial success: You may have gotten just plain lucky. The second difference between business luck and everyday luck is that luck in business can be created, whereas everyday luck cannot. You can’t will yourself to find $20 on the sidewalk. But you can create a company that gets lucky more often than the average company. Indeed, there is a pseudo-scientific formula for creating business luck. The key element is this: Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies. Why? Because lots of smart people will gather around companies with these qualities. As it turns out, precious few such companies exist. And the vast majority of human beings, and certainly most of the smart ones, are constitutionally caring creatures who would, if given the chance, prefer to spend their valuable time in a positive setting contributing to the betterment of society rather than in a negative setting contributing to its detriment. Shocking, I know, but true. And when smart, inspired people gather around a fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive company, they work very hard. And when smart, inspired people work very hard, serendipity ensues. Serendipity — the faculty of making fortuitous discoveries by chance — causes lots of unexpected things to happen to a company. Some of these unexpected things are good. Some are bad. But because no one planned for the good things to happen, they appear as luck. In other words, the best way to ensure that lucky things happen is to make sure that a lot of things happen. It’s really that simple. Much of what makes a company fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive is contained not in the company’s business model, but in how the entrepreneur communicates the mission of the company. A company’s mission, communicated by the entrepreneur with charisma and passion, is what creates the environment that attracts smart people and gets them inspired in the first place. Which is exactly what gets the luck rolling. Tripod made what money it did by selling advertising to clients such as Ford and Visa. That was our business model. But Tripod’s mission, as I described it to my colleagues, was to revolutionize consumer media, allowing anyone to publish his or her views to the entire world using the Tripod Homepage Builder. Suddenly, almost overnight, the stories, viewpoints, and opinions of every individual, interest group, or culture could be made available for others to grapple with. “Tripod isn’t here just to make money,” I told my colleagues. “We are here to fight the most important battles on the frontier of the First Amendment!” Mezze, the restaurant group I later co-founded in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, serves food and drink to locals and to tourists from New York City and Boston. That’s our business model. But the mission of Mezze is larger: to set an example of quality and service for all the Berkshires’ retail establishments. I tell our staff that by working hard to refine Mezze, we raise the bar for everyone. And that by doing so, we will together attract more visitors to our small part of the world. Village Ventures, the venture capital firm I co-founded in 2000, makes money by taking advantage of the supply and demand imbalance that results from the concentration of venture capital in only a few large cities. That’s our business model. But the mission of Village Ventures is different: to enable entrepreneurs to start companies in the towns where they want to live. Rather than having to flee to Boston or San Francisco to find venture capital, entrepreneurs in Boise, Idaho, and Providence, R.I., can get capital from Village Ventures right in their own hometowns and build their companies in the same place they’d like to raise their families. Missions such as those of Tripod, Mezze, and Village Ventures create an aura of authenticity, which is the elixir that attracts smart people and inspires them. There is little authenticity in the modern business world. But it’s just the thing that people crave most in their work. When people find themselves aboard one of these vessels, they don’t want to get off. They form a fierce protective boundary around it and will do anything to keep the vessel afloat and its inhabitants alive. These people are liberated by finding not only a way to make money but also a way to feel good about it. This is what takes inspiration and turns it into hard work. And the results of smart people working hard are serendipity and luck. Marty Liebowitz, the vice chairman and chief investment officer of TIAA-CREF, one of the world’s largest pension funds, once said to me, “Thank God they created the word ‘muffin’ or I’d be eating a cupcake for breakfast.” Words are incredibly powerful, sometimes causing us to do things that we would never normally do. It is for just this reason that I harbor a tremendous amount of guilt about my place in entrepreneurial