7. See Around the Corner

—Dan Pelson (Warner Music Group)

Where were you when the digital revolution hit? Maybe you were too young to remember, or maybe you were busy making a living. Dan Pelson knows just where he was: sitting on his front steps reading Wired magazine's cover article about Mosaic, which was a new web browser at the time. Mosaic, the first popular web browser, made the Internet accessible for regular folks. That was in 1993. Dan sat there reading about it and said, "This is incredible!" And he knew he had to find a way to be a part of it. Dan is the kind of person who has that uncanny ability to see around corners and make a pretty accurate guess about where business is going—accurate enough for Warner Music Group to hire him on as a senior vice president to remake their Internet marketing business.

Dan's 20-year career in the ever-evolving digital media industry shows that you don't really have to have superpowers to see where business is going; you just have to be a little less skeptical than everyone else. When Dan had his awakening about the Internet, he was busy selling servers for Sun Microsystems, his first real job after college. It was a pretty good job, and he did well at it. But here he was, knocking on doors, persuading publications such as Time to digitize their magazines instead of laying them out by cutting and pasting on paper. While Time bosses were puzzling over how to make use of computers, Dan already saw the possibilities of the new technology to revolutionize media. "I literally woke up in the middle of the night," he recalls, "and I said, 'Why am I evangelizing to media companies when there's this huge revolution coming with digital content?'"

Even though Dan's career is a mix of working for corporations and running his own businesses, I include Dan in this book because he's a great example of how to manage your career in a time when change is inevitable. In the past 10 years, your employer has probably tweaked its business model to adapt to the digital world. I guarantee your company will keep tweaking its business model, and maybe change it totally, thanks to the Internet and information technology. We can dread the changes and how they affect our jobs, or we can see the opportunities. People like Dan who see the opportunities of the future will be rewarded.

Forward-thinking people who profit off change have a common characteristic: They trust their judgment. Dan wasn't the only person reading the Wired cover story about the new web browser, but not everyone who read that article came to the same realization as he did. Dan wasn't writing software like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and he didn't make computers—he just sold them. He simply knew how to use a computer and how it could be used to do things such as streamline publishing. The new Mosaic browser showed him that instead of just streamlining conventional publishing, the Internet would do away with magazines or at least create a new kind of magazine—the e-zine.

That's the thing about seeing around corners: We have to believe in our hunches. If you're working today, you have inside information about whatever industry your employer happens to be in. Learn all you can about that industry, and you might be surprised at the insights you come up with. Dan's confidence in his vision of what's around the corner led him on a whirlwind career.

Starting from Scratch

Dan graduated from Colgate University with a liberal arts degree in 1988. When it came to a career, he wanted to jump on the digital bandwagon because it was the next new thing. Sun Microsystems was growing like crazy, hiring 40 people a week, and Dan wanted to work there. Even though he didn't have an engineering degree, he was persistent. "I basically told them I'd work for free to get there," says Dan, who downplays that achievement. "They just needed go-getters at the time to help them through a rapid period of growth."

For the first year, he was part of the marketing team: "Driving a van around for company trade shows," Dan says. What he really wanted to do was get into sales, but Sun was concentrating its efforts on selling to rocket scientists at Los Alamos Labs and derivatives traders on Wall Street. These were sophisticated people, so most of the sales staff had computer engineering degrees. Still, Dan kept asking to get into sales.

After a year, he got his wish. Sun executives were broadening their sales strategy and looking beyond the traditional markets. "There's only so many computers you can sell to laboratories and Wall Street, although they sold a hell of a lot of computers to Wall Street," Dan says. "They figured, 'Let's take the kid and throw him into media and have him try to break in.'" So Dan got into a brand-new sales vertical, making his rounds to print media outlets Such as Time, Dow Jones, and McGraw-Hill, showing publishers how computers could streamline production.

Back in those days, newspapers and magazines were laid out by first typing articles into large mainframes, printing them out, and then handing over the contents to a graphic arts department that literally cut and pasted everything together. Graphics were drawn by hand on paper, although some publishers were just starting to have their graphic arts people play with Macintosh computers to get some interesting graphics. Still, the work was printed out and then cut and pasted together by hand with scissors and glue.

To sell to the publishing industry, Dan used tried-and-true sales techniques. "You pick up the phone and try to track down leads. There's no real magic to it," he says. "In 4 years I had a tremendous amount of success. The timing was great." Sony Music bought huge servers to keep track of royalties, Associated Press bought servers to tabulate election accounting results on election night, HBO started using Sun's system and would buy hundreds of workstations and servers. These were the days when businesses were building their computer infrastructure nearly from the ground up, transferring information from mainframes to smaller units.

