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Science Forum Index » Medicine - Lyme Forum » his wife, who is unable to work due to Lyme
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 Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 1:12 pm |
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ReinventYourself.com
Where'd the dotshots of the '90s land?
Suzanne Leigh
Sunday, January 14, 2007
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In the halcyon days of the late '90s, dot-coms redefined both the
workplace and, for a brief time, even the Bay Area itself. But when the
Nasdaq bubble burst, fired employees fled Dodge and filed back to
brick-and-mortar companies, rents plunged, "For Lease" signs dotted
SoMa, and ritzy restaurants retooled their menus. But what of the
entrepreneurial upstarts behind those startups? Some seemed to fizzle
into obscurity, but others started new life chapters. The Magazine
talks to six of those who began anew.
Stuart Skorman
Dot-com heyday: Founder of Reel.com.
Today: Picking up the pieces after Elephant Pharmacy. Autobiography
"Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur: Why I Can't Stop Starting Over"
(Jossey-Bass) will be published Feb. 1.
At face value, Stuart Skorman might defy most people's vision of a
dotshot. He's decades older, 58, than many of his cohorts who stormed
the scene in those heady days. In 1997 the Noe Valley resident launched
an online video store with an extensive movie-review database called
Reel.com. Skorman started it with a meager $2 million and a shaky
knowledge of the Internet (to this day, he's uncomfortable with
e-mail). The Berkeley company, which later shifted to Emeryville, soon
got venture capital funding thanks to Skorman's marketing pizzazz, but
behind-the-scenes operations were less than smooth. "Pull back the
curtain and they'd see a scrawny guy yanking on wires and pushing on
buttons," he says.
Two years later the Akron, Ohio, native wisely sold Reel.com to
Hollywood Entertainment for close to $100 million. The deal made him a
multimillionaire, but on paper left a quarter of a billion-dollar dent
in the wallet of new CEO Mark Wattles when stocks plunged due to
long-standing technology problems and mounting competition from Amazon.
Soon Skorman was immersed in a new venture, the online learning site
HungryMinds.com. When that failed, Skorman and his wife, Diana Rocha ,
a former software engineer, indulged in a rare personal extravagance, a
yachting vacation in the South Pacific with friends and family. It was
the perfect opportunity to mull over his latest dream -- a drugstore
with a difference called Elephant Pharmacy.
For Skorman, the college-dropout son of a Jewish discount chain-store
owner, Elephant would be about botanical cosmetics, organic food and
flowers, alternative medicine as well as a regular pharmacy mainstay.
Health-conscious Boomers would pick up their Lipitor prescription and
consult with herbalists and estheticians about treatments for hot
flashes, lackluster libidos and crow's feet. There would be free
lectures on stress, infant massage and lower-back pain.
Skorman's vision was realized in 2002 when Elephant Pharmacy opened in
-- where else? -- Berkeley. Soon he talked about a vast herd of
Elephants redefining the drugstore experience, throughout California
and beyond.
But almost immediately it all came crashing down.
"I started a project that was too big. I got in over my head," says
Skorman, a self-diagnosed "adrenaline-junkie with adult ADD," who says
he is "an artist, not a manager." Elephant was wowing the
Birkenstock-shod Berkeley crowds, but it was losing more than $50,000
per week, thanks to HMOs squeezing the profits out of prescriptions and
the cost of maintaining two pharmacies and diverse merchandise. Skorman
had drained 90 percent of his life savings and balked at breaking into
funds earmarked for the care of his 85-year-old mother with dementia
and his wife, who is unable to work due to Lyme disease. In 2003
Skorman was in talks with CVS Pharmacy and JP Morgan. By 2005 he handed
over the leadership to new CEO Kathi Lentzsch, formerly of Pottery Barn
and Pier 1 Imports. He stepped down as chairman in March and lately has
recouped some of his millions by selling his Elephant stock.
A legal agreement prohibits Skorman from talking about developments
after an initial meeting with a CVS executive, but it's a reasonable
assumption that the three stores -- two more have opened in San Rafael
and Los Altos -- have lost some of the look and feel of his blueprint.
(At least two veteran staffers concur, according to business review
site Yelp. "Good company gone bad and heading for worse yet," says one
poster, citing "tacky knickknacks" and an exodus of "long-term loyal
employees" as reasons for their dissatisfaction. "We [have] not been
given anywhere near the same stake in the store's growth as we used to
have," says another.)
The Elephant experience is almost too painful for Skorman to talk
about. "I just wanted to help the world," he says at one point.
But the pain soon dissipates and Skorman is once again re-energized and
pumped. His autobiography, a ripping page-turner covering earlier lives
as a professional poker player, a rock band manager and
entrepreneur-in-training at grocery store Bread & Circus, will be
published next month. He's even flirting with writing a book about
Hitler. But his immediate future is focused on two projects: A second
book, "Stuart's MBA for Start-Ups" and 2.0 version of Reel with movie
reviews by professionals and amateur guides.
The latter venture is the one that incites the most enthusiasm. It
provides him, perhaps, with the chance to relive the rollercoaster of
Reel -- a golden age that offered him a steady fix in what he most
needs to sustain him: adrenaline.
"Stuart's a bona fide creative genius," says big brother Marvin
Skorman, a psychotherapist in Rochester, N.Y., who worked
intermittently as Reel's unofficial CTO. "He's massively kind,
massively loyal. When Reel was sold, he took money out of his own
pocket for employees who weren't vested. When he worked in Vermont [as
a video store owner] there was zero staff turnover, even cinema
professors worked as clerks there."
But what of the challenges of working with his serial entrepreneur
sibling?
"Stuart's mind works differently," says Skorman, 60. "He's moved on and
you haven't. Working with him is like playing chess with someone who
makes decisions that you can't comprehend. But 10 moves later, you
understand why he did what he did." |
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