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It's not the motivation for Bill Schrader either. He's another brand-new IPO multimillionaire--his company, PSINet, went public last May. It claims to operate the largest service devoted to providing Internet access to businesses and individuals. Schrader's life has remained the same--he still works seven days a week, still drinks 20 Diet Cokes a day, still unwinds by throwing a softball around with a colleague, talking about business. He and his wife, he says, "go out to dinner a bit more."
Schrader graduated from Cornell in 1974 and eventually helped run the university's supercomputer center. "I'm not a scientist," he says. "I'm a generalist and a manager of complex scientific organisms that many people don't understand. I'm never responsible for the science, because I don't know enough. I'm not a computer geek; I'm a manager and a business person." The job at Cornell led him to explore links with other computers and, eventually, the Internet. In 1990 he formed his own company, which later became PSINet.
"At one point, I thought we were going to go bust because we couldn't make payroll," says Dan Cunningham, the chief financial officer. "Bill kept the company running on his credit cards--Visa and MasterCard, not American Express, because that is a card that you have to pay the bill on every month." In the middle of a rise in the silver market in 1989, Schrader's mother raised several thousand dollars by selling the silver coins she had collected, and invested the proceeds in PSINet. The following day the silver market dropped sharply.
Marc Andreessen might be surprised to hear it, but Doug Colbeth thinks the people over at Netscape are "very much Hollywood personalities." Colbeth is the president and ceo of Spyglass Inc., which directly competes with Netscape. Spyglass is not based in lush, sun-tinged California, but rather in Naperville, Illinois. Last June, when the company went public, management celebrated by taking the 54 employees to a minor-league baseball game (tickets: $2 apiece). "We're blue-collar high tech," Colbeth says.
Spyglass and Netscape are cousins. The Illinois company controls the original patents for Mosaic, the Internet browser program that Andreessen helped write. Mosaic was licensed to Spyglass by the University of Illinois in 1994. Before that, the company was struggling as it tried to develop three-dimensional visualization software for scientists (the same kind of work that Andreessen was supposed to be doing as he wrote Mosaic). Government grants dried up, and so did Spyglass's business. Colbeth and his wife Margey went through $100,000 in savings to keep the company going. "There's a lot of bad memories I'm suppressing," he says. "A lot of nights waking up in a cold sweat wondering was I trading off too much of the family's stability--and their financial future. There were no college funds for the kids. My wife and I would have these discussions. She was very nervous. Extremely nervous. So she called me crazy more than once."