Mitch Russo

And I basically said, we're going to build a marketing company instead of a selling company.

They wanted to create a warehouse and pile furniture in it and sell it on the internet.

I knew that wouldn't work in 1999, and I told them so.

So we basically...

created a marketing company based on creating custom websites for furniture stores and for manufacturers, and then selling a website subscription to a furniture store.

Using the technology we had developed, it was one click to create a website for any furniture store, plus their branding.

So they came back and said, not only do we love that idea, we want you to be the CEO.

Now, I had already been working with Assist Ventures.

So I said, look,

it would take crazy money to get me out of this position.

I'm already working with all these other great people.

And they said, well, what does crazy money mean?

And I said, well, it would take at least a half a million bucks.

And they said, well, yeah.

And they said, okay, we'll do it.

And so for the most part, that's what I got.

And I still ran assist ventures, but I saw the writing on the wall and I started to wind that down.

I saw that a lot of my investments were just not going to make it unfortunately, but

I went forward with furniturefan.com and we started building that.

And then it was growing very rapidly when the dot-com bust hit.