Claudine Claudio:
Welcome to the Half Geek, half Human podcast, where we explore the intersections of technology, business, business, and life. This podcast is powered by Atiba, a custom software and it services company in Nashville, Tennessee. Now to your hosts, Anna Kate Ross and Joey Baggott.
Annakate Ross:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Half Geek, half human. Today, Joey and I are joined by three legends from Nashville’s early tech scene, Tim Moses, Thomas Connor, and Bill Butler, who together founded Telenk, Nashville’s first Internet provider, way back in 1993. We’ll dig in with the guys to the Telenk origin story and reflect on how the tech landscape has changed in Nashville over the last 30 years. So, Tim Thomas, Bill, welcome to the show.
Tim Moses:
Hello.
Bill Butler:
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah, we’re glad you guys could be here today. It was fun. When JJ set up the introductions on this, he had a lot of very fun things to say about Telelink and his memory of it. But before we get too far into this, Bill, just tell us a little bit about Telalink, how you got the idea to found it, what it was, that kind of thing.
Bill Butler:
Yeah, well, Tim and I knew each other in high school. We met in high school, and then we were college roommates.
Tim Moses:
We had a business in high school together.
Bill Butler:
We did. That’s right.
Tim Moses:
I think we manufactured the statute of limitations on that.
Bill Butler:
That’s true.
Thomas Conner:
Yeah.
Bill Butler:
So we made fake ids in high school with Mac computers.
Tim Moses:
We were the two people who are really into computers. So we did the. Laid it all out on our macs and printed things off in the printer.
Bill Butler:
I think the business was called ids for miners. And we were miners at the time. And it wasn’t actually a business, but, yeah, I think we got in enough trouble with that. Anyway, Tim and I were basically some of the few geeks in high school, and we ended up rooming together at Vanderbilt for. Was it just freshman year and sophomore and sophomore. That’s right, yeah. And so Tim was running a consulting business for the biomedical side of things. What was the department over there that you mean?
Tim Moses:
It was all over the medical center in different places. It’s wherever I could get work places all over town.
Annakate Ross:
This was shortly after college.
Tim Moses:
Yeah, this was during college. Then out of, like, when we graduated, we kind of all started doing that Mac consulting work.
Bill Butler:
And that business was called Telesar, right? Yeah, we had a business called Telesar, and that was all based on fixing people’s Mac computers because so much of the consulting work out there was pc related, and there weren’t many people in town that could actually work on Mac computers. And so that sort of branched into the publishing industry. We did work for the Tennessean and for the banner, and we would arrange fonts, defrag hard drives, upgrade memory, all that kind of stuff. And our mo is we kind of wore shorts and a t shirt and rollerbladed everywhere. And after we graduated, actually, while we were still in school, I was working with what was called the classroom of the future at Vanderbilt. And so they were hooked up to the Internet. They had FTP, they had gopher. They had a really nice suite of Macs, all with 17 inch monitors, which at the time, was sort of unheard of.
Bill Butler:
It was an amazing looking classroom, like 20 or 30 max with a station up front. And everything was sort of programmable. And I don’t know how this all unfolded by. I spent a lot of time in there and met this guy named Robert Beckett, and he would show me FTP and gopher. And these are kind of precursors to gopher in particular is a precursor to. So after we graduated from college, we got a place on West End Avenue right near Houston. We were renting a place on the top floor there and running our consulting business out of it. And we were able to kind of work a deal with a few people we still knew at the computer center at Vanderbilt’s computing department.
Bill Butler:
So we could have dial up access into the campus. And so basically, that was our ip connectivity at the time, which was pretty rudimentary, but it let us use email and the things that we had already had since we were students. And that was around the same time that everybody was starting to. You could hear it across the country that these college campuses had Internet, and people were. It was sort of spidering out from there. And the consulting business. Go ahead.
Tim Moses:
Yeah. And at the same time, that’s when Mosaic came out in fall of 93. Like, the web just had just started. That was right around that time.