culture. I fear that perhaps thousands of well-intentioned people wasted hundreds of thousands of hours pursuing entrepreneurial projects in part because of what they read in the press about me. I created a sort of playboy persona for myself as the CEO of Tripod. Pictures of me skiing, mountain biking, drinking beer, skateboarding in the office, and attending meetings in shorts, Birkenstocks, and a baseball cap graced several major media outlets. From Forbes to ABC’s Nightline, from BusinessWeek to People, from MTV to Spin, the media broadcast images of me doing just about everything but working. I absolutely, completely, 100% sold myself to the media to promote Tripod. Together, we created this image of the Slacker CEO: an athletic, shaggy-haired, perpetually mellow 24-year-old making millions while barely lifting a finger. This image was broadcast not just in the United States but also to most of Europe. In five days during the summer of 1999, I jetted from Madrid to Milan, to Hamburg, to Paris, and finally to London, attending launch parties for Tripod Europe, staying in first-class hotels, and internationalizing the Slacker CEO myth of which I had become the archetypal example. Hell, who wouldn’t want to be an entrepreneur? I was a rock star. And I was the only person who knew it wasn’t true. Friends would ask me, “What’s it like to be a famous international Internet CEO?” “I’m not a famous international Internet CEO,” I would answer. “But I play one on TV.” Working with the media was the most important job I had at Tripod. Period. Twenty-four-year-old Bo Peabody, with his hip Internet company in the mountains, was a perfectly packaged pied piper for the story of the decade. I was not only Tripod’s poster child, I was shilling the whole goddamn Internet. And when it came to promoting these two things, the only self-respecting thing I ever did was turn down an interview on Montel. How noble. I’ve often kidded that 90 percent of Tripod’s value was in the amount of press we received in such a concentrated period of time. Sitting at a board meeting, lamenting our anemic revenue, I once joked to the board of directors that rather than actually running ads on the Tripod site, I’d sell potential advertising customers the opportunity that I might mention them in an article or wear their logo on my baseball cap. The board didn’t laugh. They asked me to look into whether or not this plan was possible. A lot was left out of all those articles. The hundred-hour workweeks. The anxiety attacks. The crashed cars and missed planes. The times I had to tell colleagues that we couldn’t make payroll. The years of a $12,000 salary. Night after night after night of pasta dinners and stress-relieving Advil “cocktails.” The countless meetings with absolute assholes who had no interest in learning about the Internet, the single most significant business innovation of their lifetimes. Pleading to venture capitalists for financing. Firing perfectly pleasant people when they didn’t perform. In the late nineties, this reality did not sell newspapers and magazines. Baseball caps and Birkenstocks did. Had I actually begun to believe what was being said about me in the press, I would never have sold Tripod when I did. I would have reasoned, instead, that I was in fact a genius, and that I should take complete credit for the great things happening to my company. Never mind that Tripod had little revenue, no profits, and an unproven business model; we should take this horse public! “Yeah,” I could have said, “I am smart, not lucky, and I can defy economic gravity. I am in control!” Wrong. Tripod was all hat and no cattle. Had we taken it public, we would most likely have failed, and everyone, including many unsuspecting individual in-vestors, would have lost a lot of money. I was not, however, completely immune to the media frenzy. Following the sale of Tripod to Lycos, what personal money I did not invest in bonds or real estate I invested in more than 20 Internet start-ups. Only five of these companies are still in business. The others are gone, along with a few million of my dollars. The quickest way to tank your company is to believe what you read in the press, especially if it happens to be about you. The vast majority of journalists are not interested in covering what is actually happening. They are interested in covering what they think people want to think is actually happening. Everything is sensationalized. In 1999 it was sensationalized on the positive side, and in 2002 it was sensationalized on the negative side. It’s never exactly accurate. As it turns out, accuracy can be quite boring. And quite boring does not sell newspapers and magazines. Learn to keep your ego in check. That’s how you’ll be able to distinguish the crucial difference between being lucky and being smart. Your ego is both the most dangerous and the most useful weapon in your entrepreneurial