Thursday, February 19, 2009
Poker
I spent some of this week playing poker in Las Vegas. I'm traveling with my friend Shannon, who is a semi-pro poker player from Canada (also known as "America's Hat").
Last night I played at the MGM Grand, in the nicest poker room that Shannon or I have seen so far. Alanis Morissette showed up, and I sat next to her for a while. I can report that Alanis is not, at the present time, a poker pro. However, she is personable and gracious.
The $16 I got from Alanis in a side pot (where we both lost the main pot) wasn't enough to offset my losing hands... I ended up a couple hundred dollars down at the end of a long and otherwise enjoyable night. But I had fun, and Shannon brought home over $1200, so all's well.
Last night I played at the MGM Grand, in the nicest poker room that Shannon or I have seen so far. Alanis Morissette showed up, and I sat next to her for a while. I can report that Alanis is not, at the present time, a poker pro. However, she is personable and gracious.
The $16 I got from Alanis in a side pot (where we both lost the main pot) wasn't enough to offset my losing hands... I ended up a couple hundred dollars down at the end of a long and otherwise enjoyable night. But I had fun, and Shannon brought home over $1200, so all's well.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Stockroom.com
This past week, the weird little company that I founded in 1988 received an award from Cybersocket, a gay search engine and online sex info magazine, for "Best Adult Novelties Site." That was for the all-male version of our website, MaleStockroom.com. The award was one of their "Surfer's Choice" categories, which means we were chosen by a popular vote of Cybersocket users. I was proud to see that our company has been able to address that key segment of our market in a way that speaks to them and meets with their approval. Anne-Marie, who is part of our marketing team, accepted the award with me and our company president, Mike, at her side. The trophy was a cool, heavy glass obelisk.
Then last night, in front of a somewhat rowdy crowd at the XBiz Awards, I accepted another cool, heavy glass obelisk for Stockroom.com, which was chosen as Web Retailer of the Year.
I liked getting the award, and the cool obelisk which is now on display in our company offices, both of which seem to provide some validation and morale lift to the staff. I enjoyed the opportunity to address the crowd of adult internet businesspeople in Hollywood for a minute, and to plug our new & improved affiliate program which will launch in the coming weeks. But the one thing I found most noteworthy about receiving the Xbiz award was actually the response of the crowd when our company name was called out as the winner. These are adult internet people, and at an event like this, they multitask. The typical attendee is networking, chatting, pimping, negotiating, flirting, promoting, drinking, joking around, and dancing all at the same time. They've seen everything before. It's hard to command more than a fraction of their attention at once. But when our company name was announced, I was surprised to hear the crowd respond as a group with such considerable volume. Without doing 300 interviews, or taking a detailed survey, here is how I interpreted that groundswell of applause: They know who we are, they have met us, they have toured our operations, they know something about our story, and they know what we do and how we do it. We have made a mark in our industry.
I have to say it was a little surreal being up in front of all those people in 2009, my twentieth year doing business on the internet, contemplating how the adult internet business today has conventions and magazines and award shows devoted to it...
... because it was something I started doing in 1989, when there was literally not one other person I knew who was marketing sex toys on the internet...
... or doing adult business in general on the internet ...
... or doing business of ANY kind on the internet ...
In fact, if there is ANY e-commerce company on earth that has been in business as long as Stockroom (originally known as JT Toys), I don't know what it is. There must be a couple of others who have been around since those days and still exist in some form, but I can't say who or where they are.
In 1989, or '90, or '93, the internet itself was still kind of an underground phenomenon, and doing business there even more so, to the extent of even being kind of a gray area of the law and the customs that existed there at that time. When I started marketing online, and having some initial successes, it felt like my little secret, and I wasn't in any great hurry for other companies to discover that the internet even existed. It was like being the first to explore an underground cavern or a new island. But it was also a little lonely, and felt risky as well. In those days, the internet was primarily government funded and supposedly non-commercial. Internet law had yet to be developed. As silly as it sounds now, it seemed quite possible in those days that the government might crack down on internet business (restricting it or taxing it to death). And adult e-commerce in particular was dicey. There were laws passed which would have decimated Stockroom's online business. COPA (the so-called Child Online Protection Act), which would have required any person who visited our website to enter a credit card number as proof of age before even being allowed to look at our site. Had the Supreme Court not struck that law down as unconstitutional before it could be enforced, my company (like many others) would not be what it is today, and quite likely would have folded.
Today, everyone's heard of the internet, everyone knows about it, and most people I know are online, and making purchases there. The ubiquitous presence of adult content on the internet is taken for granted. People may variously disparage and lament it, joke about it, curiously explore it, pay for it, steal it, share it, enjoy it, and consume it. But society has so far not collapsed because of online sex images, information, products and commerce. For better or worse, it's hard to imagine now that anyone ever thought the internet would or could ever exist without all that sex content. Moreover, the adult industry is fairly well recognized today as having often led the way in terms of developing online business models and internet applications in general.
I'm glad now that I started a business when I was 21, and did whatever I had to do to keep it together over the next two decades, through so many challenges, upheavals, and evolutionary changes, because now I can be founder/CEO of a 20-year-old corporation and still only be 41 years old, feeling reasonably youthful. I paid a lot of dues and did a lot of grunt work -- as much as I had to give -- but I am taking it a little easier now, especially since Mike came on board. (Mike is a perpetual motion machine, obsessively focused on driving the company forward in a way that I used to be, while I have gratefully taken a step back and found some breathing room.)