Bill Butler:
Yeah. So we had the benefit of having an Internet connection and getting to see Mozilla not being in college. And I. The scene for me in my head is that we were in one of those rooms upstairs. I think I even remember which room it was the one closest to the door as you walked in from the front hallway. And we had a Mozilla browser pulled up, and we loaded up a page and we saw some text, and we saw a picture in line. And I don’t know about these two. I don’t know about Tim, but it was like, immediately, wow, that’s really different.
Tim Moses:
I can remember making our first web pages on I guess they’re hosted on a Vanderbilt server somewhere. And, yeah, that was just fantastic. That was so much fun. Easy to do. Anybody could learn HTML, especially at the time, because there were only a handful of commands. But yeah, that was great.
Bill Butler:
And so, as Tim said, mean, I guess I always get sort of this credited with sort of driving things, but I was really just interested in saying, ok, we’re doing consulting right now, but there’s only so many hours in the day to make more money. We got to hire more people, we got to build more hours. What if we could do something that was more like a subscription model and keep the consulting business, but kind of have one to fund the other, which is pretty much what we did. We decided to get investors, friends and family. And Tommy Williams, the other Thomas that was involved in our organization before Thomas came along. He was very technical as well, like Tim, but he also had really an artistic side to him. And he built a supercard stack. Pretty sure it was supercard because it was in color.
Bill Butler:
Right, Tim?
Tim Moses:
Supercard was a commercial version of Apple’s hypercard, just to fill in some for people who weren’t playing with this stuff 30 years ago. Does anybody know what hypercard is?
Annakate Ross:
I don’t, actually. What is hypercard?
Bill Butler:
It’s version of the web, essentially even predating the web. It was Apple’s invention, and you could make cards with clickable links and put buttons on.
Annakate Ross:
Okay.
Tim Moses:
And so instead of pages, you had cards, but it was a lot of the same ideas, but more sophisticated at the time.
Annakate Ross:
Right, so let me just summarize where we are. So you guys had had a little bit of kind of quote unquote Internet access through Vanderbilt, and you were using some of these early prototypes of web pages. I mean, that sounds a little bit more rudimentary than an actual web page, but then building some HTML and sort of seeing this come to life, and at the same time you’ve got your consulting business and you’re looking for a way, a subscription model or some recurring revenue to come in. And the idea sparks for teiling. Is that kind of where we are?
Tim Moses:
Well, I feel like there’s one other part. So we’re playing with this stuff for fun, the Internet stuff for fun. On the other side of it, we had a lot of consulting clients. There were service bureaus and designers. And we kept seeing designers would do all this work. They’d put all their stuff on a cartridge, pay a courier to run it across town, and then the fonts wouldn’t be there, and the courier would go back, and they were swapping disks around town all the time. And to us here, we’re dealing with modems, and ISDN had just started become available. And for us, we’re like, oh, it should all be on a network.
Tim Moses:
Everybody should be dialing into one place. And if we connect everybody together, then serverless bureaus could always be online. People could dial in with modems. And then once you’ve got that, then there’s all sorts of other things you could do just by having a network, like email and sending files and things like that. I feel like at the time, we saw that as a business independent of providing Internet access, just the idea of having a citywide network was valuable.
Bill Butler:
I’m so glad you remembered that, Tim, because you’re exactly right. We have five print shops in town that we set up with 128 kilobit ISDN modems.
Tim Moses:
Yeah, that was fast.
Bill Butler:
Fairly special hardware that would allow them to just stay up as much as they went, or even dial on demand. And so the idea was, instead of taking the big cartridge out and currying it, they could just send the file across an ISDN line, one to the other, reducing that time. And I would say that was marginal success because those files were still really big compared to the 128k necessary. And also, the equipment was. The protocols weren’t that mature yet. I think we were trying to do it over Apple net instead of ip. And there’s a lot of overhead associated with Apple protocols at the time over the wire. Okay, yeah, I think Tim segues this pretty nicely, that the Internet was coming along about the same time, and instead of sort of point to points of people connecting, the idea would be that, okay, let’s convert this all to IP, let’s install some modems.
Bill Butler:
But we had to get money.
