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SPINNER'S GOT BUZZ
By Peter D. Henig
Red Herring Online
July 30, 1998
Forget schmoozing -- Hollywood's all about buzz. And
when you've got it, you know it. Spinner.com's got it.
The two-year-old company could be the poster child for
Silicon Valley's new media startups.
But don't mistake it for the next Broadcast.com (BCST),
because this company's less like a radio broadcaster and
much more like your own private DJ -- and you don't
even need to throw a bar mitzvah.
While David Samuel, Spinner.com's founder and chief
executive officer, might look younger than his 26 years
would suggest, this Opie clone and future gazillionaire
knows exactly how to play Silicon Valley's tune. We sat
down for a chat at the Herring on Hollywood conference
in Santa Monica, where the buzz around Spinner was
turned up high.
Weddings and bar mitzvahs
Red Herring Online: Tell us about Spinner.com, and
then we'll get to how rich you're going to be.
David Samuel: (Laughs.) Spinner used to be
TheDJ.com. In junior high school I started a mobile disk
jockey service called Sounds Unlimited, and I built it up
through high school and college. I had two guys working
for me doing weddings and bar mitzvahs. It was fun.
Herring: So you started out as a DJ?
Samuel: Yep. Then I went to MIT, and then worked at
Oracle. So if you mix it all together, you've got
Spinner.com.
Herring: So it was like, poof, you had an epiphany, "I
want to start an Internet company?"
Samuel: Actually it was. I graduated in June 1994 from
MIT. I was supposed to stay there another year and do
my masters in electrical engineering, but Oracle's got this
great recruiting program so they flew us out to California
for a weekend. They've got a beautiful campus and we
had a great time, so I just decided to go to Oracle. And I
stayed there until February 1996.
But I remember the date distinctly, it was January 11,
1996. I had just started using [RealNetworks'] (RNWK)
RealAudio and I said, "Hey, we can do digital radio on
the Internet," and by February I'd left the company.
Herring: And that was it? You guys just quit?
Samuel: It's a typical Silicon Valley startup story. We
quit our jobs -- myself, my fraternity brother Steve Levis,
and my brother-in-law, Bryant Lewis -- and we had a
three-story house where we started TheDJ.com. The
basement was our office, we dropped an ISDN line in
there, and it was that way for about a year.
Herring: Ok, but how did you live, eat, pay rent, all of
that?
Samuel: We started shopping the idea around to some
of the Silicon Valley law firms, and we had a small nest
egg, some family money. It was really exciting. We
launched the service in 1996 and were already being
approached by several companiess to buy us out.
Herring: Buy what? You guys didn't even have a
business.
Samuel: We had five offer letters for an acquisition. I
can't tell you from whom, but it was in the seven-figure
range, which was amazing for us and really tempting
because we had only been in business for six months,
and we didn't even have any revenues.
Herring: It's almost ridiculous.
Samuel: And hard to turn down. But we felt we hadn't
really stood up yet, so we decided to go with a round of
financing. And I'm very glad we made that decision. We
got some more money from friends and family, and also
some from the CEO of one of the companies that
wanted to buy us out. That was our series A round. Then
in August 1997, Chris Anderson from Imagine Media
invested in us, which was our Series B, and then in April
of this year we closed our Series C round which was
several million dollars.
Herring: Who did that deal?
David Samuel: That was IDG Ventures, Arts Alliance,
Allen & Co., Bennett Media, and Phoenix Partners.
Just spinning songs
Herring: You've got to be loving it. You have all this
attention, all this financing, and Broadcast.com (BCST)
just had the greatest single one-day rise of any IPO in%