Companies I Have Founded By Clark Benson [84 more lists]
I am a serial entrepreneur. Ranker is my 5th startup in 15 years, and I'm not looking to start anything else for awhile - Ranker is pretty ambitious, and there is a LOT more that we will be doing with this platform, I think it will keep me happily occupied for quite some time.
I try to start businesses that are involved in things I am really passionate about. It makes things a lot easier when you find yourself responding to emails at 11PM on a Friday night. As you can see, I'm pretty into music - most of my prior startups were in music, and Ranker includes music (as well as much more).. Being an entrepreneur is both one of the most rewarding and most stressful things one can do - at least if you are trying to really grow businesses (it's definitely possible to have a lifestyle business where you get tons of lifestyle flexibility, don't have to work crazy hours, and make a decent living, but if you are running multiple businesses or growth companies you had better be prepared to put in the long hours). I have found the personal rewards to be much greater, and the stress much less, when I am doing something I love.
When I get an idea for a business in my head, I tend to charge ahead. This is not always the smartest thing - at numerous times in my business career, particularly when i was in my 20s, I have found myself having bitten off more than I could chew. When that happens, the only way out of it is basically to work every waking hour, which I have had to do for long stretches on numerous occasions. It's easy, and human nature, to underestimate how much time it takes to build a business. At one point I had four businesses going at once, one of them halfway across the country. I would not recommend this to anyone, it's hard to focus when you have that much going on. Ranker is 98% of my focus at this point, and I've learned the lessons of dilution. I have a thing about finishing anything I start, so no more startups on the horizon (though I have lots of ideas that I'd be happy to give to someone else who is prepared to run with them)..
But charging ahead has paid off in the long haul, to be sure. It's my nature, and it's hard to change one's nature.
I also have always put my own money into my businesses - started doing this when I didn't know any better, and I guess I have still never really learned, ha. This can sometimes be painful. But then again I'd rather bet on myself than something I have less control over. So far it has all worked out in the end.
Yes, I rated them all "10s". Yes, I'm ridiculously biased. Would you rate your children any lower?
- 1
Ranker
2008 - present
You are here.
(welcome) -
- 2
eCrush
1999 - present (I exited when the company was sold to Hearst at the end of 2006)
I started eCrush with Karen DeMars and Amy Gibby in early 1999. I had a number of other businesses going but was seeing all the articles about kids cashing in on the dot.com craze, and frankly I wanted a piece of that.
eCrush started out as an early viral app on the web - it was a way to find out if someone you had a crush on also felt the same about you. By the time we sold, it was a totally different business, www.espin.com - a teen social network. The story of eCrush is summed up here pretty well: http://www.startup-review.com/blog/ecrush-case-study-why-timing-the-ma-market-is-tricky.php
The company was always based in a city other than my home of LA (Chicago, though the team moved to San Francisco for a year before the bubble burst). This is not something I would recommend, at least for a growth company, but we made it work. We had a very solid team, and although there were many times after the dot.com crash when I wished I hadn't started yet another business, in the end it all worked out. And the experience of taking meetings in the Bay Area dot.com world circa 2000, hearing landlords and even restaurant valets talking about their stock options, is one of those rare "interesting place at an interesting time" events I am glad to have experienced firsthand - it was every bit like that documentary startup.com - 3
Almighty Music Marketing
1999 - present
Almighty Music Marketing (www.almightymusicmarketing.com) is, yes, a music marketing company. It currently includes the ISIS Listening Stations, which are no longer a separate corporation. If you are in the music industry and looking for reasonably priced ways to gain exposure for your artists via a number of platforms, check out our website for more info.
Joel Oberstein is my partner in Almighty, and he runs the day to day. It's a small company and we do a number of different things, and we couldn't do them without the best team we've had of Vince Hans and Kelly Wilson (though I do miss Shannon Losorelli, who was a core member of the Almighty team from the time we launched - hope you are doing well Shannon).
Even if you aren't in the music industry, you should check out our product at www.newreleasesnow.com, an audio/video player showcasing all of the new album releases each week. It's a great way to quickly sample new tunes, all at one place.
At different points in time the company was named Almighty Lighted Display, then Almighty Institute of Music Retail. -
- 4
Off/Beat Music
1996 - 2001 (when I sold my share to my partner Rob; the business has since closed)
Off/Beat Music was a record store (well, it was mostly CDs) in Redondo Beach, CA. I had always wanted to open a record store (I had even written a business plan for a college entrepreneur class about it), so after I had made some money with my listening station business I opened this store up with my friend Rob who had been managing a record store that we had worked together at briefly when I first moved to SoCal.
It was a "labor of love", and frankly, in the end was much more labor than love. I never really got to enjoy the store (the location being 45mins from my house and where most of my friends lived didn't help matters), being too busy dealing with growing the business and various problems that one tends to have in retail. Lesson learned - don't start businesses for non-monetary reasons until you can really afford to be hands-off.
Still, it was a pretty great store for its time, and had a loyal local following. And it never lost money, though it didn't make all that much either. - 5
ISIS Listening Stations
1995 - present (has been merged into Almighty Music Marketing)
I had been working for Virgin Records (my dream had been to work in the record industry, along with the weather it was the reason I moved to LA from Chicago) for a few years, but was realizing that moving up in the record industry would have more to do with luck and connections than skill, so I started looking around for an opportunity to do something entrepreneurial. I looked into managing a few unsigned bands (in retrospect, I do not have the temperment for artist management), but then I saw an opening when I saw a spreadsheet of the marketing dollars the labels were spending to get listening station placement at Tower Records and other chains. So I basically worked every waking minute I wasn't at my job for about 5 months, found a backer to supply the hardware (in retrospect I didn't cut a very good deal at all, but I was young), and put together a program that put listening stations in independent record stores, billing the labels for placement. At our peak we had 165 stores, though given record retail consolidations we are down to half that now.
My 1995 is pretty much a total blur as I drove U-Hauls all over the country setting these things up, sometimes sleeping just 4-5 hours a night, then scrambling to get back to LA so I could do the sales.I had no mentorship or guidance and it took awhile before it dawned on me that I should hire some help (Paul Pearson, a great guy and fellow music fanatic). I was an entrepreneur, making a lot more than my $30K/year salary at Virgin, and promoting a lot of cool music from indie and major labels in an era when there was real passion about the kind of music that would "break" out of college radio and indie record stores.
Post a Comment
Companies I Have Founded at 4/30/2010 7:01 AM
eCrush at 2/16/2011 6:36 PM