Tim Moses:
Yeah, well, before you get that, I think it’s worth talking about the investor meeting we had the friends and family investor meeting. I don’t think anybody in that meeting really cared too much about the technology, since they all knew us and just, I don’t know if they were just hoping we’d come up with something more productive than what we were doing. But we came up with this fantastic demo. Wish I still had a copy of it. We built it out in hypercard, and it was to give people an idea of what you’d be able to do if you had a citywide network and you could dial in with your modem and it was all mocked up. It’d come up, you’d see this page, you could click on things to get to other information. You could pull up news that had audio and video on it. You could listen to music before you buy it, like all these standard Internet things now.
Tim Moses:
And we weren’t saying it wasn’t the Internet that wasn’t available on the Internet yet. It was just. This was what we thought could happen with a citywide network. And it seems brilliant in hindsight, but that’s what we were pitching to Tim.
Bill Butler:
Do you remember the CD cover that we used for the was. I’m going to see if you remember it.
Tim Moses:
Bonnie raight.
Bill Butler:
No. Well, that was maybe one of them, but it was happy birthday, Charlie Brown. I remember it was like a vince.
Tim Moses:
Yeah. You could click on a couple of samples and then play the music. I mean, it was a fully functional fake, but you could click everything and it would all work. It was great.
Bill Butler:
And so we ended up getting about, I don’t know, 40,000 friends and family, something like that.
Tim Moses:
That disappeared so fast. Yeah, that got us nowhere.
Bill Butler:
The thing I remember.
Tim Moses:
That got us going with getting the service bureaus hooked up. And did it get us. Maybe it got us through that first connection to North Carolina.
Bill Butler:
I think it did. But you know what really got us through the first connection to North Carolina was Tim’s chase Manhattan credit card with a $5,000 limit. Because a Cisco 2600 router at the time, which was what was required to terminate a fractional t, happened to cost $5,000. And Tim’s credit limit was exactly $5,000. So we put that router on his credit card, and then we went with the company. Was it vnet or something like that?
Thomas Conner:
That sounds familiar.
Bill Butler:
They brought a 256k line, which is about. I thought it was like a 6th of a t one. And we had that brought in, and then we set up maybe eight modems, four modems. We didn’t have very many.
Tim Moses:
So that line he’s talking about is a full time long distance call to a place in North Carolina. So it wasn’t like connecting through a local phone. Mean, we’re basically paying for a big long distance connection. Back then we actually paid per minute for long distance.
Joey Baggott:
Back when you had to pay for long distance communication. Yes.
Tim Moses:
It wasn’t like a regular phone call, but it was still very expensive to get that little connection from North Carolina.
Joey Baggott:
Now, when you were talking about the investors meeting, I’m just kind of curious because you sat down with a lot of friends and family. How did you pitch, what did you say to them? Because what I’m envisioning here is trying to talk to my grandmother, who knows zero, about technology and all this technology is so new. How do you communicate that with them? And granted, friends and family, they were probably willing to invest in you guys more than anything, but how did you present it to them?
Tim Moses:
I think it went over their heads, and I don’t think anybody really knew what we were talking about. It looked flashy, and I don’t know.
Bill Butler:
I feel like it was pretty formal. We were at the Apple offices right over, off of either the alliance center, Apple’s offices. We did it there.
Annakate Ross:
And was there a value proposition communicated? Like, were you painting a picture of what the Internet was going to do? Did you have a sense of that, or was it a business tool?
Tim Moses:
We weren’t really pitching the Internet, but we were pitching a lot of the ideas of what the Internet would end up being.
Bill Butler:
Yeah, I don’t think we necessarily foresaw at that time the Internet, because we were thinking of building a citywide network connecting people. We also had an interesting relationship with a number of. With Apple themselves, with publisher. Hammock publishing at the time was a big client of ours. We worked on a lot of their. So Michael Knott was the designer with them. He did a lot of our graphic work for just logo design and that sort of thing. And then there was another computer company in town that sold Macs.
Bill Butler:
And so it was like, we’re the consulting. We’re partners with Apple, we’re partners with the hardware company and with designers in town. So we were kind of trying to, I guess, just get some notoriety along those lines. And it just so happened that as we were talking about a citywide network, this worldwide network was there as well and offered everything it offered, plus. Right.
