I began my entrepreneurial career taking my grandmother's magazines, clipping articles, stapling them together into new magazines of my own creation and selling them door-to-door. My career as an eight-year-old media aggregator and syndicator was short lived, but in high school I joined the early team at one of the country's first commercial ISPs (Our class B was 155.212), where I built the first Web sites for many businesses.
After creating the first Web-based college application, I turned down college to instead become Netscape's youngest employee in 1996, where I had the opportunity to work closely with giants (marca, jimb) who were generous in teaching me what they knew about building what was at that time the world's highest profile start-up success story. I was a product manager for our Web browser, worked on our anti-trust suit, and helped launch mozilla.org.
In 1999, I left Netscape to co-found Tellme with my mentor, Mike McCue. What followed were ten years of startup successes, failures, and lessons learned. Along the way we raised almost a quarter billion dollars in capital, built a profitable business with over $100 million in sales and more than 300 employees, and made speech recognition part of everyday life. Today Tellme answers every call to businesses like American Airlines, UPS and American Express (to name a few) and half of all calls to 411 directory assistance. We launched the first voice mobile search, so you can "say what you want and get it." In 2007, Microsoft acquired Tellme in their largest-ever acquisition of a private company (watch Calacanis interview). By far the most valuable Tellme experience was working with incredibly talented and smart people.
