Schedule a meeting with the man who co-founded one of the most well-known Internet-related businesses in Nashville, and you might expect a certain amount of pomp, circumstance, and pretension.
Walking up to the stately red-brick Harpeth Valley Drive offices of Monster Labs for a meeting with Tim Moses—co-founder of Telalink, a local Internet service provider launched in 1993 and sold to PSINet in 1999—you might expect all that. Step inside, and you find something altogether different. Against one wall stand an organ and an aquarium. Hanging on another is a dartboard, beside the structurally reinforced beginnings of what soon will become a “climbing wall.”
And in the middle of all this sits a sock-footed Moses, dressed in a button-down shirt pulled over a T. Although he’s an investor in and co-founder of the company, his title is neither president nor CEO. It’s “programmer.” Like most of the pierced and ponytailed people around him, he stares into his Mac’s monitor, typing with one hand and cradling the telephone to his ear with another. And when he looks up and notices his 2 p.m. appointment standing there, he puts down the phone, grins, and offers the grand tour.
“This is it,” he says, spreading his arms outward. “This is Monster Labs.”
Monster Labs is actually the parent name for two Internet-related services: SiteMason (www.sitemason.com), a Web applications company offering tools for Web designers to increase functionality on their sites, and moses.com (www.moses.com), a Web hosting company, offering a range of Web functions, storage space, and e-mail accounts for businesses.
Any would-be Internet entrepreneur can farm out those services from any large hosting company nowadays. Even the Web “portals” such as Netscape and MSN offer some tools for Web development and design. So what’s the big difference?
The distinction, as Moses points out, is that SiteMason and moses.com are providing more sophisticated tools than the portals, and doing it with the talents of just 12 people, nine of whom were with Telalink before its absorption into PSINet. And there’s one thing about the Telalink people: They’ve always had a reputation for knowing their business and having the answers.
“We wrote all the SiteMason Web tools ourselves,” Moses says. “We have a lot of talented people here. Most of them came from Telalink, and many of the tools we have here were developed at Telalink.” When they sold the company to PSINet, Moses and his partners decided to keep the tools, which allow SiteMason users to add functions—polls, feedback forms, news pages, media information pages, and more—all without writing a single line of code. Also in development, Moses says, are an e-commerce package and a discussion forum tool.
“It makes things easier for the Web designers,” he says. “That’s our target group with SiteMason. They can focus on the design of the site and not worry about how to make it work.”
For instance, Moses demonstrates how to create a poll on a Web site by selecting that tool in SiteMason. He types his question in one form field (in this case, “What’s the best newspaper in Nashville?”) and the possible answers in another (“Nashville Scene, The Tennessean, City Paper, Nashville Business Journal”). He uses a built-in color picker to decide on the proper appearance for his poll. Then he just has to decide whether he wants the results to appear as a bar graph or a pie chart. (The poll test produces a bar graph showing the Scene as the best newspaper, with 100 percent of the votes and one person voting.) Then he clicks a button, which shows him a preview of the tool. Clicking one more button generates the code he needs to place the poll on his Web page.
The moses.com service actually resembles Telalink more than SiteMason, providing customers with traditional Web hosting services that include storage space, FTP access, e-mail accounts, and more, depending upon the level of service requested. What it doesn’t provide, though, is actual Internet connectivity. Like many Internet entrepreneurs, Moses and the other founders of Monster Labs (Tim Conner and Andrew Webber, both of whom were involved in Telalink) seem to realize that it’s time for telecommunications companies to handle connectivity and someone else to handle what to do with it.
In spite of that knowledge, dot-com disasters remain very prolific. Virtually every day there’s a new headline about a tech start-up with millions of investment dollars circling the drain. But the dot-com failures don’t seem to bother the Monster Labs team. They may have kept the casual office formula—what with the climbing wall and the fish tank—but unlike many of the failed dot-com entrepreneurs, Moses and company knew going in they needed a profitable product.
“I don’t worry about the dot-com climate,” Moses says. “A lot of the failure of the dot-coms comes from people who were just looking for a way to sell to investors, without planning for profit. That’s not the approach we took with Telalink, and that’s not the approach we’re taking. We’re going to grow steadily and make this company work.”
So far, the formula’s working. SiteMason launched on Jan. 1. In that short time, it’s grown a customer base ranging from local businesses to its largest customer—in Palestine. Monster Labs itself is actually a year old, although most of the work leading up to the SiteMason launch was back-end development.
Meanwhile, Telalink’s doors closed for good a couple of weeks ago. The loss of the superior technical support and reliability of that company as a local ISP will be felt by many. But Nashvillians can take comfort that the same group that helped make Nashville one of the most wired cities in the nation is now charging forward with that reputation worldwide.