Annakate Ross:
So the original product was a citywide network where you were connecting businesses locally, and probably a lot of the businesses you were already working with. From a consulting perspective, that’s how it began. It is, yeah. Okay. And then, Thomas, talk a little bit about what happened when you came on board, because this was maybe two years later or so that you joined the team.
Thomas Conner:
Yes. Bill and I overlapped at Vanderbilt by year, and we were both involved in video production. And you could already see Bill’s entrepreneurial spirit just flourishing. You have to remember, MTV was only three, four years old at that time, and video geeks at Vanderbilt were all finding this one place that a friend of mine started at Vanderbilt on campus. And I just saw Bill’s enthusiasm, his creativity, and his willingness to go out and create a video of just about anything. And so I told him. When I was graduating, I said, I think you should stay involved, and I think you could eventually become the executive producer, which he did. And after he graduated and went into business with Tim, we stayed in touch.
Thomas Conner:
I went into banking and needed to hire somebody to help me produce a video down in Memphis. So naturally, where I was in Kentucky and where Memphis was, Nashville was right in the middle. And Bill knew everything I needed to have on hand for this project. And I don’t think we made any money, but it was a fun collaboration and we really played off of each other well. And at some point too, I think I made some observations when I was hanging out at the Telesar, soon to be Telelink place, and I recognized how maybe disheveled it looked around there, and I just made an impression on him on a few comments I made. But sure enough, in 1994, they were needing somebody to help them because the geek concentration was well established. The business management side of the whole thing, maybe not fully baked yet.
Bill Butler:
Well, you’re being kind there.
Thomas Conner:
Yeah, you’re being really kind, fellow to my old age. But by the winter of 1994, Bill was showing me what they were doing. I just happened to be visiting in Nashville and he said, I think we need somebody. And I said, yeah, I think you do. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t understand any of this stuff. But email sounds like a great idea to me because if we can get rid of fax machines and communicate with email, I think you’ve got a good business idea. That was the essence of my understanding of what they were doing.
Thomas Conner:
And I needed a little time to think about leaving my banking job to become an Internet entrepreneur with these guys. But by October 10, 1995, I was there and they didn’t know what the CFO was, but that’s what I was. And I happened to show up on Intern night and they were all just marveling at this new server that was being installed. All I could see was dollar signs. But the thing, it was pretty clear they put an ad in the back of the Nashville scene, and suddenly everybody wanted to buy Internet access through Telelink. And some very creative people were creating a website, which they could get at slash, Tilde, and whatever your username was. If you were really ambitious, you could have your own domain name and these guys would enable a website. But even learning how to host a website on a server was something they had to figure out.
Thomas Conner:
So there was a lot of understanding coming along still. But there was this attraction. Teleink was the place for teenagers, college age students, preteens, everybody knew that these guys were cool, that they were accessible, and they had Internet. And all of these young people who were showing up wanted to be part of this. There were no classes that you could take. There was no anything where you could go figure out these things that these guys had figured out or were figuring out. And so we suddenly became this magnet for. It was almost like an underground of teenagers and college students who were just flocking there.
Thomas Conner:
And I saw my job as adding some structure to the finances, making sure they didn’t go too far overboard figuring out how to raise money, which we did with debt, and really trying to formalize the business appearance so that we weren’t just a bunch of kids running around in t shirts and shorts, but we were a legitimate, authentic business.
Annakate Ross:
Got you. Okay. So, building on that, I’m curious in some of the reading that we did to prepare for this, and just in chatting with you guys, I know you had the friends and family that helped fund this originally, but also a lot of friends were coming in to support you. You had a lot of relationships, probably through your Vanderbilt connections. Do you think, like, how influential was Nashville in making Telelink a success? Do you feel like the size of the company, the industry that was here, maybe the university connections, made an environment that was particularly accommodating to a business like this, and that allowed the Internet to be shepherded in in the way that it was.
Bill Butler:
I definitely have a comment on the university connection, because we found our CTO through Vanderbilt. We got an email one day, and it said, I’ve got root on your mail server.
Thomas Conner:
Meaning he hacked into the system.
