Marc Colando. Small Business Person of the Year Finalist. Patent holder.
Strategizer, innovator, online architect and developer. Twicefunded entrepreneur.
Marc Colando
I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been a bit of a geek before geeky was cool. I made my first profit from a computer program at age 11. Since then, I’ve worked hard to innovate new products and launch successful companies.
My first startup, Interactive Planet, Inc. (IPI), got started in Atlanta a few years before the Web 1.0 craze. We generally did big jobs for big clients – things like launching the first Kodak photo sharing site with IBM, bring Coca-Cola’s marketing intranet online, launching the US Marine Corps on the Web, and architecting and deploying online banking for NationsBank and Bank of America.
Bank of America Ventures purchased 10% of IPI’s capital stock for US$8.3mm in 2000. About 15 IPI employees moved into the bank as full-time employees as part of this deal, and many ex-IPI’ers are still in online leadership positions there today. IPI itself is still around as ipi.net, serving a select client base and licensing intellectual property.
In 2006, I took a hiatus from ipi.net to launch Tape It Off The Internet, a.k.a.TIOTI. The abstract idea of combining social media with television content came from a former IPI freelancer in London. In a little over a year, I brought together the legal, technical and partner talent that landed the site Series A funding.
TIOTI launched to rave reviews and attracted over 1 million unique visitors in the first 30 days. Ultimately, my co-founder’s “yin” and my “yang” were a bad fit and I left to do new things.
TIOTI was < a href=”http://newteevee.com/2008/12/05/vizimo-acquires-tioti/”>acquired after trying to follow the Twitter example of purposely eschewing revenue to leave valuation vague and immeasurable for future investors. I didn’t like the no revenue startup model when I left TIOTI, and I still like to imagine a business – not just a product or service – when I’m launching something new.
Today, I’ve got about a half dozen patents filed or pending. My patent for “Systems and Methods for Extracting and Adapting Data” was awarded by the USPTO in June, 2009. This patent covers some of what evolved from the Glue™ and ChannelCart™ products at ipi.net. I’m working on turning some of the pending patents, and some about-to-be-filed ideas, into businesses that I’ll announce here as things evolve.
Last, but now least, I’m lucky to have a beautiful and talented wife and two great kids, but more about that on the personal site I keep promising to do one of these days…