How did you get involved in new media?

Defense Department domain application. That was the pivotal point for me. I decided then that I was going to focus my time and energy in the nascent and emerging field of computer animation.

That was a different thing back then, right?

Yea. I remember a guy showing a slide of a wire frame model of a cube, and thinking, “This is amazing.” It ultimately led me to a place at MIT called the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). I then became a CAVS research fellow at MIT. The purpose of CAVS was to bring artists, scientists and engineers together in a collaborative environment to see what would happen. After that, I wanted to continue working in computer animation, so I left Boston and went to New York City and was fortunate enough to get a job at the only place doing that kind of stuff, Dolphin Productions, the first commercial computer animation facility in the U.S.

What brought you back to Pittsburgh?

By the mid-eighties, New York had actually become a really dark city. There were homeless people everywhere to the point where you’d literally have to step over them. All the excess and the economic decline really caught up with the city and it became really depressing. My wife-to-be and I decided that it was time to leave and try another city. We returned to Pittsburgh and started a company called Electronic Images on the South Side.

How did you hook-up with USWeb?

They first hit my radar in mid-1996 when I saw an advertisement in a trade magazine. Later that year Joe Stafura, my partner at the time, made contact with their business development guy. In January of 1997, we visited their Silicon Valley office to see what they were about. Their vision was to be the first company to build a national network of Internet professional services firms. If your company met their criteria, you could buy a franchise from them for $50,000.

But you weren’t really interested in buying in?

I was really looking for a strategic investment partner, not just the idea of paying someone to hang a logo on our door. But I knew that if they saw our operation first-hand, took our skills and applied them to their business model, that we’d become an asset. When we finished our presentation to USWeb’s Joe Firmage in our offices a week later, he became very excited about our capabilities, so much so that he started clapping wildly and enthusiastically. Instead of telling him we were going to become a franchisee though, I essentially asked him to invest $3 million in our company. He settled down quickly and in a very intense style and serious tone of voice told us that we’d caught him at a good time. His board had just voted to switch the business model from a franchise plan to an acquisition plan. Essentially he told us that USWeb was beginning an aggressive acquisition program to quickly scale their business in preparation for an IPO. We began formal discussions that evening at my family restaurant on the South Side (Café Allegro), and closed the deal six months later on July 1, 2000. It was the largest Internet deal in Pittsburgh at the time, valued at over $65 million. But it was an all-stock transaction.

So it was a huge risk, wasn’t it?

Yes and no. We made the deal on the assumption that USWeb was eventually going to go public and the stock would turn into real money…someday. And because it was pre-IPO, the valuation was very high. That helped attenuate the risk. On December 5, 1997, USWeb completed a successful IPO. We got in at exactly the right time. The Internet exploded soon thereafter.

What’s your new focus at Merging Media?