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My Story
The Early Years (1984-1988)

Already as a teenager I have been fascinated by computers. My first BASIC program (simple sorting algorithms) ran on my grandfather's programmable SHARP pocket calculator, and when the first home computers appeared (in particular the Commodore 64), there was no stopping me trying to get this machine to work the way I wanted.

As Commodore's BASIC was so awfully slow that writing a sensible program was impossible, I had to learn machine code. Literature about home computers and especially programming them was very sparse at the time. There was no text book about the 6502 Assembler, other than the technical specification released by processor manufacturer Motorola directly. I had to order the book from the US. And of course it was very technical. And it was in English, which I didn't speak so well at the time.

But in the end, I managed to work through it. And I finally wrote my first machine code program. I did not even have a tool to edit it on the computer. So I wrote it on paper, then translated every line to Hex Code with a pocket calculator, and manually "poked" it into the computer's memory. We were still in the Middle Ages of IT.

The computer kids on the block used to meet in the "computer corner" of the local department store "Horten". Luckily that store was just down the street from where I lived. Every other day I would go there, meet soul mates, discuss the latest software, and read the books from the shelves I could not afford to buy. "64 intern" by Data Becker was one of those highlights, priced at an outrageous $40 - too much for a 13-year old on monthly pocket money budget of $25. As other comrades did the same, we had soon developed a good relationship with the staff, who would even allow us to photocopy pages of such books, which were vital for advanced programming (memory addresses and such).

It was there that I met my future partner, Michael J.G. Gleissner. Like me, he was obsessed with writing code for his Commodore 64. Contrary to me, he was already making money with his hobby. He worked part-time on projects for a local Btx agency (a type of early-day web agency). And he asked me if I wanted to join him. I loved the idea of making money from what excited me anyway much more than delivering weekly newspapers for $50 a month, which I had done before to increase my financial abilities.

Soon after, the agency we worked for proposed a deal to us. We would develop a Btx editing software (some sort of early-day FrontPage) for free, but we would get 50% of the sales proceeds. Unfortunately, it turned out that the agency was not too interested in the sale of the product. They just wanted to use it internally. After all, they charged for set-up of Btx sites - and if they had sold our software, people would not need their services any more. So they did not concentrate much on external sales, they were happy to have a professional internal tool at no cost.

We were confident we could not do any worse ourselves, and decided to start our own company (Gleissner + Jagodzinski GdbR, ArtData Systems), on 10/8/85, in Michael's room at home. We put in our lives' savings (which were around $500 each), rented office space in my grandmother's house for as little as $50 per month, and bought little things like a telephone and folders.  As the $1,000 would not even buy a PC, we had to realize the first projects on our clients' computers, before we bought our first IBM PC clone. It was equipped with an 8088 processor running at 8 MHz. That was "fast" - the original IBM PC would only clock 4.77 MHz.

As all that was at the age of 16, when we both were not able to sign legally binding contracts, so we had to be declared "adults" for the realm of our business by court decision. Our parents were hesitant at first to approve of this extraordinary plan, but finally did not want to stop our enthusiasm. 

Getting Serious (1988-1995)

After more or less attending school until the Abitur in 1988, while always spending most of my free-time with PCs (now programming in 8086 machine code, Pascal 1.0, and Borland C 1.0), we transformed our little garage business into various companies around the globe. Concentrating on soft- and hardware at first, we soon made use of our technical background for more scalable business models.

In January 1989, we took our company to the next level (ArtData Systems GmbH, 1989). We moved into new and larger offices, hired sales & support staff, and got larger clients, such as Loewe Opta in Kronach, for who we developed the very first software Btx decoder software (some sort of Internet browser). We were still doing the same - software development - just on a larger scale.

