All right. Welcome everybody today
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 5:26 am
We have a very exciting guest Ari Kahn president and CEO of Bridgeline digital. Bridgeline Digital helps customers maximize the performance of their complete digital experience from websites and intranets to online stores and marketing campaigns. Ari, welcome to Growth Marketing Chat.
ARI: Thank you, Nick. Nice to be here.
NICK: Thank you for joining us. You know, maybe mobile number list we can open up and talk about your journey through entrepreneurship and growth. You've kind of dabbled in a lot of different things. Computers, mathematics founding multiple companies. So I'm very excited to share all about it.
ARI: Okay, great. Well, thank you. I've got my heart in engineering, I have a PhD in artificial intelligence and after I finished my thesis, I started a company called Fat Wire and it was one of the first marketing technology companies. It was one of the first web content management businesses that was in 1996. We built that company to seven or 8 million in revenue by 2000, purely off of a couple of credit cards and a lot of hard work. We didn't know anything about venture capital or raising money, just did it the old fashioned way. And in 2000 when the tech bubble was really at its height and the phone calls from venture capitalists were nonstop. We did a $10 million capital raise just in time for the market to explode.com bubble burst. So we were lucky we had $10 million in cash, and we didn't know how to spend money and pets.com and all these guys were trying to figure out how to cut their spending.
And at that point I learned a lot about international business and mergers and acquisitions. We bought some companies there, most notably open market, which I believe at one point had a market cap of close to 2 billion and bought it for less than 10 million. And that launched that wire into 13 or 14 different countries, ultimately fat wire grew to to be over $40 million in revenue. And we sold it to Oracle for 160 after we sold fat wire. I took some time off one way or another. I ended up down in Belize, beautiful country. I started a company called great land holdings, completely different type of business was building condos and houses and restaurants and lakes and infrastructure and roads and all this great stuff. So physical asset based company selling selling real estate internationally.
That was great. We did a lot of things that I'm very proud of. And in 2015 as I was starting to become more and more involved in technology again, I saw I saw fat wa or I saw Bridgeline at an investor conference, and I saw Bridgeline as a di a roll up of digital agencies that had an identity crisis. It was making transformation to be a software company. And interestingly, it was transforming into a web content management company, very similar to fat wire, but that's a difficult transition. Culturally it's different. The business model is very different. The way you interact with customers is different. And like a typical guy with zero accountability. I sat in the audience leaned over to the guy next to me. Oh, I was one of the founders of this, of the web content management space. I could fix that company.
ARI: Thank you, Nick. Nice to be here.
NICK: Thank you for joining us. You know, maybe mobile number list we can open up and talk about your journey through entrepreneurship and growth. You've kind of dabbled in a lot of different things. Computers, mathematics founding multiple companies. So I'm very excited to share all about it.
ARI: Okay, great. Well, thank you. I've got my heart in engineering, I have a PhD in artificial intelligence and after I finished my thesis, I started a company called Fat Wire and it was one of the first marketing technology companies. It was one of the first web content management businesses that was in 1996. We built that company to seven or 8 million in revenue by 2000, purely off of a couple of credit cards and a lot of hard work. We didn't know anything about venture capital or raising money, just did it the old fashioned way. And in 2000 when the tech bubble was really at its height and the phone calls from venture capitalists were nonstop. We did a $10 million capital raise just in time for the market to explode.com bubble burst. So we were lucky we had $10 million in cash, and we didn't know how to spend money and pets.com and all these guys were trying to figure out how to cut their spending.
And at that point I learned a lot about international business and mergers and acquisitions. We bought some companies there, most notably open market, which I believe at one point had a market cap of close to 2 billion and bought it for less than 10 million. And that launched that wire into 13 or 14 different countries, ultimately fat wire grew to to be over $40 million in revenue. And we sold it to Oracle for 160 after we sold fat wire. I took some time off one way or another. I ended up down in Belize, beautiful country. I started a company called great land holdings, completely different type of business was building condos and houses and restaurants and lakes and infrastructure and roads and all this great stuff. So physical asset based company selling selling real estate internationally.
That was great. We did a lot of things that I'm very proud of. And in 2015 as I was starting to become more and more involved in technology again, I saw I saw fat wa or I saw Bridgeline at an investor conference, and I saw Bridgeline as a di a roll up of digital agencies that had an identity crisis. It was making transformation to be a software company. And interestingly, it was transforming into a web content management company, very similar to fat wire, but that's a difficult transition. Culturally it's different. The business model is very different. The way you interact with customers is different. And like a typical guy with zero accountability. I sat in the audience leaned over to the guy next to me. Oh, I was one of the founders of this, of the web content management space. I could fix that company.