blue hypermedia

I co-founded and creative-directed one of Silicon Alley’s original interactive agencies. We won top-tier clients including Cigna, MasterCard, New York Times and Rockefeller Foundation. We also won a couple of the biggest awards in the industry. Blue was acquired for $14 million by Microforum.

Founded in 1995, Blue Hypermedia (then blue.com) was a seminal Silicon Alley digital agency. Our early clients included The New York Times, The Rockefeller Foundation, Cigna, Pfizer, IBM, MasterCard and a colorful array of Silicon Alley’s first generation of start-ups.

Founded initially as a tiny 3 man digital design studio located on Desbrosses Street in an industrial Tribeca workspace, we grew Blue to a mature agency located in sprawling SoHo offices, and boasting a client list of multiple Fortune 500s.

With each year, Blue Hypermedia collected new creative accolades and an ever expanding “trophy wall” decorated with dozens of the industry’s top creative awards from Cannes Lions to Web Awards to a couple of coveted awards from The One Show. (I was awarded the latter for my art direction on the Rainforest Foundation website— an amazing project we felt privileged to work on)

Starting, growing and eventually selling Blue Hypermedia was a fantastic experience. We were fortunate to have an amazing team of truly talented and engaged people who were genuinely interested and energized by the promise of the Web. It was Web 1.0. At the time, so much of what we worked on had never been done before. There was no blueprint. There were no well trodden path. The Web was virgin territory and we were all making it up with each new day.

Among our many projects which pushed the envelope were The New York Times Channel which came bundled with Windows software, the ground-up re-creation of David Lynch’s SciFi Channel advertisements using web technologies, location-based interactive entertainment for MasterCard and two truly vast websites for two the largest non-profits in the world: The Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

After turning down multiple acquisition offers along the way, we finally agreed to part ways with Blue in 1999 — selling to publicly-traded Microforum for US $14 million. It was a difficult decision. Blue was our baby, but the time had come to join a larger team and take the company to the next level.

Shortly after acquisition, the music stopped: The great Internet Bubble had burst, and the rest of the Silicon Alley story is now well-known history. Deciding to sell when we did was a wiser decision than we had guessed.