arsenal. When used wisely, ego helps entrepreneurs craft their mission, work hard, and keep faith in their companies, even in the face of heavy scrutiny. Ego also gives entrepreneurs the confidence to sell their start-ups to partners, customers, and investors, and the courage to act like famous international CEOs even when they know they really are just playing a role. And ego is the force that allows entrepreneurs to get comfortable with their powerlessness and learn to love the word “no” instead of panicking in the face of it. On the other hand, when allowed to run amok, ego keeps entrepreneurs from knowing what they don’t know and tempts them to believe their own press. Ego is also the culprit when entrepreneurs cling to their role as founder rather than turning their companies over to more capable managers. And ego is to blame when entrepreneurs can’t work with odd people who are clearly smarter than they are, or when they fail to remain calm and gracious in all business situations. Use your ego when it is called for, and check it at the door when you sense that it will get in the way. Unchecked egos are the most destructive force in business. I have often dreamed of a study that somehow measures the impact of ego on workplace productivity. The results, I imagine, would be staggering, with as much as a 50 percent increase in productivity resulting from the eradication of egos. In an ego-free company, all good ideas from all sources would be implemented. Managers would hire only people smarter than themselves, and would never spend valuable time worrying about who gets credit for what. Meetings would be shorter, as no one would feel the need to drone on in an effort to impress his colleagues and managers. In a business world devoid of egos, profits would rise, salaries would increase, and unemployment would plummet. In all seriousness: A number of the planet’s problems would be solved. But it will never happen. As it turns out, businesses consist of human beings, and most human beings have either tragically fragile egos or uncontrollably big ones. All we can do is make an effort to control our own egos. As hard as it may be, there are real incentives to do so. If I had let my ego go unchecked, I would never have let those crazy programmers put the Homepage Builder on Tripod. The Homepage Builder, after all, was not my idea. Moreover, it was the idea of people who were clearly smarter than I was. Someone who was insecure would have declared the Homepage Builder a distraction, a waste of time, inappropriate for the Tripod audience, too expensive, too risky, or any of the other excuses that those with fragile egos use to fortify their own power bases. But the fact is, the Homepage Builder was the foundation of Tripod’s success. The day we launched that little piece of software, we enrolled more members than in the entire previous month. It was like watching the Gold Rush all over again: The automated-membership counter ticked away as hundreds of strangers from all over the world signed up on Tripod and staked a claim to their little piece of Internet real estate. In the end, my original idea for Tripod — practical advice for college students — was completely consumed by the popularity of the Tripod Homepage Builder. At one point, Tripod was the eighth most trafficked site on the Internet. Our membership base spanned every age and more than 40 countries. Now, as part of the Terra Lycos network, Tripod has 40 million members, from virtually every country on the planet. Had I stuck religiously to my original idea, the best thing that could have happened to Tripod would have been my being fired as its CEO. More likely, it would have ended up on the pile of failed dot-com start-ups that now symbolize an age of ego and excess. Without the Homepage Builder, Tripod most likely would have failed, and my life would have taken a different direction. Without the success of Tripod under my belt, Village Ventures would probably not have received the funding and support it has. And without Village Ventures, the four other start-ups I helped found — Mezze, VoodooVox, Waterfront Media, and FilmFree Entertainment — would most likely not be flourishing to the degree they are. Was I lucky? You bet your ass I was lucky. But I was also smart: smart enough to realize that I was getting lucky. This article was adapted from Bo Peabody’s book, Lucky or Smart? Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life (Random House, December). Peabody (bpeabody@villageventures.com) is the managing general partner of Village Ventures.
