Just a few years ago, Michael Golden was living the Internet life–jetting from coast to coast to sell online expertise to big clients, including Barnes & Noble, for the company he had helped found, Organic Inc.
Today, he is slapping salami and cheese on rolls behind the counter at Hoagie Experience at the Shops at Village Square in the Philadelphia suburb of Blue Bell, Pa.
Two years after the technology-stock-driven Nasdaq reached its all-time high, many former dot-commers are happily living decidedly not-com lives. Like Golden, others who went through the Internet spin cycle are devoting the next stage of their lives to something else–volunteering for a non-profit for one, teaching women about personal safety for another and starting a for-profit venture for a third.
Golden, 32, wears an apron and makes sandwiches, but he is no wage slave. He co-owns Hoagie Experience, which is swankily decorated with orange suede-covered stools, polished metal and blond wood.
The menu isn’t for the Formica-and-linoleum crowd, either. Hoagie Experience occasionally offers such specialties as soft-shell crab hoagies. Golden says they sell about 300 sandwiches a day. The average tab is $11.
In late 1999, Golden left New York and Organic, which helps other companies develop Internet advertising strategies, to become an executive at Global Sports Inc., a company in King of Prussia, Pa., that handles online sales for 20 national retailers. As that company grew, he became less satisfied.
“I’m not necessarily a guy who should be in charge of 500 people,” he said. “I’m a great start-up guy.”
The 90-hour workweeks were wearing him out. He had made several million dollars in six years at Organic. That was enough to retire, so in September 2000, at age 30, he did.
“I didn’t have the ambition anymore to do what it takes,” he said.
He had dreamed of running his own hoagie shop since high school when he worked at Hoagie Experience, where he loved the close connection with regular customers and the feeling of responsibility for a small business. He called his old boss, Scott Sternberg, who had sold Hoagie Experience to people who later closed it.
“It took me about 48 hours to convince him to reopen it,” said Golden, who invested $375,000 and reopened Hoagie Experience last April.
The job change has meant more time for his wife, Allison, and his 1-year-old son, Cole, and a more relaxed lifestyle. He has lost 25 pounds and found time for his first doctor’s visit in six years.
Rick Mosenkis was always a high achiever. He graduated from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School before working for several start-ups. But when he felt that shares of his employer, Verticalnet Inc., could not sustain their heights, he sold and left the company in 2000.
The proceeds from the sale–he won’t say how much–meant he didn’t have to work for a while. But the money left Mosenkis, 38, feeling like he had gotten rich without contributing much to society.
“It was an integrity issue for me,” he said.
To relax, he took woodworking classes and started designing furniture. He also began casting about for non-profit organizations where he could volunteer his business skills.
He fell in love with City Year Philadelphia, which has teens and young adults devote a year to community service. When he asked how he could help, City Year got back to him quickly with two pages of ideas.
Last spring, he started helping the group look for new Philadelphia headquarters. He also taught a class on public speaking for City Year members. The organization is still looking for a building that can hold about 300 people. Through various friends and businesspeople, Mosenkis has enlisted the help of a real-estate firm and of a pro bono architects’ group.
“It would be a far different search process than if we didn’t have his help,” City Year executive director Jim Balfanz said. “We would be much more limited in terms of what we were looking at.”
Mosenkis also has spent more time with his wife, Sharon, who is a voice coach, and their sons Adam, 4, and Ryan, 1.
He’s still looking for new businesses to invest in, but he’s not eager to return to killer workweeks. Mosenkis also rearranged his priorities, in part because of what he learned from the young adults at City Year.
Jacquelynn Waterman took up skeet and trapshooting to relieve the stress of designing Internet sites for U.S. Interactive Inc. in King of Prussia, Pa.
Her father was a hunter and gun collector, but she did not start taking shooting lessons until she was in her 20s.
“I don’t stick to 9 to 5,” said Waterman, 33, “so shooting was really a way of just forgetting all the other deadline pressures and office bureaucracy.”
In 1999, as the Internet bubble expanded rapidly, Waterman saw signs that it wouldn’t last. Stock prices were going too high, too fast. In late 1999, after two years at U.S. Interactive, she left the company, which filed for bankruptcy in early 2001. Unlike some others, she did not get rich from working at an Internet company because she never had many stock options.
Eventually, she started her own advertising company, Thin Cow Inc., whose motto is “Cut the Fat”–corporate advertising fat, that is. It produces mostly print advertising, though she does Web design work when she gets it.
The bursting of the Internet bubble has brought reason back to business, she said.
“Clients are a lot easier to talk to now, and they’re not deep-pocketed with venture capital,” she said.
Working out of the basement in her Phoenixville, Pa., home, complete with pool table and three computers, she now has more time to devote to her other passions–shooting and women’s safety.
She admits getting a kick out of beating men in shooting contests.
“When you go out on the line with four other guys and you outshoot them, some of them really have a hard time getting beat by a girl, and some of them think it’s the greatest thing, so it’s really entertaining in that sense,” she said.
She also coaches women at the Lower Providence Rod & Gun Club (www.lprgc.com) and teaches personal safety as part of the National Rifle Association’s “Refuse to Be a Victim” program. Much of the work is volunteer, though she does charge $20 a person for some seminars.
Guns are only one part of her personal-safety courses. Her courses include tips, such as planting prickly bushes under windows to make it hard for criminals to break in.
“It’s about an attitude of taking responsibility for your own safety and not relying on friends or family or police,” she said.
Marvin Weinberger is never short on ideas. One of his first, Infonautics Inc., an online information company, made him a multimillionaire on paper. He lost it all on the next idea, Electric Schoolhouse, which offered online educational services for children and families.
Weinberger, 47, has churned through a few more since then before settling on a concept aimed at the heart of anyone who has battled Jack Frost and lost. Weinberger’s IceDozer has three blades that fit to the windshield of your car. Two have carbide ice-cracking teeth that will bust ice but not scratch your window.
It costs $14.95–a price Weinberger says is reasonable because the IceDozer, which comes in bulldozer yellow, is designed to be durable and move through ice like a razor through shaving cream. He said he had shipped about 1,000 since he started selling them over his Web site, www.innovationfactory.com, in October.
It’s been a tough sell in a warm, dry winter. Area venture capitalists have turned him down, he said, because his travails in launching Electric Schoolhouse were described in a series of stories in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999.
He said he had raised $200,000 from private investors outside the area.
His wife, Fran, has returned to work as a teacher to support him and their two children. Jake, his Portuguese water dog, remains faithfully at his side as he works from his Havertown, Pa., home.
He said he was in talks with retailers to sell the IceDozer.
And after that?
“One of our fondest hopes is to reinvent the squeegee,” he said.