 
[My first TV interview, 1989]  
In the early 1990s, CD-ROMs became popular. And with it, catalogs on CD-ROM. At some point in time, we looked more closely at that market. There was only one company publishing a book catalog on CD-ROM (the "Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Buecher", VLB). And a subscription to their bi-monthly service was $3,000 annually - ridiculously high given that CD production costs were at around $1 per CD. We therefore decided to come up with a low-cost alternative, at only $500 annually. In the process of collecting the data from various publishing houses and wholesalers, we ended up in talks with Libri - one of the two book distributors controlling the German book market. And joined forces. We developed the retrieval and ordering software, they gave us their catalog data, and sold our CDs to all of their 1,000 client bookshops.
Back in 1991, my partner Michael had started ABC Buecherdienst, an online bookstore. It was initially a small side business, based on software modules we had developed for our clients in earlier years. He set it up on a server in the corner of our office, using the infrastructure and modules we had already in place. In the beginning, his girlfriend at the time, Ulrike Stadler, packaged and mailed the 2 daily orders in the evenings - she still had a normal full-time job elsewhere.

Silently over the years, it turned from an evening job to a part-time job to a full-time job for Ulrike. The volume doubled each year, without much advertising or significant investment. The mere fact alone that it was the only "real" online store at the time made it the best example for all articles about the future of e-commerce. Every time a journalist needed to demonstrate an e-commerce site that actually worked, ABC was there. ABC thus grew from zero to around $1M in sales from 1991-1994.

Internet Goldrush (1995-2000)

In 1995, we realized the impact the Internet would have on the whole industry. We decided to put all our resources into the Online Bookselling business. We migrated the application to the Web, gave the company more capital (ABC Buecherdienst GmbH, 1996) and an international brand name (Telebook), and merged all resources of ArtData into ABC.  Now, at the dawn of Internet for everyone, it was time to deploy the services of Telebook internationally. We started in Spain (LibroWeb S.L., Madrid, 08/1996), in the US (Telebook Inc., Miami Beach, 01/1997), and in Namibia (ABC Media Investments, Swakopmund, 04/1997).

Namibia? Well, it's not so easy to find native German speakers anywhere outside Europe. Namibia has kept some German-speaking communities from its colonial past, and labor cost is about a third of the industrialized world. So setting up an email costumer service center there made perfect sense, especially after we secured tax breaks and subsidies from the Namibian government for our investments. 

In 10/1997, we utilized the presence close to a larger book market in South Africa to set up Telebook SA, Cape Town, to service the South African market with the American books we sourced through our US office.

In 01/1998 Amazon.com approached us (we were by far the leading online book retailer in Germany) and discussed an acquisition to facilitate entering the German market. After just 3 months of negotiations we agreed to the proposed merger. In April 1998, Telebook Inc. and all its subsidiaries (ABC Buecherdienst, LibroWeb, ABC Media Investments, Telebook SA) were acquired by Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) in a stock-swap.

I stayed with Amazon.com for little over a year. At first, as one of the managers for the German subsidiary (together with the American "away-team") to integrate the two organizational and IT structures. The last 2 months I worked on strategic alliances with book wholesalers and database owners throughout Europe (Spain/France/Netherlands/Sweden/Italy). I chose to do that as I could work from my home in Paris. But I soon realized that I was not the large corporation person. I like to see quick results, and I hate being inefficient. And nothing is more inefficient than a large corporation. If you have an idea, you will spend 70% of our time convincing your colleagues that your idea is good. If you could just spend that 70% to bring it to market, and to service your customers...
 
Other Ventures

During the Telebuch lifespan, we had founded another start-up in the technology sector. WWW-Service, a local retailer of web-hosting services for US-based HiWay Technologies, was a similarly successful venture. Founded in November 1996 solely with the intention to attract a large customer base quickly, and sell it after 2-3 years to one of the big players in the market, I was not involved in the operational side of the business much. That obviously facilitated the selling process (I was not an integral part of the management team, didn't have to sign any non-compete agreements or employment contracts). In 08/1998, we increased the capital to 1,000,000 DM, changed it to a publicly tradeable company (WWW-Service AG), and took in some other shareholders to supervise the different areas of the business.  In 10/1998, we sold WWW-Service AG to Verio Inc. (NASDAQ: VRIO).

Verio was an interesting venture. It was started by a group of investors during the Internet boom phase. Verio's business plan was simple: Raise money, acquire as many Internet providers as possible, and then re-sell the whole conglomerate to someone else at a profit. Verio wanted to be the #1 Internet powerhouse worldwide, and resell the market leader position. They were successful: Verio was acquired in 1999 by NTT (Nippon Telecom) for $2.5bn.

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