It’s hard to believe, but it’s been almost five years since I wrote my first blog post on Thomas Hawk’s digital connection. Since then, the internet has changed almost as much as it did in the previous five years, but I’m still having fun sharing my thoughts with others online. While I normally write about other people’s ventures (I’m just not that interesting) I did want to take a moment to share a piece of my life with you.
When the Hawk first started to recruit me to write articles for his site, I was a little bit reluctant. Part of it had to do with a lack of interest in creative writing on my part, but a large part of it had to do with my not wanting to take center stage in front of so many people. You wouldn’t know it if you met me in person, but deep down inside I tend to be shy and don’t particularly care for the spotlight.
To help overcome my stage fright, Thomas Hawk suggested that I publish under a pen name instead of mixing business with pleasure. Since I share my legal name with a celebrity, my chances of being heard above the fan posts were slim to none anyway. When picking a pen name, I wanted something that reflected a part of me, but had never been used on the internet before.
Ten years ago to the day, I was finishing up my final semester in college and was taking a course on entrepreneurism. I must of have saved the best for last because unlike some of my more stuffy classes, this one really connected with me. At the time, the internet bubble was still inflating and .com madness was everywhere, but even before we saw the wealth creation of the 90′s, I always knew that I wanted to start my own business.
One of the projects for my class was to create a business and to try and raise funding for it. After many late night brainstorming sessions, our team finally settled on the idea of an MP3 car radio. At the time, Napster was just taking off and while most people over the age of 30 hadn’t heard of an mp3 yet, I knew that it would be the format of choice to replace the CD. With limited hardware supporting MP3s, we felt that there was a large market opportunity for the first company to build an MP3 car radio.
Immediately, we set out to build a prototype and was lucky enough to attract top tier tech talent to our team. We also assembled an out of this world advisory board to help and started putting together a business plan. By the time we were done, we had a great idea, but lacked the experience to actually make it take off. At the time, I remember thinking if I had only been born ten years earlier, it would have been a lot easier to raise financing. We did enter our business plan into several competitions (and performed quite well I might add), but overcoming the challenges of educating investors on MP3 technology, ultimately proved too tough for a scrappy group of college seniors.
I remember one meeting where an investor who had never heard of the MP3, told us that we were foolish to try and take on the compact disc. He had asked us why we thought we could compete against Sony as a startup. When we pointed out Sony’s reluctance to embrace the technology because of their studio business, he just kind of rolled his eyes and told us that if the format was any good, it would only be a matter of time. As it turns out he was right in a way, but Sony ended up waiting too long and lost their walkman franchise to Apple’s iPod.
Since then, the MP3 has become the de facto standard of choice and while there are plenty of mp3 players and other devices, there still isn’t a lot of choice when it comes to the MP3 car radio market. Maybe we were ahead of our time or maybe we simply lacked the experience to create something this big, but whatever the reason, our business never got the funding and eventually became a fond memory.
Since this experience had such a profound affect on my life, when trying to come up with a pen name, I wanted to use something that referred to the original idea. Since the name of our business was Discfree, Davis Freeberg was born. Before hitting publish on my first post, Google said that there were 0 search entries for the term “Davis Freeberg.” Today, there are 105,000 references. While it’s probably too late for me to go back and be the first to create an MP3 car radio, the entrepreneurial spirit that was discovered during the project has carried over to this very day.
Eventually, I set up a business on my own and am living out my dream from ten years ago, even if the details are different than I imagined them at the time. As a way of thanking all of the great readers who’ve stopped by my site over the last five years, I wanted to share a copy of my original business plan with you. I’ve removed some of the details to protect the anonymity of my partners, but it should give you a good idea for what we were trying to build.
In retrospect, I think that our numbers were a bit aggressive (what startup isn’t?) and that we were asking for too little money given the equity that we were prepared to give an angel investor, but the idea was solid and had we moved forward with our team, I think we could have at least made a run with it. While Discfree won’t ever become the business that I had hoped it would be, I am pleased to see Davis continue the dream, even if it’s in a different form. Thanks for making the last five years a truly remarkable experience for me and I hope you enjoy the sneak peak at what Davis was blogging before he even knew what blogging was.
This is probably a good thing for home shopping addicts, but works against’s TiVo’s goal of revolutionizing the advertising business. If they want couch commerce to actually succeed, they must make it easier for consumers to make an actual purchase. 
Feldman Sherb & company was the auditor.
In 2006, I 