Shortly after I sold my banner advertising network (1999 or 2000-ish) I built VitalBio.com and the story basically unfolded like this…  

When I sold Bannerclicks.com I had two groups competing to buy it.  The second group was made up of some investment bankers from New York. During the course of our negotiations, when it became clear that they couldn’t match the competing company’s offer, I asked them why they wanted my ad network.

I got back a pretty long and convoluted answer, which I’ve come to learn was banker speak for “we don’t really know, but these things seem hot right now and we want to build something else completely unrelated and figured this would be a good jumping off point”.

Bemused, I explained that they really didn’t need my advertising network for that, and what they really needed was x, y, z…and then laid out a pretty convincing strategy to cover the whole thing.

The response was basically “WOW, Great! Can we hire you to come do that for us?”.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been a 19 year old kid who’s:

• Never had a job/boss/clean shirt
• Just sold his company to a large publicly traded company for more money than he could easily spend

But that’s pretty much the position I was in at that moment.  Did I want to come work for someone else? Uh…that’s a no.

But I suggested that we might become partners. Why not start a new corporation and split the stock, I’d build the site and handle the technology, they’d do all that voodoo you need to raise money and take the thing public.

And thus VitalBio.com, Inc. was formed.  We even had offices in New York somewhere. I never actually visited them though. By that time I had just moved to Chicago and wasn’t about to pack up and ship out to the big apple.

VitalBio.com

Anyway…that’s the story..but what was the site all about? Basically it was a vertical B2B portal for the Biotech Community. Biotech was MASSIVELY hot right then. These guys had the connections to the ceo’s of the biggest biotech companies.

The site was a place to come and learn all things biotech. From diseases and conditions, to info on the major corporations in the field, to info on universities with biotech programs, to investment information and current news. It had it all. We even had some Yale med school professors writing articles for us. Whiz-Bang…

I snatched this from the way back machine. I doubt I wrote it myself, but it was on our about page:

VitalBio.com, Inc. is a preeminent business-to-business (B2B) vertical portal for the life sciences industry (vitalbio.com).

The VitalBio.com website provides comprehensive online information and services to the investment, corporate, scientific and governmental communities. The B2B vortal provides biotech and pharmaceutical related content, including news, associations, business directory, education, scientific research, publications, employment, stock prices as well as other related content.

A special section on the website called vB Network allows affiliate companies the opportunity to provide a 24 hour seven day a week online “road show” to the investment community. The website also has a section devoted to bringing together companies seeking capital or joint venture collaborations.

Whatever. It took me about 3 months of 20 hour days to build from start to finish. I was happy with it at the time.

Stock Market Crash

You know how they always say that EVERYONE was caught by surprise when the dot com crash hit? Virtually overnight, the stock market cratered and all those insane web companies with sky-high valuations based on user eye-balls and other idiotic metrics suddenly blew up.

Well, that’s pretty much BS. I knew it was coming, lots of wall street people knew it was coming. We used to talk about it all the time in regards to taking our company public.

I thought it would happen sooner than it did, so I sold out my half of the business to some investors that my partners knew. Once the site was built, they didn’t really need me anymore and I think they were happy to buy me out.

And then the crash hit and vitalbio.com inc never went public.

But I made nearly as much on that sale as I did from my banner advertising network sale, so I was pretty happy. And after all – I’d only spent a few months on it.