On paper the dot-com game seemed easy. But Brett Singer and Simeon Schnapper discovered it was harder than it looked.
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But when the Nasdaq started to crash in the spring of last year, the money people stopped returning their calls. “It was depressing trying to get funding in a really turbulent time,” Singer recalls. “We had a sound idea but no experience and not a lot of industry expertise.”
Wanderon.com did qualify for a $300,000 matching grant under a state program meant to stimulate high-tech businesses in Illinois, but the payoff came too late. By the time the check arrived in January, the firm’s operations had been suspended for two months. Its lead investor is now trying to resuscitate the company–which had become a business-to-business site for the bicycle industry–but Singer hasn’t received a paycheck since June 2000. “I was just the creative guy,” he says. “Only the CEO and the sales guy got regularly paid.”
In July Schnapper took off to do some serious soul-searching in India and Tibet. “I negotiated my severance from a mountaintop,” he says. Around this same time, Singer, fed up with his dwindling prospects, began to aggressively pitch to Schnapper the idea of doing a film. “I had been on him for over a year,” Singer recalls. “I first became interested in digital graphics, streaming and the like, because they were like little movies.”
Dotcom: A True Story will be shown as part of the Chicago Improv Festival at 4 PM this Sunday, May 6, at the Vittum Theater on the third floor of the Northwestern University Settlement House, 1012 N. Noble. Admission is $5.
