SITE SEER | Cyber visionary turns dot coms into gold

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Kathryn Balint
STAFF WRITER

07-Sep-2000 Thursday

John Carrieri

John Carrieri could have been peddling coffee beans to college students right now instead of reigning over an empire of dot coms.

But the University of San Diego shot down his coffee cart idea.

So he came up with other big ideas. One was staking a claim in cyberspace.

o o o

The year was 1995, and Carrieri was just four years out of college. The Internet as we know it was just beginning to take off, and, for $70 a pop, anybody could buy a dot-com address on the Web.

But who would shell out cash for a piece of virtual real estate that most people didn't even have access to?

Carrieri, who grew up in Arizona sweeping floors for his dad's construction business and dishing up fettuccine for his mother's restaurant, was that kind of risk taker. An entrepreneur. A visionary.

"I have more ideas than time in the day," he says.

This time, there was no one to shoot him down.

o o o

Any good trailblazer has a plan. Carrieri mapped his by asking himself, "What are the things that are most important to people's lives?"

A thousand ideas sprang to mind. Love, work, humor, education, money.

He got it all down on a spreadsheet.

The simplest, most generic words, he decided, were the best.

The trick was getting there first.

America Online, it turned out, had already snatched love.com.

But Carrieri nabbed jobs.com, colleges.com and bars.com.

"I literally was jumping up and down," he said.

A big Internet company beat him to download.com by just a few hours.

Later, he added jokes.com, democracy.com, campaign.com, tequila.com and heartattack.com to his portfolio.

When someone else already owned an address that Carrieri wanted, he'd talk them into selling it to him. The process sometimes took months of give and take.

Carrieri has long been the consummate negotiator.

His buddy, Michael Slentz, recalls hailing a cab with Carrieri during a rainstorm in Greece years ago. As Slentz tells the story, Carrieri wouldn't get in the car, out of the rain, until he settled the price with the driver.

Slentz got soaked while Carrieri had fun haggling.

"Will you just get in the damn cab?" Slentz finally ordered. "I'll pay the $7."

o o o

Carrieri, 31, is an unlikely dot-com multi-millionaire.

He wasn't particularly savvy with computers. He didn't have any special talent for writing software. Nor did he have a penchant for investing in the stock market.

What he did have was gumption and business acumen.

With his fascination for trademarks and his knack for negotiating, he almost went into law, except that, after his proposal to sell coffee fell through, he landed a job selling computers out of a tiny Kearny Mesa shop.

Within two months, he said, he was the company's No. 2 salesman.

"The only reason I wasn't No. 1 was because the No. 1 salesman had the Navy account," he said.

When his customers needed service on their computers, Carrieri offered to help. Trouble was, he didn't know his way around the inside of a computer. He hired the No. 1 salesman to teach him.

By the time he learned how to add memory and install new hard drives, Carrieri quit his sales job to get hands-on experience running a computer system for a pharmaceutical firm. Before long, he left to start his own company, Structure Computers, out of the spare bedroom of his Carmel Valley apartment.

From the vantage point of that consulting business, Carrieri saw the phenomenal potential of the Internet. He plunged in as a speculator in dot-com names.

o o o

These days, a good Internet address doesn't come cheap.

Although you can still register an address for $70 or less, the best ones were snagged by the end of 1996. Folks like Carrieri, who were smart enough to have gotten in on the action early, are asking astounding figures for their prime real estate: $1 million and up, sometimes for nothing more than the name.

Last month, San Diego-based Venture Catalyst sold CyberWorks.com, a name it no longer needs, for $1 million. Before that, beauty.com snatched $1 million, loans.com sold for $3 million and business.com went for $7.5 million.

"The old American Dream used to be to write the killer software application," said Ellen Rony, a Marin County author who co-wrote "The Domain Name Handbook: High Stakes and Strategies in Cyberspace." "The new American dream is to get the killer domain name and sell it for big bucks."

Carrieri instinctively knew how to play the game.

In his mind, it was almost a sure bet that his collection of virtual real estate would someday be as valuable as a real, honest-to-goodness plot of land. If he'd had more money at the time, he said, he would have bought "thousands of them."

But, back then, during the great Internet land rush, he could afford only 100 or so, and that was a stretch.

"It all could have amounted to nothing," Carrieri said. "But I believed in it to the point that I would have walked to work if I had to."

More than once, he thought he might have to sell his most prized possession, a Corvette convertible, to make ends meet.

Carrieri got rich before he ever reached that point.

He won't reveal how much money he's made, but here's a hint: Jobs.com, which he merged last year with a Dallas-based company, was valued at $600 million earlier this year.

o o o

As the frenzy for dot coms pushes prices into the stratosphere, the international organization that oversees the Internet has plans to create other domains, such as .shop or .movie.

You won't find Carrieri jumping on board. He thinks dot coms will remain the Boardwalks and Park Places of cyberspace.

"It's like ocean front real estate, Carrieri said. "It's only appreciating in value."

He gets as many as 10 e-mails a week from people wanting to buy his Web addresses. Tequila.com is in hot demand.

Carrieri said he'll consider only "serious offers."

"Nothing under a million," he added.

Before he sells, he usually develops Web sites for the domain name.

He boasts that he's turned jokes.com into the most popular humor site on the Net. This month, he's wrapping up its sale, but can't say yet who's buying it, or for how much.

Carrieri said he reinvests almost all of his money into his dot-com endeavors, so he doesn't have a lot of expendable cash. His latest focus is Colleges.com, which he's developing himself as a gathering place on the Net for college students.

He's raised $7 million from investors for the site, and he's about to throw in another $1 million of his own.

The pace is frenetic.

o o o

Carrieri doesn't work out at the gym like he used to. He doesn't see his girlfriend in Arizona much. And his co-workers, who include his brother and friends he grew up with in Arizona, joke that maybe they should put a bed in his office because he spends so much time there.

As a publicity stunt, and for kicks, Carrieri rides in the company's blimp, emblazoned with the blue, red and gold Colleges.com logo, over college campuses coast to coast.

He's moved Colleges.com into a posh new offices in Sorrento Valley.

The reception area is almost sterile; Carrieri's own digs are strewn with promotional products, from the textbooks that have Colleges.com printed on the back to basketball hoops and even bar stools that bear the company's logo.

But those are last week's ideas.

Carrieri is already on to the next, which launches this month: "The largest collegiate store on the Internet for alumni," he boasted.

The thought of having to walk to work is just an inside joke these days. He arrives in the 'Vette, of course. But, just in case he should ever need a lift, there's always the blimp.

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Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co.