Launch - Spring 2008 - (Page 28) entrepreneurs are wired 24/7 to think of ways to make money. The chairman of our company, Brent Bishop, is very much that way and he is in my office several times a week to talk about new ideas that he has. Jack Sunderlage: My name is Jack Sunderlage and I am president and CEO of ContentWatch. I had the opportunity to join ContentWatch in 2005 and had been on the Board of Directors for a few months prior to that time. Before ContentWatch, I had a very long career in the IT industry for some 40 years that extended from Burrows Corporation, which we know today as Unisys, and then with Digital Equipment, who was acquired by Compaq Computer and then acquired by Hewlett Packard. I only made one job change during all those years but I had the opportunity to work for five different companies. I took an early retirement from Hewlett Packard and at the time was vice president of our global accounts for the west region. In terms of community involvement, I have been involved with the Utah Information Technology Association (UITA), which we know today as the Utah Technology Council (UTC), and was one of the founders of that back in 1991. I have had a lot of experience to interact with the community there. I was the chairman of the board of trustees there for a period of time. I’m also involved with the World Trade Center Utah. We want to make Utah more of an international player. I am serving as chairman of the board of directors right now. We have had a great experience thus far bringing the private sector and government together. Jerry Ropelato: I am the CEO of TopTenREVIEWS, an Internet company that reviews technology and entertainment. I have been involved with seven different startups over my entire career, four of which still exist today. One of those was ContentWatch. Jack: Jerry, I have been impressed with what you have done with TopTenREVIEWS and it looks to me like you have a wonderful market opportunity. Could you talk about how you started the company, what your vision was and what it is today? 28 launch spring Jerry: When we first started, it was to be an Internet marketing consulting company. On the side, I used to do a lot of Internet safety seminars and one of the questions I was always asked was what is the best Internet filter out there? One day I sat down and I put a little Web site together to answer that question and we had some good success with that so we built a second product site and a third and a fourth and about three months into our company, we realized we were having more fun building review sites. We actually threw out our 50-page business plan and changed the name of the company. We headed in a new direction and we have never looked back since. It was an interesting way to start a company. Jack: Business plans have to be a living document and I can speak from experience here that we have had to modify what we originally thought our company was going to be and where we are headed today. When you started TopTenREVIEWS did you have to bootstrap the company? Jerry: That is exactly what we did. Out of the 12 co-founders, none of us started out full time. I very quickly became one of the full timers. My wife pulled me aside as we got this going and she said, “I’ll let you go one year without a salary, but that is it. If you can’t make a salary within a year then we are done.” Guess what? I held her to that entire year right to the day. We have never taken an investment round as far as growing our company and we were very frugal when we started. At first, we were a virtual company so everyone worked from home. We would have our staff meetings on Saturday mornings at Village Inn. Even today we are a very frugal company. Our offices are in a 70-year-old warehouse and we still use a lot of plastic worktables. That has allowed us to be a profitable company and grow very quickly. So Jack, tell me a little bit about what traits you think makes for a successful entrepreneur vs. maybe the traits of a great leader. Do you think they are different? Jack: I think that is definitely the case in small business vs. a larger corporation. I was fascinated by a presentation by Jeff Dyre, who is on the faculty of BYU’s Marriott School, and Clayton Christensen who we know from Harvard Business School who wrote “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “The Innovator’s Solution.”
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.