In mid-December 1999, smack in the middle of the ridiculous premillennial hysteria surrounding Y2K, my longtime business partner, George W. Slowik Jr., and I sat in a very somber financial meeting high atop one of Manhattan’s glittering structures with all of our company’s investors and other assorted Wall Street looking dudes. And what a meeting it was.
George and I created and co-owned PressCorps, a smallish, successful magazine company in New York City that launched and operated more than a dozen magazines, both consumer (Celebrity Style, Teen Celebrity, Gym, Tennis Match, Burn!) and trade (Music Choice, American Druggist, City Family, Medical Tribune).
After making PressCorps our lives for the five years we were in operation, our investors asked us to consider selling the company so we all could recoup our money. Ah, of course. But here was the caveat: The suits told us if we could somehow pivot and call PressCorps a “content provider Internet company” instead of the archaic sounding “magazine company,” we’d undoubtedly sell PressCorps’ assets to any number of the gazillion venture capitalists crawling all over Silicon Valley (Northern California) and Silicon Alley (lower Manhattan) looking for any opportunity to drown a good idea or upstart company in high-tech money and throw in insane valuations for good measure. We’re all gonna be rich! Who in their right mind wouldn’t love that plan?
George and I are very different in many significant ways, but what made our decade-long partnership work as well as it did was we agreed on fundamental, big-picture things: how to conduct ourselves as a company; which magazines reflect who we are best; how to treat employees who became lifelong friends; when to walk away from a fight and, most important, the belief that lying is never, ever an option.
As our investors laid out the plan that long, frigid afternoon, George cut them off with a raised hand and calmly said, “Richard and I don’t own a content provider Internet company; we own a magazine company.” The room fell silent. Tense. Our main investor gently protested that this is the best and perhaps only way to sell PressCorps at its proper value. George stood up, and in what has become lore among our many mutual friends said, “You can put a party hat on a mule and call it a unicorn if you want, but it still won’t make it so.”
A few months later, PressCorps was sold to a traditional media company, and George and I had to wonder: Did we miss the high-tech money train by sticking to the truth?
At about the time we sold PressCorps, Napster, the rogue music-sharing Internet company, was launched. I remember thinking that someone had to find a way to monetize Napster’s incredible technology—and fast. While the record companies cried foul and record company executives slept at the wheel, Napster’s technology gave life to Apple’s iTunes, and for 99 cents you could now download any song you wanted on Apple’s portable music listening device—the iPod®, the gadget of the decade. The record company executives didn’t know what hit them.
This week’s cover story by Rick Velotta chronicles a similar turning point in the history of an industry; in this case, online gaming. The “ostrich strategy” (head in the sand) approach adopted by the record industry nearly killed an unkillable industry. Online gaming is here, folks. If Nevada ignores the reality and hopes the technology or the momentum for it will simply go away, we, too, will be looking in the rear view mirror as the world spins forward with technological advances and inevitable change.
Nostalgia—in the form of “in my day” mentality—isn’t only overrated, it’s economically ignorant. Time moves forward? Yes. Change is good? Yes. C’mon, even sharks know if they don’t keep moving, they die.
So, no more talk of party-hat-wearing mules dressed up to be unicorns. Online gaming is here forever. It’s time to get the sand out of our eyes.