Best of the Web You can shop for art in cyberspace, but does it make sense? Eighteen CEOs scout sites offering everything from Picasso originals to basic frames As the manager of a new office in San Francisco last year, Richard Ogden drew the assignment of decorating the space. His employer, Quidnunc, an E-commerce consultancy based in London, provided $5,000 for artwork. Ogden, a musician by training, didn’t know much about buying art, so he went online. He zipped to NextMonet.com, perused its offerings of original paintings, and created his own virtual “gallery” of works that he thought might jibe with Quidnunc’s style. NextMonet.com, one of several Web sites that market art to businesses, concentrates on works by contemporary artists. If Ogden’s budget had been far larger, he might have checked out Fine Art Lease’s site, which features original Picassos and Pissarros that companies can buy or lease. Or if Ogden had been hunting simply for vintage van Gogh and Matisse prints or posters, he could have turned to Art.com. In addition to actual art, these Web companies typically market framing, matting, and installation services, as well as art consulting. These sites are, of course, businesses themselves, aiming for a slice of the burgeoning corporate-art market, though all of them seek individuals as customers as well. They vary as widely in their content and character as the products they sell. Artsourceonline.com, for example, is the Web arm of ArtSource, based in New Berlin, Wis. It was founded in 1990 as a mail-order catalog, the sales from which still account for part of its $3 million in revenues. At the other extreme is start-up NextMonet.com, based in San Francisco; leading Web investor CMGI owns 38% of the company. Unlike ArtSource, which displays art on its site but urges customers to contact the company by E-mail or telephone, NextMonet.com is set up to consummate its sales online. But Ogden, for one, didn’t buy over the Net. He chose to visit NextMonet’s headquarters, which happened to be down the block from Quidnunc’s. During the six weeks that followed, NextMonet dispatched representatives to the Quidnunc office to measure walls and observe the light. Eventually, Ogden bought six $600 abstract paintings by Derrick Buisch. By posting Quidnunc’s preliminary selections on NextMonet’s virtual gallery, Ogden made it easy for other Quidnunc employees and NextMonet representatives to weigh in with opinions and scope out alternatives. Shopping on the Web saved Ogden from having to browse galleries from New York to Paris. But if you go online in search of art for your company, which site would serve you best? To guide your search, Inc. asked 18 small-business chief executives to review five Web sites that sell art to companies. The panelists differed widely on which sites they liked and didn’t like, based on their tastes and needs. Which site is right for you? Read on. www.art.com What it’s good for: Prints and posters of well-known artists and genres. The CEOs generally lauded Art.com’s framing and matting services, as well as its pricing. “Simple, recognizable prints at a decent price,” said one CEO. Don’t waste your time if: You want paintings. Asked if he’d return to the site, one CEO replied, “Maybe for reasonably priced prints.” What our CEOs had to say: Another reviewer reflected the consensus of his fellow panelists when he said that judging Art.com in relation to Fine Art Lease, for example, was “like comparing a poster outlet store in a mall to a fine art gallery.” What you ought to know: The site’s parent company, $248-million Getty Images, based in Seattle, provides digital images to such customers as publishers and graphic designers. In light of how well Art.com scored with our CEOs, it’s noteworthy that Getty Images considers Art.com a sales channel primarily for reaching consumers rather than businesses. www.artsourceonline.com What it’s good for: Browsing for posters and “understanding different looks and treatments,” in the view of one CEO. Don’t waste your time if: You want a 100% online transaction. Many of our panelists were miffed that most items were unaccompanied by listed prices. “The service generally requires you to add a piece to a personalized gallery, which requires registration, then forces you to request a quote,” said one reviewer. “Too much trouble to go through for the generic Jimmy Dean poster I was looking at.” What our CEOs had to say: Several lauded the site’s setup, which lets the user point to paintings according to price bracket. But they said other aspects of the site’s search function needed work. “I could see all fine art between $751 and $1,500,” one said, “but if I limited the search further, I was likely to get a goose egg on the results.” What you ought to know: The absence of pricing on some sections of the site is intentional. ArtSource sells to many wholesalers, and it doesn’t want to intimidate them by posting the more expensive retail prices conspicuously on the Web. www.fineartlease.com What it’s good for: Leasing, leasing with an option to buy, or outright purchasing of renowned paintings, photographs, sculpture, and drawings. “I really like the idea of being able to lease a piece of nice and expensive