Watching so many communities, companies, phenomena, and movements explode out of that secret, underground, weird, geeky, text-based, yet-to-be-defined internet that I knew in the 1980s and early 90s has been fascinating. Surveying and exploring that wild frontier on the back of the Stockroom horse has been a life-defining experience, and a rare privilege.
It's nice to have colleagues, support, business partners, peers, customers, suppliers, fans, and even imitators, and to have seen an industry take shape and grow. But I've also come to see that in the world of business, as in the universe in general, all things are in flux at all times. Adaptation, evolution, and innovation are what's happening, and what is needed to continue to thrive.
Time for a new horse. Or, time to turn the horse into a land rover, a tank, a jet, or a spaceship. I'm 41 now. I'm still young enough to find another new frontier before I retire. Maybe two. I have a few ideas. We'll see what happens.
Then last night, in front of a somewhat rowdy crowd at the XBiz Awards, I accepted another cool, heavy glass obelisk for Stockroom.com, which was chosen as Web Retailer of the Year.
I liked getting the award, and the cool obelisk which is now on display in our company offices, both of which seem to provide some validation and morale lift to the staff. I enjoyed the opportunity to address the crowd of adult internet businesspeople in Hollywood for a minute, and to plug our new & improved affiliate program which will launch in the coming weeks. But the one thing I found most noteworthy about receiving the Xbiz award was actually the response of the crowd when our company name was called out as the winner. These are adult internet people, and at an event like this, they multitask. The typical attendee is networking, chatting, pimping, negotiating, flirting, promoting, drinking, joking around, and dancing all at the same time. They've seen everything before. It's hard to command more than a fraction of their attention at once. But when our company name was announced, I was surprised to hear the crowd respond as a group with such considerable volume. Without doing 300 interviews, or taking a detailed survey, here is how I interpreted that groundswell of applause: They know who we are, they have met us, they have toured our operations, they know something about our story, and they know what we do and how we do it. We have made a mark in our industry.
I have to say it was a little surreal being up in front of all those people in 2009, my twentieth year doing business on the internet, contemplating how the adult internet business today has conventions and magazines and award shows devoted to it...
... because it was something I started doing in 1989, when there was literally not one other person I knew who was marketing sex toys on the internet...
... or doing adult business in general on the internet ...
... or doing business of ANY kind on the internet ...
In fact, if there is ANY e-commerce company on earth that has been in business as long as Stockroom (originally known as JT Toys), I don't know what it is. There must be a couple of others who have been around since those days and still exist in some form, but I can't say who or where they are.
In 1989, or '90, or '93, the internet itself was still kind of an underground phenomenon, and doing business there even more so, to the extent of even being kind of a gray area of the law and the customs that existed there at that time. When I started marketing online, and having some initial successes, it felt like my little secret, and I wasn't in any great hurry for other companies to discover that the internet even existed. It was like being the first to explore an underground cavern or a new island. But it was also a little lonely, and felt risky as well. In those days, the internet was primarily government funded and supposedly non-commercial. Internet law had yet to be developed. As silly as it sounds now, it seemed quite possible in those days that the government might crack down on internet business (restricting it or taxing it to death). And adult e-commerce in particular was dicey. There were laws passed which would have decimated Stockroom's online business. COPA (the so-called Child Online Protection Act), which would have required any person who visited our website to enter a credit card number as proof of age before even being allowed to look at our site. Had the Supreme Court not struck that law down as unconstitutional before it could be enforced, my company (like many others) would not be what it is today, and quite likely would have folded.
Today, everyone's heard of the internet, everyone knows about it, and most people I know are online, and making purchases there. The ubiquitous presence of adult content on the internet is taken for granted. People may variously disparage and lament it, joke about it, curiously explore it, pay for it, steal it, share it, enjoy it, and consume it. But society has so far not collapsed because of online sex images, information, products and commerce. For better or worse, it's hard to imagine now that anyone ever thought the internet would or could ever exist without all that sex content. Moreover, the adult industry is fairly well recognized today as having often led the way in terms of developing online business models and internet applications in general.
I'm glad now that I started a business when I was 21, and did whatever I had to do to keep it together over the next two decades, through so many challenges, upheavals, and evolutionary changes, because now I can be founder/CEO of a 20-year-old corporation and still only be 41 years old, feeling reasonably youthful. I paid a lot of dues and did a lot of grunt work -- as much as I had to give -- but I am taking it a little easier now, especially since Mike came on board. (Mike is a perpetual motion machine, obsessively focused on driving the company forward in a way that I used to be, while I have gratefully taken a step back and found some breathing room.)
Watching so many communities, companies, phenomena, and movements explode out of that secret, underground, weird, geeky, text-based, yet-to-be-defined internet that I knew in the 1980s and early 90s has been fascinating. Surveying and exploring that wild frontier on the back of the Stockroom horse has been a life-defining experience, and a rare privilege.
It's nice to have colleagues, support, business partners, peers, customers, suppliers, fans, and even imitators, and to have seen an industry take shape and grow. But I've also come to see that in the world of business, as in the universe in general, all things are in flux at all times. Adaptation, evolution, and innovation are what's happening, and what is needed to continue to thrive.
Time for a new horse. Or, time to turn the horse into a land rover, a tank, a jet, or a spaceship. I'm 41 now. I'm still young enough to find another new frontier before I retire. Maybe two. I have a few ideas. We'll see what happens.