Bill Butler:
Okay. When you have root on a system, it means you have control of the system. And it was a Vanderbilt.edu address. So we replied back and we said, come on over for a. And Bob Colley was not old enough to drink a beer at the time, but he came over and had a beer and showed us how he took over root on our mail server and patched it. And then he brought over two more servers, FTP server and a gopher server. And he set both of those up. And I think this may have been.
Bill Butler:
I don’t know if this is pre HTP or not. It was pretty close to it. But he really understood slackware. He knew how to build a Unix system from scratch. He knew the ins and outs of basically a Unix file system. And he, like I said, became our cto and really laid the foundation for all of the web based things that we did from that point forward, I would say, and I think I remember this correctly, Tim, that I was more the infrastructure guy. I was pipes, right. And then you and Bob, you were kind of the software level, and Bob was more like the network and systems systems.
Bill Butler:
And so really with those things, we had Thomas covering finance. We had Bob and Tim handling anything related to server infrastructure. And then I was handling pipes, hardware infrastructure. And we had all the pieces that we need at that point.
Thomas Conner:
And Tim was coding. Tim was coding all kinds of things to make websites work so that web designers didn’t have to worry about that stuff. And then we brought Scott Sears in for customer service to make sure that people that dealt with us felt amazing, which is what Scott was so good at. But Anikate, I think, yes, Nashville was a good place for a business like this to be seated. Music and publishing businesses, like all the music publishers, wanted in on Internet access. Several music companies. It was funny to me that with all these private high schools, when one of them jumped and said, we want Internet access, all of them wanted Internet access from the same people. We had every school park, the tall Montgomery fell one of their other ones.
Bill Butler:
Do you guys remember selling the curb records? T one, it was five k a month. We were freaking out. We were so happy with that sale. It was amazing. And I think we met with Mike Curb, too. I don’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure it was all small enough at the time that we met with him personally. It was wild bunch of kids.
Thomas Conner:
Well, go ahead.
Tim Moses:
I was just going to say, we had, wasn’t compass records just like a couple of buildings down from us? Was it compass?
Bill Butler:
Oh, Capricorn. Capricorn. Get Capricorn records.
Tim Moses:
Capricorn. That’s what it is. Yeah.
Bill Butler:
Are you going to tell the story about the domain?
Tim Moses:
Oh, no.
Bill Butler:
What was is great. So Capricorn records, they didn’t really pay us. They would just bring a load of cds over every now and then, and that’s how they paid us for their. But it gets better because they wanted us to reserve capricorn.com for them and we couldn’t get it. But guess what? We could get corn.com. So we reserved corn.com and prefixed it with Capra. So it was Capra corn.com. And I don’t know if they still own corn.com or not, but.
Tim Moses:
Probably worth a good bit.
Bill Butler:
Corn.com? You kidding me? Yeah.
Joey Baggott:
I want to talk a little bit about kind of that era of the early ninety s. The Internet is pretty new. Al Gore just invented it. And it seems to me like what you guys were describing. I’m totally joking, by the way, what you guys were describing. Everybody kind of flocked to you and Telenk, and that was the thing. That was it. It almost relates a little bit to the AI race now.
Joey Baggott:
Everybody’s using it. Everybody’s thrilled about it. But if you could give us a glimpse into what the Internet was like in those days, the early ninety s, I would love to hear about it, because that’s when I was very young. I didn’t even know what the Internet was. But what was it like? What was that technology like back then?
Tim Moses:
Not very good. I look at everything with the business. There was so much going on. There was so much exciting stuff happening, but really it was email and crude web pages. And for the first few years, nobody really knew. They could see that there’s something valuable, but nobody really figured out quite what it was, so. But everybody wanted to be on it. They realized everybody needed to have a web page somehow.
Thomas Conner:
I mean, Lamar Alexander, a presidential candidate who was not expected to do that well, unexpectedly did okay. And he uttered his web address in a post primary event. He said, you can go to my web address. And I’m not sure that a presidential campaign had ever uttered a website address before it crashed our servers. But it was starting to become a tool, Joey, that people were using and promoting themselves as a way of saying, hey, we know the future. We know where things are going. We even have a website. And it might not have been a very sexy website, but it was giving out policy information.