art,” said one CEO. Don’t waste your time if: Leasing gives you the creeps. The reviewers liked the concept, but none said they’d actually do it. “I can’t imagine leasing a $200K painting,” noted one. “If I wanted it enough, I’d buy it.” What our CEOs had to say: Ironically, the only site of the five that offers original Picassos was considered “boring” to look at. “Fine Art Lease gave me sort of a foreboding feeling … dark colors … not much help,” one CEO explained. What you ought to know: According to Fine Art Lease chairman and CEO Ian Peck, the company’s average work costs $35,000. To lease a $35,000 work for three years would cost $690 a month, which might explain why our panel found leasing appealing only in theory. www.nextmonet.com What it’s good for: Affordable work by up-and-coming artists. Even one of the most critical CEOs said, “I felt as though there was art I liked at a price I would pay.” Don’t waste your time if: You need answers right away about frames, since the site refers inquiries to its network of framers all over the United States. “I didn’t find the framing options when you purchase a piece, which is important,” said one CEO. A few panelists wished the site had different search criteria, since they wanted to view artwork by movement (impressionism, for instance) rather than by medium (say, sculpture). What our CEOs had to say: The site was well organized and good-looking. What you ought to know: NextMonet.com’s specialty is original contemporary art. Don’t shop there if you’re looking for a print of your favorite Rembrandt. www.visualize.com What it’s good for: Specific information on how businesses should buy art. “Great for the corporate user,” one of the panelists said. “It’s like having your own corporate interior designer.” There is, in fact, a specific area of the site devoted to the corporate user. Don’t waste your time if: You want something by someone famous. Like NextMonet.com, Visualize showcases its own troupe of artists. What our CEOs had to say: The site is presented very effectively and offers great information. It’s not too flashy but is clearly navigable and easy to understand. What you ought to know: Visualize has a rental program; monthly rates range from $25 to $60 for a piece of artwork. The Bottom Line Receiving the most laurels were Art.com and Visualize, each of which scored well in every category. However, the three CEOs who reviewed both sites liked Visualize a little better, singling out portions of the site that catered specifically to business buyers. NextMonet.com and ArtSource Online rated about the same, but the former generally received more enthusiastic comments. Fine Art Lease brought up the rear, despite its seemingly business-friendly leasing options. The CEOs didn’t burn with desire for the site’s crÃme de la crÃme collection, and they found the art too expensive even as a rental. Ilan Mochari is a reporter at Inc. The savvy entrepreneur’s guide to the art Web Would our CEOs go back? What is the site good for? CEOs’ quick take www.art.com “Yes, for specific personal art.” “Prints from known artists and genres.” “Quick, easy, enjoyable.” www.artsourceonline.com “Maybe.” “To browse posters.” “Not possible to browse and buy in a single session.” www.fineartlease.com “No.” “To lease a piece of nice and expensive art.” “Not my style — can’t imagine leasing a $200K painting.” www.nextmonet.com “Just out of curiosity.” “Possible discovery of new artists.” “I didn’t find the framing options.” www.visualize.com “You bet.” “Corporate programs and options.” “Very good; I like it.” Grading the Sites Ease of navigation Inventory Content Reliability Framing/ ancillary services Pricing Something you’d pay for? Average grade art.com B+ B B B+ A- A- B+ B+ artsourceonline.com B B- B- B B- C+ C- B- fineartlease.com B- C C+ B C+ C- D+ C nextmonet.com B B- C+ B+ C B C- B- visualize.com B B A- A- B+ B B+ B+ Our Panelists Terry Benish, president and CEO, Purple Solutions Jeffrey S. Davis, CEO and chairman, Mage Bryan Desloge, CEO, TMC Medical Don Epperson, president, HookMedia Julio Gomez, CEO, Gomez Advisors Sam Goodner, founder, Catapult Systems Pamela Hawken, president and CEO, Gardenside Samuel B. Kellett Jr., founder, president, and CEO, eAttorney.com Brent M. Kleinheksel, CEO and founder, PlanetPortal Jack Littman-Quinn, CEO, OneCore Michelle Lubow, CEO, Design One Bret McElfish, CEO, McElfish + Co. Spencer Newman, CEO, AdventurousTraveler.com Bill Oxford, CEO, The Oxford Group Gary G. Pan, CEO and founder, Panacea Consulting Claude Pope, president and CEO, Office Supply Solutions Dennis Scheyer, president and creative director, Scheyer/SF Steve Warren, owner, Katzinger’s Deli Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.
