The Internet’s new boom kids are poised to take over the world — if they don’t crash first
DAVID KUSHNER
LicketyShip Founder & CEO Robert Pazornik was mentioned in this Rolling Stone article. Some excerpts:
That’s why they’ve gathered here tonight. This is one of the first meetings of a secret society they formed and jokingly called the Young Guns; a more apt moniker might be the Valley Brats. It’s an invite-only cabal of the most powerful under-thirty-year-old mavericks in town. Every few weeks they gather to drink, plot global domination, make friends and, mainly, just act their age. “We got sick of hanging out with older guys,” says the Brats’ gregarious founder, Rob Pazornik, twenty-six-year-old creator of an online shopping startup called LicketyShip. “All they talk about is mortgages and nannies. It’s like hanging out with your dad’s friends.”
And:
When they arrived at the tail end of the late-Nineties boom, they quickly realized their predecessors seemed more interested in cashing in than breaking ground. “Their business plans were ass-backwards,” Pazornik says, “and the excess was, like, totally out of control.” Pazornik, a square-jawed guy with a backward Yale baseball cap, raises his voice above the hip-hop music in the bar and tells the guys a cautionary tale. One night in 2000, he went to a geek bash. To hype their new product, some startup guys had transformed a warehouse into a rave. They hired dancing girls, DJs, put on a cheesy light show. For the finale, fog machines blanketed a stage in smoke. And then the guys wheeled out . . . an empty purple box. The big plan was to sell those boxes online. Boxes that, um, you would put outside your house to collect your FedEx packages. Yes, it was ludicrously dumb. Pazornik recalls gawking at the overkill — the hot girls, the lights, the fawning venture capitalists — and having one thought: “Man, this is crazy.”
In geek-speak, hype that never materializes is called vaporware. The nascent Brats share a passion for creating something that will last. They found an audience by tapping a personal need. Ross, an earnest and self-taught prodigy, created Firefox after getting frustrated with the incessant pop-ups and viruses associated with Microsoft’s ruling Web browser, Internet Explorer. Zuckerberg made Facebook as a way for students to keep in touch with one another online after his university, Harvard, dragged its heels on a promised student directory. Pazornik created LicketyShip, a shopping site that one-ups Amazon by offering same-day deliveries, after he ran out of ink while printing a term paper at Yale. “Each of us is running a company that is intended to change the game,” says Pazornik. “We’re not making building blocks, we’re making explosive technology.”
And:
In February, Noah Kagan, a partner in OneClickTennis, an online site for Bay Area tennis players, convened a panel of young CEOs called Entrepreneur27. As the featured guests on the panel, Pazornik met Ross and Masonis. They stepped into the room to find it jammed with hacker geeks in graphic tees just like them. Though the panelists were familiar with one another’s startups, they hadn’t met in the flesh. But they had mutual friends and acquaintances — Zuckerberg, Sternberg, Hurley and Chen. The more they talked, the more they found they had in common. “We could go out and buy a Ferrari tomorrow,” Pazornik says, “but we’d rather change the way people live.”
They also share a mutual respect. “Blake had done this amazing and powerful thing,” says Pazornik. “He one-upped Microsoft!” Sternberg idolized Zuckerberg. “Mark has this amazingly clear insight into his users,” he says. And each of them could learn from Masonis, who had been navigating the murky waters of venture capitalists the longest.
So Pazornik had an idea. Round up the others. Let’s start a band.
After pazornik floated the idea of forming a secret society, the Valley Brats hit their IMs and started texting their like-minded pals. They met for the first time as a group in June at a Palo Alto dive. It was awkward at first, since they had little experience shooting the shit for fun. To break the ice, they came up with their version of a fraternity handshake: removing the batteries from their cell phones and slamming them on the table. “I suppose we could just turn our phones off,” Zuckerberg says, “but this makes more of a statement.”
At first, they made small talk, kicking around their common celebri-geek experiences. “We talked about photo shoots,” says Ross. “Yeah,” snickers Zuckerberg like Beavis, “photo shoots suck.” They talked about the pressures, and the harsh reality that getting millions from venture capitalists doesn’t make you rich. Just like in the music industry, venture capitalists want a heavy return on their investment, which means these guys pinch pennies until they bleed.
While collectively valued at roughly $4 billion, few are making six figures. Fearful of blowing their wads, the Brats don’t sit around ordering Dom Perignon, they compete over how cheap they can be. Matt Sanchez, a twenty-five-year-old behind a startup called VideoEgg, is buried in student loans. Pazornik treated himself to a forty-dollar punching bag. Zuckerberg splurged on a $100 amp. “The only other things I’ve bought myself are a sword and a teapot!” he brags. Yet everyone from their parents to the wanna-be geeks jamming the Entrepreneur27 assume they’re loaded. “It’s ridiculous,” Ross confided. “Even my mom thinks getting $10 million [from investors] makes me rich.”
These days, when they’re not together as a group, they hook up informally around town. Pazornik and Sanchez soon became the designated frontmen of the group: gregarious, sociable, laid-back. Zuckerberg and Ross, the resident Jedi masters: quiet, stealthy and insightful about how to focus on building a product while resisting the urge to sell out too soon. Power schmoozer Sternberg and egghead genius geek Masonis, middle school friends from Connecticut, are a dynamic Odd Couple.
Tags: LicketyShip
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