In 1996, while running Radio Ink, I had a concept to put radio on the internet. At the time, radio didn’t even have websites. In 1998, we launched the Radio Internet Conference, and later the Convergence Conference, to get people to embrace websites and online radio.
Everyone thought I was crazy. Over the years, I wrote editorials about how people would get their music from the internet, not just radio. People got ugly and accused me of being anti-radio, when all I wanted was to help the radio industry control it.
I even predicted a time when online listening could equal or exceed actual radio broadcasting. I started by going to radio companies to fund the concept, but all but two thought I was nuts.
In 1999, I started RadioCentral in San Francisco. We raised $7 million from MediaVenture Partners and several independent angel investors, including Eddie Hilliard, Jimmy DeCastro and Ron Unkefer (from radio).
We pitched two concepts. The first was like a newsstand of radio stations built around narrow subjects; essentially, it was what podcasting, which hadn’t been invented yet, became. The second was online music radio itself, which had not yet been done. We perfected audio quality, streaming that exceeded FM quality and solved the buffering problems that plagued streaming at the time. We built dozens of formats, at the time using Dalet machines.
I hired Steve Rivers as Director of Programming, Sean Demory and Steve Wyrostock to run programming, and Chris Rathaus to run production, along with a team of top radio talent doing voice tracking and a giant tech team. We had a team of about fifty people, and we were making huge progress and even getting some advertisers.
We ended up producing the first branded radio content. Our first client was Earthlink, for whom we produced multiple formats. We went on to do radio for About.com, A&E Television Network, Agile, and other brands. According to our streaming provider, we had become the #2 user of streaming in the US, behind only Yahoo’s Broadcast.com. That was good and bad news, bad because we were accumulating millions in monthly streaming fees. We needed more money to scale.
So we lined up meetings: Dow Jones in New York, a couple of other companies in New York, and Hubbard Broadcasting in Minneapolis, one of the few radio companies that thought the technology might be worth investing in. My CFO at the time, Mark Dirsa, also needed to meet with the SEC, so we built our itinerary around all of it.
We booked rooms at the Marriott across the street. The plan was to meet for an 8:30 AM breakfast in Tower One of the World Trade Center, then go to the SEC meeting at Building 7, then head across the street to Dow Jones. From there, we’d handle our other New York meetings and fly to Minneapolis to meet with Hubbard.
But on Friday afternoon, Ginny Hubbard called to push our meeting back a week. That gave us two options: fly to New York on Monday, September 10, as planned, do our meetings on September 11th, then make a separate trip to Minneapolis a week later; or push everything, including the New York meetings, forward a week and handle it all in one trip. Though disappointed, I agreed and brought it to my team. We chose to push everything back.
On Tuesday, we watched the towers fall, knowing we would have all been in the building when it collapsed. My life, and the lives of my entire senior executive team, were spared because of one meeting cancellation. With one exception, all the buildings we were to be in, including our hotel, went down. Several of the people we were to meet with were killed.
My wife was pregnant with our triplets at the time, and I’ve had the privilege of raising my children, watching them grow up and become independent adults. I was granted 25 years.
I like to say Ginny Hubbard saved my life that day, and I owe her everything. That’s worth more than any investment we were chasing.
