Memorial for Chris Schefler
Last Wednesday evening, a former employee of mine, Perry Harrington, called me up to tell me the terrible news: my former business partner, Chris Schefler, with whom I co-founded Web Communications, the world’s first self-service web hosting company, had passed away.
I wanted to take a minute or two and tell the Sentinel’s readers about a couple of things your excellent obituary didn’t cover… about Chris, the passionate advocate for social justice, who I met in the summer of 1993 while working for Peace Action a year after moving to Santa Cruz and about the brilliant and visionary businessman who created a $3 million dollar a year business literally from nothing, and without a single dollar of external investment.
Many of your readers will appreciate that Chris had been motivated to come work for Peace Action by a conviction that the original 1991 Gulf War was unjust and immoral and that he could change things by becoming personally involved. It was these common values, along with a passion for technology’s ability to empower people (something somewhat unique among the typically luddite hippie peaceniks that we hung out with), that lead Chris and I to co-found WebCom.
Chris wrote the following paragraph for our “About” page in 1994:
“We believe in the fundamental value of communication and are excited about the real-time flow and exchange of ideas, dialogue, information, commerce, music and art over the global net as a powerful catalyst for innovation and creativity, efficient niche marketing and commerce, understanding, learning, grassroots community, and unprecedented synergy.”
Nothing could be a better expression of what he (and many other of us pioneering Internet start up folk) felt we were helping to make happen - the goal wasn’t to get insanely rich; it was to change the world, for the better. To get a sense of how Chris thought, I invite you to visit his Gaia site, devoted to the emerging Global Brain, at http://www.webcom.com/gaia/.
Chris also had a head for business. We bootstrapped WebCom to the point of launch on less than $25,000 worth of initial investment and half a year’s labor, and the business was cash-flow positive from day one. His commitment to quality service and empowering products led WebCom to develop one of the most fanatically loyal set of customers imaginable… if any business was ever built on positive word of mouth, it was ours: almost all of the customers we ever signed up came to us as the result of personal referrals by existing customers. And, four years later, despite minimal investment in services and technology since the company was acquired in 1999, I’m informed that most of them still stubbornly refuse to leave for other web hosting services.
What was the key to this incredible record? Two things - one: Chris insisted that every customer’s support requeset be answered within a single business day, if not sooner (you’d be amazed at how stunned customers were to not have to wait 2 weeks for an answer to their questions); two: when a customer made a sensible suggestion for an improvement in our service, he listened. To him, customer service was not a “cost center” to be outsourced overseas to the lowest bidder, it was a mission critical function that provided our company with essential information about how our customers were thinking, feeling and acting.
Corporate America could benefit a lot from following Chris’ business philosophy - hire intelligent, capable people who are dedicated to understanding the technology and customers your company works with, give them the freedom to take initiative with regards to solving customer problems and addressing customer needs, and you’re most of the way towards having a successful business. Our technical support people thought nothing of walking up to one of the co-founders and engaging them in a detailed conversation about the problems they were experiencing and what they felt might be a proper solution, or describing in detail where they thought a bug in a developer’s code might lie, or saying that they thought customer X had a great idea and would it be possible to tell them that we intended to release such and such functionality within the next two weeks.
This created an atmosphere that several former WebCom employees recently told me was “the best work environment I’ve ever had”. Having worked over the hill in Silicon Valley for several years after the sale of WebCom, I can only echo that sentiment. Silicon Valley would be a vastly better place to live and work if the people running it had even a tenth of the respect for the integrity and competence of their employees that Chris had.
Chris was no saint, I had major personal issues with him that played a significant role in why I quit working for WebCom fulltime in 1998, prior to the company’s acquisition, but I’d give my right arm for the opportunity to work with another human being who had his unique combination of vision, values and just plain common sense when it came to running a business. Chris was a good man, and he will be sorely missed by a lot of people, myself not the least among them. May his soul rest in peace among the woods and wilds that he loved so much, and fought so hard to protect. Anyone wishing to honor his memory could do no better than donate to Peace Action, where it all started; http://www.peace-action.org/ (hosted by WebCom).
