Razorfish

In 1994, two childhood friends from Minneapolis ran into each other on the streets of New York's East Village and soon realized that their complementary knowledge and passions gave them an opportunity to create a pioneering enterprise in the emerging electronic media business.

Jeff Dachis and Craig Kanarick first met in nursery school when they where four and three years old, respectively. They went to Hebrew school together and parted when Jeff graduated high school a year ahead of Craig.

Jeff left Minneapolis to study theater and classical ballet at SUNY Purchase but before graduating he came to New York City and founded an advertising and promotion company called In Your Face. He went on to get an MBA at New York University and founded the Game Financial Corp (NASDAQ: GFIN) a credit card cash advance company in the casino industry.

GFIN gave him an understanding of what it took to process a huge volume of credit card transactions electronically, and whetted his appetite for another venture in electronic commerce and media. But what would it be? CD-ROM looked interesting, but there were a lot of problems too.

Craig went to the University of Pennsylvania to study computer science and engineering. After graduation he worked for Bolt, Baranek and Newman building the SimNet, the military's battlefield simulation network. Then he went on to MIT's Media Lab where he explored creative design in Muriel Cooper's Visual Language Workshop. On a project for IBM's design council with Tangent Design, he demonstrated the emerging online services and the new NCSA Mosaic Web browser. Even at this early stage it its development, he was enthralled by the potential of the Web.

When Dachis and Kanarick met up again on that fateful day in '94, Craig showed Mosiac to Jeff along with the embryonic WWW. For Jeff it was a revelation. "This is it," he exclaimed. "This is how it all comes together." They soon founded Razorfish and worked out of Jeff's living room for seven months serving a client list that included Time-Warner's Pathfinder and Modem Media, the first major interactive advertising agency.

Today Razorfish is a multi-million dollar company with 40 employees and a 16,000 square foot SoHo workspace. Dachis, the business guy, is President and CEO, Kanarick, the technology and design guy, is Executive VP and Creative Director, though both speak the other's language.

What has the company done to distinguish itself from the hundreds of other "Web shops" that sprang up in New York and all around the world during the next two years?

For one thing, the outfit thinks big. Razorfish is regarded not as a Web shop, but rather as a "strategic digital communications company." It creates communications strategies and solutions across a variety of media including the World-Wide Web, broadcast, print, CD-rom, kiosk, and Intranets for a fast-growing list of clients that includes AT&T, IBM, Disney, Microsoft and Viacom.

Dachis believes that the brand is the core and the differentiator of corporate content. Corporations should speak the same message to clients, shareholders and employees in all media. To this end, Razorfish offers three types of services:

• Digital Change Management: Management consulting that moves companies into the digital future.
• Creative Media Design: All types of digital media design from Web sites to faxes, e-mail and palmtops.
• Information Technology: A variety of technology services ranging from networks and commerce systems to custom software, information architectures, databases, legacy systems and more.

Razorfish helps companies communicate internally, externally and in the commerce space. The outfit is building a global company with a broad range of services; everywhere a company needs to communicate, Razorfish will attempt to make the brand apparent.

Dachis believes that digital technologies are changing the landscape of business and culture and that Razorfish's uniquely creative set of technology, communications and marketing skills afford them the ability to solve problems in this changing digital world better than many companies 10 or 100 times their size.

"By understanding each client in the context of a dynamic virtual market--a market which includes the traditional marketplace, the expanding universe of cyberspace and the virtual province of mindshare--Razorfish offers innovative and surprising perspectives on technology as well as technically-savvy perspectives on corporate communications, marketing and original content."

Another thing that makes Razorfish unique among companies in the interactive services area is its creation of original content. This began with a bouncing blue dot on the company's home page--the original Web animation. The Blue Dot evolved into a collection of sites including art, literature and photography. This turned into a strong portfolio piece and a valuable alternative to the company's corporate work. It also served as a distribution outlet for its own employees.

The success of the The Blue Dot led to the creation of The Razorfish Subnetwork (RSUB) (The acronym also stands for Replicate Sinful Uncensored Beauty.)

"We've created this subnetwork in the spirit of an indie music label," says Dachis. "While other content channels launched with the major TV networks as their role models, we have a decidedly smaller and more personal vision about what content on the Web can be."

RSUB features six separate and original offerings:

• The Blue Dot, a playground of art, design, literature, humor, photography and phlogiston. Curated by Craig Kanarick, it features work by such artists as JK Potter, Spencer Tunick, Yael Kanarek, Jill Greenberg and more. This area includes the much-ballyhooed "Society for the Recapture of Virginity," the only place on the Internet where one can regain virginity.
• Bunko!, a site devoted to single and multiplayer online games, featuring "Lose-An-Eye", "Crash and Burn," and "Club Seal." Bunko! games are easy to learn and play, and feature a Java-based area that allows players to chat with each other as they play.
• theNvelope is a series of provocative, challenging messages, dystopic prophecies and mad rants from and about the digital future. theNvelope has been created by some of the most well-known digital artists in the world, including Marina Zurkow, Jaime Levy, Prophet Communications, Heidi Dangelmaier and Razorfish's own Oz Lubling.
• ThisGirl, the online journals of our fictional friend Phoebe Wilson, a brash 20-something babe trying to survive in New York without a day job.
• typoGRAPHIC takes a serious look at type in the dynamic, evolving context of digital media as well as print.
• Disinformation, a search engine and curated index of Internet sites devoted to the proposition that "everything you know is wrong." This area offers everything from CIA-watchers to conspiracy theorists, and alien-abductees to black magick.

So who owns Razorfish? It's still mostly Dachis and Kanarick, with a small chunk bought by Omnicom, the world's largest advertising agency holding company, and owners of TBWA/Chiat-Day, BBDO, DDBNeedham and others.

Is the company planning to go public? Not anytime soon. But you can bet it will be a nice investment to make, if and when they do.

Past installments of Multimedia Web