Page 90 - 6 Secrets to Startup Success

Founder Readiness 69

company OmniMedia. They were going to buy the business for $16
million and the deal was fully negotiated. He signs the contract and
sends it back to them for counter-signature, and it was the day the
bubble burst, spring of 2000. The CFO of OmniMedia calls him up
and says, ‘Hey, everything’s fine. We’re just going to sit on this. We’re
busy with some other stuff. The markets are doing weird things.’ Long
story short: They never signed the deal, and the whole thing crashed
to zero. So, he had $16 million in hand, from his blackjack game to
that point, then all to nothing.”

Mark Kahn soldiered on. “Even during that time, we didn’t say,
‘Oh, the e-commerce market is blown up.’ We tried to ride it out. We
had 35 meetings (with VC firms), even though 35 said, ‘No thank you.’
You go to the next one and the next one and the next. That’s what you
have to do if you are committed to the business.”

Unfortunately, the business ran out of money and stalled. Mark
Kahn, needing to support a growing family, got a marketing job with
another startup in New York City. Chris Holden joined a venture cap-
ital firm specializing in digital media investments and continued to
watch with impressed fascination as his former colleague picked him-
self up and moved forward.

A few years later, when Mark Kahn had an idea for his next ven-
ture, to create an Internet marketplace bringing online advertisers and
publishers together, Chris Holden brought his firm, Court Square
Ventures, to the table with startup capital. He had seen Mark Kahn
deal with crisis and failure and come out the other end as a stronger
person. “Right now it’s one of the most successful investments we’ve
ever made,” he says of TRAFFIQ , Mark’s newest venture. “He
plowed through his first failure, dusted himself off, and he did it again.
And, he’s so good at taking all the lessons he learned along the way
and packaging them within himself. He truly is—I hate to be so ex-
treme—but he’s close to being the perfect entrepreneurial CEO.”

m

To this point, our discussion of your readiness as a founder has fo-
cused on who you are, your motivation, personality, skills, and knowl-

American Management Association • www.amanet.org