And these were still the pre-Internet days. Although the Internet existed, it was mainly used by scientists. Web pages were utilitarian looking with just text and no graphics. Individuals couldn't even access the Web from home computers, if they were one of the few households who owned a computer. Then, suddenly, things changed.

In 1993, a new web browser, Mosaic, was released. Wired, a new magazine at the time, ran the cover article about Mosaic that got Dan excited. Here he was telling Time to lay out their magazines on computers instead of cutting and pasting with paper. Then this article forecasts that more and more people would have home computers linked up through the World Wide Web. It wasn't hard for Dan to go one step further and see that if magazines were laid out on paper, that meant they could be linked to consumers' home computers through the World Wide Web using a browser such as Mosaic.

Dan saw around the corner, and he was so excited he decided to start up his own online magazine.

In case you are thinking of going out on your own 100%, visit www.wesmoss.com for more information on my first book, Starting from Scratch.

Underestimating Obstacles

Again, Dan's timing was great. He quit Sun on December 31, 1993, and launched his e-zine—Word—on January 1, 1994. In 1994, online services started popping up, and computers with modems were becoming standard. His e-zine was a simple website aimed at young adults in their 20s, just like Dan. It was full of articles that he and a few friends wrote about how to cope with life after college. "The content was probably not the best," he says.

"But the Web was just coming to public consciousness—us and Yahoo were the first two places you could actually place advertising on the Web."

Word didn't make him rich, but it did get him a job in the emerging e-zine market. Remember that launching a little shoestring business was also how Kevin Noland got his job at GE as a computer programmer, even without a programming degree. I'm not saying that you have to necessarily launch your own company, but it's interesting how when new technology comes out, companies are eager to hire employees with nontraditional backgrounds.

Dan got hired at Icon CMT Corp., a technology company whose main income stream came from providing bandwidth to companies. Icon acquired Word and hired him to build its brand-new media practice. Dan and his little staff at Word all joined Icon. Here was Dan, just a few years out of college, and he was running the new media practice at a technology company. Over the next few years, he'd grown the group into a staff of 75 people. Besides Word, they also put out another e-zine, Charge, aimed at extreme sports types. It became a large operation for the time, generating revenue from ads. "It was an exciting time. It was generating a lot of interest, and things were going great," Dan says.

This was in 1996, just before Icon went public. Even though his media group was chugging along, Dan ran into a difference of opinion with the Icon founder. Since his group was so successful, he wanted to spin out his group into another company. Icon's founder disagreed, so Dan left. As he tells it, this wasn't a difficult decision because, again, he had an idea what was coming around the corner. Online media was where the action would be, he believed, and there was no doubt in his mind that pursuing that wholeheartedly would be a better move than staying with Icon, where media was a sideline. "Word had given me a lot of recognition, so I was able to raise a million bucks to get the company off the ground," Dan says. "It wasn't that difficult."

Building Momentum—Persistently

On his own again in 1996, Dan called his new company Concrete Media. The idea was to design and maintain websites for brick and mortar companies that were just establishing their websites. Concrete Media also had its own online media—a site called Bolt, a social networking site for teens. Bolt was making money from ads, and Concrete Media was making money from selling online services and building websites and portals. To add to the media content, Dan also purchased a small movie review website called Girls on Film (clean movies—not what you were thinking!). The company grew to more than 400 employees.

Things were going so well that by 1999 Dan was getting ready to take Bolt (the social networking site) public. Morgan Stanley was the company's bank, and by November 2000 it had filed plans for an initial public offering (IPO). In April 2000, Bolt planned a road show to promote its coming IPO; that was the same month the dot-com bubble burst, and no one wanted to buy stock in a technology company. Things went from great to horrible in 1 month, and of course, there was no IPO for Bolt. This was the beginning of the end for Concrete Media.

When Dan talks about those times, he's very calm; but it must have been horrible. "After the market crashed, the Internet was viewed as a fad," Dan remembers. "People were saying, 'Is the Internet going to survive?'" The Wall Street Journal called the Web the "CB radio of the 1990s." Concrete Media's business went down the drain because no one was paying to launch new websites, and advertising revenue went down at Bolt—but it didn't completely dry up. Bolt's business kept afloat, hanging on by a thread, but Dan still saw possibility and profitability in the Internet, and he sat tight.