Best of the Web You can shop for art in cyberspace, but does it make sense? Eighteen CEOs scout sites offering everything from Picasso originals to basic frames As the manager of a new office in San Francisco last year, Richard Ogden drew the assignment of decorating the space. His employer, Quidnunc, an E-commerce consultancy based in London, provided $5,000 for artwork. Ogden, a musician by training, didn’t know much about buying art, so he went online. He zipped to NextMonet.com, perused its offerings of original paintings, and created his own virtual “gallery” of works that he thought might jibe with Quidnunc’s style. NextMonet.com, one of several Web sites that market art to businesses, concentrates on works by contemporary artists. If Ogden’s budget had been far larger, he might have checked out Fine Art Lease’s site, which features original Picassos and Pissarros that companies can buy or lease. Or if Ogden had been hunting simply for vintage van Gogh and Matisse prints or posters, he could have turned to Art.com. In addition to actual art, these Web companies typically market framing, matting, and installation services, as well as art consulting. These sites are, of course, businesses themselves, aiming for a slice of the burgeoning corporate-art market, though all of them seek individuals as customers as well. They vary as widely in their content and character as the products they sell. Artsourceonline.com, for example, is the Web arm of ArtSource, based in New Berlin, Wis. It was founded in 1990 as a mail-order catalog, the sales from which still account for part of its $3 million in revenues. At the other extreme is start-up NextMonet.com, based in San Francisco; leading Web investor CMGI owns 38% of the company. Unlike ArtSource, which displays art on its site but urges customers to contact the company by E-mail or telephone, NextMonet.com is set up to consummate its sales online. But Ogden, for one, didn’t buy over the Net. He chose to visit NextMonet’s headquarters, which happened to be down the block from Quidnunc’s. During the six weeks that followed, NextMonet dispatched representatives to the Quidnunc office to measure walls and observe the light. Eventually, Ogden bought six $600 abstract paintings by Derrick Buisch. By posting Quidnunc’s preliminary selections on NextMonet’s virtual gallery, Ogden made it easy for other Quidnunc employees and NextMonet representatives to weigh in with opinions and scope out alternatives. Shopping on the Web saved Ogden from having to browse galleries from New York to Paris. But if you go online in search of art for your company, which site would serve you best? To guide your search, Inc. asked 18 small-business chief executives to review five Web sites that sell art to companies. The panelists differed widely on which sites they liked and didn’t like, based on their tastes and needs. Which site is right for you? Read on. www.art.com What it’s good for: Prints and posters of well-known artists and genres. The CEOs generally lauded Art.com’s framing and matting services, as well as its pricing. “Simple, recognizable prints at a decent price,” said one CEO. Don’t waste your time if: You want paintings. Asked if he’d return to the site, one CEO replied, “Maybe for reasonably priced prints.” What our CEOs had to say: Another reviewer reflected the consensus of his fellow panelists when he said that judging Art.com in relation to Fine Art Lease, for example, was “like comparing a poster outlet store in a mall to a fine art gallery.” What you ought to know: The site’s parent company, $248-million Getty Images, based in Seattle, provides digital images to such customers as publishers and graphic designers. In light of how well Art.com scored with our CEOs, it’s noteworthy that Getty Images considers Art.com a sales channel primarily for reaching consumers rather than businesses. www.artsourceonline.com What it’s good for: Browsing for posters and “understanding different looks and treatments,” in the view of one CEO. Don’t waste your time if: You want a 100% online transaction. Many of our panelists were miffed that most items were unaccompanied by listed prices. “The service generally requires you to add a piece to a personalized gallery, which requires registration, then forces you to request a quote,” said one reviewer. “Too much trouble to go through for the generic Jimmy Dean poster I was looking at.” What our CEOs had to say: Several lauded the site’s setup, which lets the user point to paintings according to price bracket. But they said other aspects of the site’s search function needed work. “I could see all fine art between $751 and $1,500,” one said, “but if I limited the search further, I was likely to get a goose egg on the results.” What you ought to know: The absence of pricing on some sections of the site is intentional. ArtSource sells to many wholesalers, and it doesn’t want to intimidate them by posting the more expensive retail prices conspicuously on the Web. www.fineartlease.com What it’s good for: Leasing, leasing with an option to