Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos (Part 2)

Jason Robbins: Frankly, I didn’t like my job. It was very clerical. I wanted to do more higher-end things that required me to think. More than one time, I was told, “You’re paid to do and not think.” I really wanted to improve my job and improve the organization. When they’re making $20 million a year, they don’t care that you’re going to save them $100,000 in operations. I became friends with the developers. This was before the time you could open two different programs at one time and switch between them. I helped develop software. I said, “Can you enable me to do this?”

Lo and behold, over time, my 14 hours a day was reduced to 8 hours with just keystroke changes that I was able to make. Then they gave me more work. I was back to 14 hours. I went back to the developers. I just kept doing programming with the developers so that I could make my job easier and go home earlier. I said, “I have a really good skill for finding the challenges in the operational system and fixing them with software.”

I had gone to business school, which was very Finance-driven. I probably chose the wrong school at that time. I did take as much of the entrepreneurial classes as I could. Marketing and Internet were just coming out at that time. I was one of the first people that was playing with the Internet on a daily basis back in 1992 where, at one point, you had to log in to this green screen. Before you know it, www had taken off. When I got out of business school, I wanted to get involved in tangible things. I really loved products. I went into the job market after business school. I could have gotten a job at consulting or a job back at Wall Street, but I didn’t really want to do any of that to the surprise of everyone who went to business school. I just didn’t want to do it.

I went to a head hunter, and she placed me at J. Crew. I worked at J. Crew. For the first couple of days, I had one task that took me eight hours. I wasn’t the only one that was doing the task. There were literally five other assistants. I was the assistant to the leader of one of the three or four major divisions. I realized that five of us were manually calculating the return per square inch on the catalog. Taking the sales for the week and dividing it up by approximately how much the item took off a single page. We would be able to give this ratio to our direct report. That was tremendously inefficient. I knew that if I go to the developers, I could have them develop something for me, which I promptly did.

The job went from eight hours to 30 minutes. I went to all the other people who did the job and I told them how to make their jobs in 20 minutes. Then I went to the President and said, “I just gave you your top people’s assistants back for almost one full day a week. By the way, I just got out of business school. I didn’t work in consulting or Wall Street. I came here. I want to do big things here.  Why don’t you let me start the web?” They said, “What is that? We think it needs to be proven before we get into it.”

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Jason Robbins: This was around 1994. They didn’t want any of that. After a while, I left. I really bounced around with a lot of different businesses. My father had told me about a guy who made tamper-evident packing tape. If you put it on the box, if you peel it up, it separates and the word “Open” appears. When you put it back down, you’re busted. The other part of the tape was that it was a little extra wide. If anyone tried to slit it and put a new piece over, they need to have extra wide tape. It was very shiny on top so it really wouldn’t stick. It was really cool. I thought it was neat and I thought I could run with it. I learned a lot by doing this, and not making money and trying to take someone else’s product and showing it to somebody else. The problem I had with that business was that it was a tough sell because it was an esoteric interesting new thing. At the same time, the person who was manufacturing it for me was very inconsistent in their production and it was quite expensive. Then I went back to real estate. I’m living in the upper west side of New York and I drove out 45 minutes to Jersey to learn how to do shopping center rentals.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos
1 2 3 4 5 6 7