The business climate got even worse. What remained of Bolt and Concrete Media were housed in Manhattan, and on September 11th, most of his employees were at work and saw the World Trade Center terrorist attack (Dan happened to be on the West Coast). "It added tremendously to the challenge of keeping people motivated after the dot-com bubble burst," says Dan, who kept himself focused on the benefit Bolt brought to the millions of teens who came to the site. As we see in many of the stories in this book, when times get hard, focusing on the social benefit of your work can keep you going.

"Millions of teens were coming to the site every month, and you don't want to just walk away from that. I had dedicated, passionate employees, and I didn't want to walk away from them either. I kind of felt we had to do everything we could to survive, and we deserved to survive." Did he ever doubt that he could continue? "Every day," Dan says.

Even though Bolt's advertisers had cut back, it was as popular as ever with teens. "I felt like they needed us more than ever," he says. "Having a social network is about expressing yourself and having a forum to do that in. For me, personally, I realized it was going to be a long time coming before Bolt was a substantial value again." Just before its IPO plans, Bolt was valued at $350 million. After the crash there wasn't even a value placed on it; it wasn't clear that there could be a financial return.

Then, by 2004, advertisers were back, some great Internet companies were launched (Google, for example), and the Internet was back in style. Bolt got back some of its advertisers and became profitable again. Dan brought in his old partner, Aaron Cohen, and sold Bolt. During that time he also sold Girls on Film, something he'd bought for a few thousand dollars, to Oxygen Media for several million.

Why not stay at the helm of Bolt? "I kind of got itchy about hanging onto the company for 10 years," he says. "I wanted to do other things." Dan didn't earn the huge fortune that had dangled in front of him before the dot-com bubble burst, but he did earn a small fortune from the sale of Girls on Film. "Compared to most people, I feel really lucky," he says.

Taking the Next Leap

As he figured out his next step, Dan took a year off. He chilled out, got married, and had a baby. "Running a business, it's kind of hard to have a relationship with anyone," says Dan, who really needed that year off. "I don't look back and say I lost a year. I needed to think about myself for a little while."

To get back into the job market, Dan consulted for 6 months for Evite. "It wasn't big enough to get me fired up," Dan says, so he declined their job offer. Then he thought about how he'd always loved music. Along with his friend Bo Peabody, Dan started a website, UPlayMe, that connects people with people who are downloading and listening to the same music. "It becomes a social network of music lovers," Dan says. "Pulling people together through entertainment and making it a social experience again."

A few months into UPlayMe, Warner Music Group came knocking. The company wanted Dan to remake its 1,000-plus high-traffic artist websites to keep up with the changes hitting the music industry. Dan says it has been easy to maneuver the corporate waters because he has a track record of building profitable websites. He just thinks of his chunk of Warner as a great big startup instead of a media conglomerate and feels the same kind of ownership as he does with his own businesses. "I'm helping the company completely reinvent their business model," he says. "So that part is very entrepreneurial. The transition hasn't been that difficult."

Dan says the main problem he sees in corporations is the fear of risk: "I've left meetings where there was discussion and debate and argument over which path to take. Guys who've been here 10 years say, 'Oh my God, I hope you have a job after that one.' I know they're joking, but I'm shocked that that's even on their minds. That's just the course of normal business, to get into debate, argue, and get passionate about this stuff. If that's not happening, they should be worried about their jobs. It's a volatile chaotic time in the music industry. We're trying to be transformative and effective."

One of the biggest obstacles is that music artists aren't accustomed to seeing advertising on their websites. But with 15 million unique visitors around the world, "Of course we should be putting advertising on these sites. That's a whole new revenue stream for us!" Dan says. "I know we have to maintain that artist relationship, but if 5 years from now we're still generating income from that artist, we're going to have a better shot at maintaining that artist relationship than the way we've been doing business."

Dan's main challenge now is to change the industry from being focused on artists into being focused on consumers. Instead of just packaging music and using the websites to get people to buy CDs at brick and mortar stores, the websites need to offer more. "You've got a lot of traffic coming, and these are very passionate people visiting these websites."

"Business models at every major media company are definitely going to change," says Dan, peeking around the corner again. "Warner has accepted that need to change. Now the question is how to transform the organization to make it happen."

Whatever your industry, how do you use Dan's advice to position yourself to take advantage of the inevitable changes hitting business every day? "You have to be willing to take risks," Dan advises. From his point of view, not taking a risk is the more risky path. Whether Dan's vision of the media business is right or wrong, he's getting rewarded for his vision today. And if he's even a little right, he'll be rewarded again the next time people need to see what's coming around the corner.

If we try to adapt parts of Dan's approach even a little bit and trust our view of what's happening in our industries, we can be sure to benefit in some way. If we do nothing, we're sure to miss out. Try looking around the next corner today and see how you like the view.