This is the story of an entrepreneur who couldn’t raise venture capital even when investors were doling it out like Monopoly bills.
When his peers were writing business plans for billion-dollar Internet companies, Joe Born was plugging away with a patent for a low-tech gadget he thought might bring in $7 million in sales and enough profit to finance more products.
He’s a young man with a square jaw and a wrestler’s build who never set out to build a fortune, though a 50-year-old sales vet who joined him says, “I told Joe I hitched my wagon to him because I knew he would make me rich.”
He probably will.
Born’s company, Digital Innovations LLC in Lincolnwood, is growing as fast as many Internet start-ups during the boom–and a lot more profitably.
More Top Picks How To Get A Dyslexia Diagnosis For Your Child
What turns Born on isn’t money or even technology. The 33-year-old is happiest building a business with people like himself who see the company as a way to their dreams.
The spark for his company came when Born was an engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, working part time at an auto body shop.
His roommate’s favorite CD was skipping badly, so Born used the auto shop’s polishing wheel to sand off the scratches. His repair worked, and he filed for a patent.
He was mulling a couple of ideas when he moved back home to his parents’ basement in Lincolnwood.
In the end, it was his scratch-remover patent that propelled him into a cubicle at the Evanston Research Park about the time the Internet boom was taking off.
The park’s stars were software start-ups. Nobody got excited about a plastic device shaped like a hand sander, called SkipDoctor, financed with a meager $15,000 from friends and family.
The exception was Collin Anderson, a University of Chicago MBA who signed on as co-founder in 1996.
Bruce Borenstein, the sales vet who hitched his wagon to Born, recalls the pair showing up at his office in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1998, driving a Chevy Nova with one working windshield wiper and cardboard covering a window.
They needed a sales rep who could get SkipDoctor into stores.
Two demos failed–their SkipDoctor prototype was acting up–but Borenstein smelled a winner.
He thought the market was much bigger than music stores–SkipDoctor repairs DVDs and CD-ROMs, too–and he assembled a contract sales force in 30 days.
A low point came when they’d raised $80,000–again from friends and family–to start production. Born discovered SkipDoctor ruined disks running longer than 68 minutes.
A summer intern joked that they could label the product “For novelty use only.” Born retooled.
Today, various SkipDoctor models are sold in 22,000 stores from Best Buy to Circuit City.
Digital Innovations broke even in 2000 with $5 million in sales. This year, with 33 employees, it’s looking to do $35 million.
The company recently began selling to Wal-Mart after turning down the chain’s advances last year because it wasn’t ready to meet potential volumes.
It’s getting ready to roll out a new product, I-Spot, a device with a transmitter that beeps to locate misplaced items like keys. There are more in the works.
Born, chairman and chief technology officer, leads a team developing a digital music device. Just as he’d hoped, SkipDoctor’s profits are financing his R&D.
You’ll find him in a far corner of his company’s nondescript leased offices on North Cicero Avenue.
The plastic veneer is peeling off a corner of his desk. His black file cabinet is dented. Project timetables are taped to a wall. His laptop is open next to two Thermoses: one coffee, one water.
He’s not sorry he couldn’t raise venture capital because friend and family backing was a powerful motivator. “In our hearts, it was very personal,” he says.
It still is. “It’s not about how many yachts you can buy. It’s about allowing people to achieve their own dreams by working together.”
Born’s dream? He’s living it.
More Top Picks Hard Drive
———-
Contact [email protected]