How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 1)

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Nick is CEO of TalkPoint and a pioneer in the fields of unified communications and interactive webcasting. Nick launched his first company, Voyager Data Networks, in 1996 and sold it two years later. Prior he was the founder of NextVenue, a joint venture among Microsoft, NBC, and Dow Jones. He led its global expansion and merger into streaming media company iBeam Broadcasting. At iBeam, he served as president of enterprise services and was a member of the board before buying back the company, now known as TalkPoint, in 2003. Nick holds an MBA from Rutgers Graduate School of Management.

Sramana: Nick, tell us about your beginnings. Where are you from?

Nick Balletta: I grew up in northern New Jersey and I went to school at Rutgers for both my undergraduate and my MBA. My first job out of school was a sales job in the late 1980s for MCI Communications. Instead of going into Wall Street like most of my classmates, I decided to jump into technology. It was a really good experience starting out in frontline sales. If you look at Fortune 500 companies the vast majority of CEOs today spent time in sales organizations. It is important to know how to drive top-line revenue and understand customer requirements.

Sramana: Selling is incredibly important. It is particularly important for entrepreneurs because that is what you are doing at every step of life. What year does that bring us to?

 Nick Balletta: I left MCI in 1991. I was a top performer there. I then went to MFS Communications. MFS was a company that took on the local telephone companies and was building fiber optic lines in many cities across the United States. It was my second David and Goliath story. Subsequent to MFS, my friends and I had the concept of building a server hotel. This was in 1996 and we saw the advent of the Internet. I was working for a division of MFS called MFS Datanet, which was involved with building the first internet exchange point on the Internet.

I tried to build the hotel for servers concept internally at MFS. I did not get a lot of positive feedback there so I took the big risk of leaving my day job to start Voyager Data Networks. We leased a small datacenter space in New York City, and we convinced a couple of big companies to manage their websites for them. I had relationships with folks at Sony and we convinced them to give us their website. Once we were managing one of the largest gaming websites on the Internet we managed to convince Dow Jones to give us their website. Soon we began managing websites for some of the largest financial institutions at the time.

Sramana: Essentially your business idea was the precursor to a modern datacenter, correct?

Nick Balletta: Absolutely. We had a little bit of angel investment, and I went out looking for larger investors because an infrastructure business needs to raise more capital to grow the business. We were completely undercapitalized and had only 12 people. I was doing everything from sales to collection and marketing. This was pre-bubble, so the money from a capital perspective was not free flowing yet. This was around 1997.

This segment is part 1 in the series : How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta
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