SM: What did you do after Meineke? JS: The company was sold, and I got fired. They pushed me out of the company and forced me to deal with what I wanted to do. Right before I was fired we were looking at other businesses to franchise.
Jay is the CEO of Blinds.com, a company he founded in 1996. It has since achieved revenues surpassing $50 million and is ranked #192 of all US e-commerce companies. It is also the world’s top retailer for blinds, shades, and other window coverings. SM: Tell me first about your personal background leading up to this
SM: How is Latin America going from a broadband adoption point of view? MM: It is skyrocketing. We opened in Bogotá, Colombia, a year and a half ago and that is going extremely well. We are happy with growth there. We are looking at taking the cloud to Latin America. I think there is tremendous
SM: What part of cloud computing do you think will be transformed by virtualization? MM: Could computing is just providing raw computing capacity through the Internet. Instead of buying servers, space and storage you can buy gigahertz of computing capacity along with storage and memory through a friendly Web interface. You will not ever have
SM: Let’s talk about how your business has changed. What is it like today? MM: We are now a global company spanning three continents. We have 800 employees, guided to more than $290 million in revenues, and $82 million in EBITA. It is a completely different company.
SM: Why did you make the decision to finish building NAP? It sounds as though, given the implosion in the industry, that staying with real estate would have been a better decision. MM: I don’t believe that for a minute. Look at how we are doing today.
SM: What else was going on around you at this time? Wasn’t Exodus a high-profile data center company at the time? MM: Absolutely. That was in 2000, and Exodus was going through the roof. Global Crossing had a global center.
SM: When did you start getting into the data center business? MM: The more we got involved in the telecom hotels, the more in love I became with the data center business. All the folks who were renting space from us, such as Global Crossing, were operating data centers. Because of that I started learning