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 Marketing Strategy Unplugged by David Black  MBAs with a Mission by Brook Raflo Thinking inside the Box by Nicholas Shreiber, Guest Columnist |
Double the pleasure  Tom Rearick '97EMBA Founder Big Science Co. Tom Rearick '97EMBA founded and ran Big Science Co. twice. The first time, he used his engineering background to establish Big Science as a cutting-edge company specializing in html, the computer language used to structure and code articles and data for the Internet. He did even better the second time around, thanks in part to what he learned at Goizueta. Before going it alone, Rearick, now forty-six, led a team of Lockheed scientists working on computational vision and artificial science. The original Big Science, founded in 1988, developed SmarText. The html product allowed nonprogrammers to turn out electronic documents on corporate networks, CD-ROMs, and diskettes. A number of major companies, including Intel, Exxon, and BellSouth used the system. In 1992 Lotus Development, now a part of IBM, acquired Big Science. That transaction didn't work out as Rearick had hoped, and five years later, he left Lotus, taking with him all rights to the Big Science name. Then, along with two partners, he re-established Big Science. A year later, the Alpharetta company introduced the "Klone Server" and boasted that it had created "the first virtual employees that communicate in plain English with shoppers on electronic commerce web sites." Rearick says Big Science's Klones answer 20 percent of the questions that generate 80 percent of call volume of online retail sites. In February of this year, Rearick reached an agreement to sell Big Science to eGain Communications in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $35 million. Rearick is a lot happier about the eGain transaction than he was about the first sale of Big Science. His Goizueta MBA education, he says, helped him become "a better negotiator and to realize what my options were. I also learned to concentrate on my strengths, outsourcing other tasks to those more qualified." He views the combination of Big Science and eGain as a good fit. "eGain is small enough for us to count, but also big enough to be a potential gorilla in its field." The Sunnyvale, California, company, with annualized revenues of about $13 million, provides e-mail and other e-commerce customer services to retailers. Although Rearick has a three-year commitment to eGain, he hasn't shaken the entrepreneurial bug. Asked if he hopes to start another company, he admits that "further down the road, I may try again." Although it's too soon to say, another start-up might involve the work he did at Lockheed. Alan Jenks 
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