Jul 24, 2006
From a Spare Bedroom to Fat City

Every company has its tale of the good old days, when the CEO was also the chief cook and bottle washer and job titles meant nothing. FatWire Software's tale begins in a spare bedroom in Oyster Bay.

That's where Mark Fasciano and Ari Kahn, fresh with their PhDs in computer science from the University of Chicago, set up shop, with two of Fasciano's friends from Chaminade High School, little experience and a vague sense money could be made helping companies publish information on Web sites.

"It was a very rough-and-tumble time," Fasciano said of the year or so running the business out of his parents' house. "Both of us had very temporary living conditions. We weren't in tents, but maybe a step up from that, and we did everything ourselves."

That included Kahn's personally digging the ditch to lay the cable for the high-speed Internet connection needed to make the business work and learning the non-technical but nevertheless important facts of running a business foreign to computer science PhDs.

A big break came early on, when IBM signed on as a client - "Everybody scratches their head and can't believe that a few guys in a bedroom sold IBM this software," Fasciano said - and within a year, FatWire had grown too big for the bedroom - "once we had enough contracts where we had to hire another 10 people," he said.

FatWire set up shop in Port Washington and after a couple of years moved to Mineola, where last week it celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Much has changed in the ensuing decade, including, Fasciano noted, the increasing complexity of corporate Web sites to allow for personalization that targets individual customers. "We needed to make sure our architecture was up-to-date," he said.

He and Kahn spend only a small amount of their time on technical matters and more talking with their customers' marketing representatives. And after an acquisition in 2003, FatWire's business has gone international, which led Fasciano to wax rhapsodic about seeing his sofware being used at a customer's business in Dubai.

FatWire has 450 customers now and 150 employees, including the four who started in the Oyster Bay bedroom. "It's quite a distance from the old days," he said. But, of course, the stories remain.

Publication: Newsday
A.J. CARTER