Thomas Conner:
It was giving out how to contact us, how to donate to us that kind of information. Vanderbilt contracted with us to the athletics department to provide the first ever streaming of a football game. And we had to bring the announcer, the guy on the radio that was talking about the website, because that’s what we got. We got a sponsorship brought to you by Telelink. You can go find them. And the guy butchered it. He would say, HTTP ww. Period.
Thomas Conner:
Telenk, period. I mean, we had to introduce George Plaster to the first ever website that he’d ever seen. So he would understand, because he would say, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what I just read. And so I think we were equipping people, especially on the website side, with this newness about business. It wasn’t just about having an ad in the yellow pages. It wasn’t just about having maybe a spot on a tv station’s new show. It was a whole new way of saying how to market themselves.
Thomas Conner:
And we traded out a lot of stuff. Channel four, WSMV, the Nashville scene, WPLN. We didn’t really get money from those people, but they got web services and we got ads.
Tim Moses:
Did a lot with WSMV.
Joey Baggott:
Yeah, I remember a video one time of one of the it was in the early 90s where they were reading out a website and they had superimposed it over what they were talking about, and they were doing the same thing. Thomas, that you just described there. HTTP and they’re like, and I remember one guy said, he’s like, I don’t know what that is, but there’s no way that’s going to catch on. And it’s funny that it did catch on and how quickly that technology changed and how quickly some of it didn’t. I think, Thomas, you said earlier that your job was to get rid of the fax machine, and yet we still have today people communicate via fax machines. That’s one piece of technology that I do not understand how it has not gone away, but it’s not gone. So I had no follow up question.
Bill Butler:
I was just making a statement.
Thomas Conner:
I was always entertained by Bill because he would get so frustrated with inefficiency. And I would say something about a fax machine, or somebody would mention fax and say, and Bill would say, why don’t we just fax the facts of the fax machine? He would just get so frustrated. And if it was bad technology or old technology or outgoing technology, Bill was eager to push it on out the door. And that was immensely helpful for me because he sit there and watch me struggling with opening a webpage or using a file or something like that. He would just say, give me that. And he’d just take this mouse and just like, here, you do this, you do this, you need to do this. I try to keep up, but it was fun to be part of something. Nashville was kind of a sleepy town back then.
Thomas Conner:
We had a mayor that was not so visionary, was on the Phil Donahue show talking about having an extra marital affair and that kind of thing. And then a fairly tech conscious Nashville mayor comes on board and Phil Bettison, and he’s going to make the city bigger and better and more prominent. And he did. He was a tech geek, too.
Bill Butler:
Yeah. He even came to the ribbon cutting ceremony for Nashville Regional Exchange point. When we put that together.
Annakate Ross:
And what was that? What was the Nashville regional Exchange point?
Bill Butler:
It was actually a partnership between ISDN net and ourselves. So they were our competitor, but we both needed common data center space. And it costs so much, there’s so much sunk costs into creating a data center that we thought, well, we’ll just share the cost of it and each rent out space in it. And so we formed a partnership and rented the old Verizon space that was on the top of one american center. That big black building on 31st and West End, the very top floor. It’s a 13th floor past the elevator. Elevator is the twelveth. You have to walk up to the 13th and it’s like, I don’t know, 3000, 4000 sqft open floor space overlooks downtown Nashville.
Bill Butler:
And so we ripped out all the Verizon stuff after they left and put batteries and racks up there and would sell rack space. And then we did what was called peering, regional peering. So what that does is it’s almost like a bypass. It goes around a city to alleviate traffic going to the middle. It’s a very similar concept. And so we would peer with other providers there to reduce latency.
Annakate Ross:
Let me ask you a question then. So the company was around for, I think, seven years, right? 1999, you were acquired. At what point did you think acquisition was likely or was acquisition always the goal?
Bill Butler:
Was it always the goal? I don’t know if it was.
Tim Moses:
That wasn’t in my mind. I don’t think somebody started offering something.
Annakate Ross:
And you got some early offers from mindspring, I believe.
Thomas Conner:
Well, they never made an offer. They were just foolish. They would just send people over to hang out in our front yard.
Tim Moses:
Literally. They would have a couple of people just sitting in the front yard waiting. I don’t know what. Because they didn’t know what else to do.