buy, or outright purchasing of renowned paintings, photographs, sculpture, and drawings. “I really like the idea of being able to lease a piece of nice and expensive art,” said one CEO. Don’t waste your time if: Leasing gives you the creeps. The reviewers liked the concept, but none said they’d actually do it. “I can’t imagine leasing a $200K painting,” noted one. “If I wanted it enough, I’d buy it.” What our CEOs had to say: Ironically, the only site of the five that offers original Picassos was considered “boring” to look at. “Fine Art Lease gave me sort of a foreboding feeling … dark colors … not much help,” one CEO explained. What you ought to know: According to Fine Art Lease chairman and CEO Ian Peck, the company’s average work costs $35,000. To lease a $35,000 work for three years would cost $690 a month, which might explain why our panel found leasing appealing only in theory. www.nextmonet.com What it’s good for: Affordable work by up-and-coming artists. Even one of the most critical CEOs said, “I felt as though there was art I liked at a price I would pay.” Don’t waste your time if: You need answers right away about frames, since the site refers inquiries to its network of framers all over the United States. “I didn’t find the framing options when you purchase a piece, which is important,” said one CEO. A few panelists wished the site had different search criteria, since they wanted to view artwork by movement (impressionism, for instance) rather than by medium (say, sculpture). What our CEOs had to say: The site was well organized and good-looking. What you ought to know: NextMonet.com’s specialty is original contemporary art. Don’t shop there if you’re looking for a print of your favorite Rembrandt. www.visualize.com What it’s good for: Specific information on how businesses should buy art. “Great for the corporate user,” one of the panelists said. “It’s like having your own corporate interior designer.” There is, in fact, a specific area of the site devoted to the corporate user. Don’t waste your time if: You want something by someone famous. Like NextMonet.com, Visualize showcases its own troupe of artists. What our CEOs had to say: The site is presented very effectively and offers great information. It’s not too flashy but is clearly navigable and easy to understand. What you ought to know: Visualize has a rental program; monthly rates range from $25 to $60 for a piece of artwork. The Bottom Line Receiving the most laurels were Art.com and Visualize, each of which scored well in every category. However, the three CEOs who reviewed both sites liked Visualize a little better, singling out portions of the site that catered specifically to business buyers. NextMonet.com and ArtSource Online rated about the same, but the former generally received more enthusiastic comments. Fine Art Lease brought up the rear, despite its seemingly business-friendly leasing options. The CEOs didn’t burn with desire for the site’s crÃme de la crÃme collection, and they found the art too expensive even as a rental. Ilan Mochari is a reporter at Inc. The savvy entrepreneur’s guide to the art Web Would our CEOs go back? What is the site good for? CEOs’ quick take www.art.com “Yes, for specific personal art.” “Prints from known artists and genres.” “Quick, easy, enjoyable.” www.artsourceonline.com “Maybe.” “To browse posters.” “Not possible to browse and buy in a single session.” www.fineartlease.com “No.” “To lease a piece of nice and expensive art.” “Not my style — can’t imagine leasing a $200K painting.” www.nextmonet.com “Just out of curiosity.” “Possible discovery of new artists.” “I didn’t find the framing options.” www.visualize.com “You bet.” “Corporate programs and options.” “Very good; I like it.” Grading the Sites Ease of navigation Inventory Content Reliability Framing/ ancillary services Pricing Something you’d pay for? Average grade art.com B+ B B B+ A- A- B+ B+ artsourceonline.com B B- B- B B- C+ C- B- fineartlease.com B- C C+ B C+ C- D+ C nextmonet.com B B- C+ B+ C B C- B- visualize.com B B A- A- B+ B B+ B+ Our Panelists Terry Benish, president and CEO, Purple Solutions Jeffrey S. Davis, CEO and chairman, Mage Bryan Desloge, CEO, TMC Medical Don Epperson, president, HookMedia Julio Gomez, CEO, Gomez Advisors Sam Goodner, founder, Catapult Systems Pamela Hawken, president and CEO, Gardenside Samuel B. Kellett Jr., founder, president, and CEO, eAttorney.com Brent M. Kleinheksel, CEO and founder, PlanetPortal Jack Littman-Quinn, CEO, OneCore Michelle Lubow, CEO, Design One Bret McElfish, CEO, McElfish + Co. Spencer Newman, CEO, AdventurousTraveler.com Bill Oxford, CEO, The Oxford Group Gary G. Pan, CEO and founder, Panacea Consulting Claude Pope, president and CEO, Office Supply Solutions Dennis Scheyer, president and creative director, Scheyer/SF Steve Warren, owner, Katzinger’s Deli Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.