Thomas Conner:
They would say, we want to buy you. And we’d say, not today, thank you.
Bill Butler:
I don’t know if you guys realize that we lived in the same place that we worked. It was a condo that we owned and we each had a bedroom and our offices. And the data center was in the sunroom overlooking. We had a fiber dragged into that place and tons of copper all coming into this tiny room with three racks and modems, worrying it was just the weirdest, geeky bachelor pad you’ve ever seen.
Tim Moses:
Yeah. Ripped out the kitchen to put in more server.
Bill Butler:
Yeah.
Thomas Conner:
Yeah.
Bill Butler:
Pulled out the sink and the dishwasher. And know the interesting thing about the sale or moving towards that was that at one time Psinet did come to us and they wanted to somehow share leads. I remember they’re like, you can give us leads for this and we’ll give you leads for that. We’d already been through that with the alliance center stuff where, I don’t know, it was really difficult because if you have the same products and services, it’s unlikely you’re going to legitimately give someone a lead. And so I, tongue in cheek, said, or maybe Tim, I don’t remember who said, you know, there’s another way you could get a lead. You could buy us. And I don’t know, within a few weeks, we were starting to have conversations. So it was more of a tongue in cheek thing that ended up starting all that.
Thomas Conner:
That’s not exactly how I remember the lead sharing for us, I thought, came more from Nextlink. Nextlink was this phone company that got started because of the 1996 telecommunications law. And they really didn’t want to sell Internet. They just wanted to sell phone lines. And we wanted to sell Internet, but we didn’t have anything to do with phone lines. So we sort of partnered up. And they liked us, they loved us. And I think, Bill, really, you really pushed the idea of getting acquired by Nextlink.
Thomas Conner:
And they had already done. And this was a company outside of Seattle, Don Hillenmeyer. Right, right. Don Hillenmire was the local guy, but they wanted to buy. Don wanted to buy us. His boss said, no, we’ve got a company we’ve already bought. We don’t need another Internet service provider. And we’ve just inked a deal to Coastell with.
Thomas Conner:
And.
Bill Butler:
I have some precursor on that to finish that.
Thomas Conner:
Well, they did say we were too little. Psi Net said, we are too little. We don’t want to buy you. We partnered up with ISDN to do this data center, NREp, and that’s when they said, let’s go out and let’s just promote ourselves. If you want to be in the Internet industry in Nashville, you’re going to have to deal with us, so you should buy us. And that’s when we started entertaining just about every schmo on the planet that came in and offered something. Most of the time, we didn’t understand the formulas. Most of the time it was a stock deal with a company that wasn’t even traded publicly.
Thomas Conner:
I mean, we entertained probably ten or so different prospects. And all of these people that came in, they just said, oh, you’d be insane to not go with us. We know everything. We are the best. We are going to change the world. Everybody’s going to change the world. And don’t you all want to be part of us? I thought most of them were just crazy. I didn’t like them.
Thomas Conner:
I didn’t like their personalities. I think Bill and Tim felt the same way. And ultimately, we met with the Psi net people along with the ISDN net people. Lots of eyes and ends in there. Sorry. And we got this call from the guy that was representing Psi net, said, we want to buy you. And I said, yes, so does everybody else. And they said, no, just you.
Thomas Conner:
We just want to buy you. We don’t want to buy the LSTN net people. We just want to buy you. And I said, right. All stock. And we can’t do anything with it for five years. They said, no, you take your pick. Cash, stock, whatever combination you want.
Thomas Conner:
And that’s when it really started getting interesting. That’s when I thought, hey, Tim, Phil, these guys just want to give us a bunch of cash. We just sell the company to them and they still want to employ. That’s. And I was driven by fear. I thought that the blue star people that were selling DSL lines were going to wipe us off the mat.
Bill Butler:
Scott Kaziki from blue Star and Covenant, Covent Cobad. Cobad. Because no CoVAd was going to buy blue Star, and Blue Star was rapidly expanding, and DSL was a real threat to ISDN and modem business. Right. Because it was sitting between that and t ones. I mean, really, you had basically cheap t ones coming out. And I do think we felt the pressure from that to some degree.
Annakate Ross:
And then you were able to sell in 1999, just a few years before the.com bust, and your parent company expired. Months. Okay, so that was perfect timing.
Tim Moses:
Brilliant planning on our part.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah. Let’s fast forward to 2023 today and talk a little bit about the Nashville tech scene. I know you all have been involved in various tech ventures since the telenc days. We’ve got the Nashville software school here booming. The entrepreneur center has got all kinds of interesting programs. There’s an accelerator, like one for healthcare and music, with a tech underlay on that. We’ve got all these big businesses moving into town. Just kind of love to hear your reflections on where we were and where we are now.
Annakate Ross:
And that kind of goes back to that question about what makes Nashville special. Kind of this special sauce we had then that enabled Telelink to be successful. But also, how have we evolved now? And are we still special?
Bill Butler:
I’m not sure I have much to contribute, other than I could list off the names of people that came from telenc and kind of where they spidered around.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah. Do you feel excited by the growth of Nashville as a tech hub? I mean, people do refer to us sometimes.
Tim Moses:
Yeah, I’m certainly happy to see that because at the time we were doing this, it wasn’t. And we certainly struggled with finding the resources we need or anything we were doing. We were just a few of a small group of people who were even doing tech stuff in town. I think that’s why Telink became such a magnet for other people is because there was nothing else happening here. So certainly happy to see that we started all of that for Nashville and that it’s been so successful because of what we did. Just kidding. I’m not really taking credit for think it’s great. I think Nashville has been doing it’s.
Tim Moses:
I’m so happy that I’m living. I have never had plans to move out of Nashville, but I’m happy to actually be in a city that actually has a technology future to it.
Annakate Ross:
Thomas, were you going to add something to that?
Thomas Conner:
I was going to say I think the ecosystem has fostered a lot of the spirit that makes it easy to maybe start a tech company now or to move a tech company here. Or in the case of some people, you might find this interesting. One of our staffers from the early days is a guy by the name of Nathan Hubbard, and he left us and he went to California and joined a company called MP3.com. And then he joined a little startup called Twitter. And up until just a few months ago, he was very important systems person with Twitter. But he lives in Nashville, he can live anywhere. And he’s here in Nashville. I don’t think he ever plans to leave.
Thomas Conner:
The Nashville software school got started because of the visionary leadership there that said, oh my goodness, we’ve got all kinds of opportunities popping up. We need to help create a community of coders so that we can help fill this need. Oracle is here, is moving here. Amazon is opening a big, massive operation here. We couldn’t even imagine back then that people would think that this will be a hub or a main location for not little stuff like what we did, but massive interplanetary activity when it comes to tech. But just about any industry now needs tech. Anything you can think of, whether it’s just a little in house cookie shop, they’re going to use some way, something along the lines of an Internet connection, at least probably a website, probably a payment processing system. That stuff was just a little something on one of those Mac cards that you’re talking about back in the day.
Thomas Conner:
Hypercard. Yeah. See, show me the balance sheet and the income statement.
Bill Butler:
The radius authenticates to the Spark Thomas.
Thomas Conner:
Well, that’s a whole different story. That’s probably going to know. That’s on the blog. But yeah, this is a great culture for people in tech. There are a lot of people moving here and they might be working for a company in a different town, but this is a great space for it. And maybe we were ahead of our time for assembling our people and doing what we did, but it’s just gone up and up since then.
Joey Baggott:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of saying that. Thomas. One thing we say on the network services side of Atiba, the IT services, is that if you have a computer, if that computer access the Internet, if you have a website, if you do anything with email, you’re a technology company. And if you’re a technology company, you have to have the infrastructure in place to protect yourself and to be that technology company. So if you think about it in that sense, there’s not really many companies these days that would not be considered a technology company. So it’s really cool to hear kind of where it started back in the early ninety? S and kind of where it is now and just hearing you all’s take on that. So thank you guys for that.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah, this has been a really fun conversation hearing about the origins of Teilink and then your reflections on Nashville then and now. So thank you guys for joining us today.
Bill Butler:
Yep, thanks for having us.
Claudine Claudio:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Half Geek, Half Human podcast. Make sure to follow the half geek, half Human podcast on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. We’ll see you next time.