Plenty of children run lemonade stands or pick up golf balls at the local golf course to earn a little spending money. When Ronald Burr was a kid growing up in Pasadena, Calif., he did both of these things, and liked the idea of being in business for himself so much he designed logos for his "venture," an imaginary company he called Burr Industries.
"It was a fantasy I had as a kid," he explains. "My dad was a small-business man, and I lived with the realities of what that meant. He could take time off when he wanted to, and he made a good living."
Unlike many people who close their childhood lemonade stands and never again run a business, Burr followed through on his childhood dream. In 1991, he and a former colleague, Stacy Haitsuka, founded a software and consulting company called Impact Software. Six years later, in 1997, the two joined with former colleagues Harold MacKenzie and Marwan Zebian to form NetZero, the free consumer ISP service. The company went public in 1999, and attracted millions of registered users.
Last week, a month after the company announced plans to merge with Juno Online creating an ISP second only to AOL in terms of subscriber numbers, Burr and the other founding executives announced they would move on, as a team, to start a new company. The venture they've devised is a broadband startup called Layer2 Networks that would try to make it easier for a single company to offer cable, DSL and other broadband services. Burr will once again be at the helm as CEO of the Westlake Village, Calif., company, as he was when NetZero launched.
Burr explained his decision to leave by saying that he missed the thrill of creating something new, and that the excitement of running NetZero was no longer there. "I don't want to run a mega-company for the next 10 years," he says. "A true entrepreneur can create value where there was none before, and they'll do whatever it takes to make it happen. They're willing to sacrifice their own time and money, and put their blood and sweat into an idea to make it a reality. That's much more rare."
The new broadband venture is just the latest move in the 36-year-old's career, which could be considered unusual based on his lack of a formal college education. After high school in 1983, the then-19-year-old took a job in tech support at a software company called Vault Corp., and taught himself to program by reading computer-science textbooks he bought at the bookshop at the California State University at Northridge. "It was the first time in my life I wanted to learn for the sake of getting something done," he says. "It wasn't work for me - it was fun." Burr's self-education had him in the office for 16 hours a day, seven days a week. During the next five years, he climbed the ladder at the small company to the point where he was named VP of software development.
Burr eventually left the company, and in 1989 was recruited to work as a technical consultant for IBM, where he met his future partners. Today, the four are friends as well as business associates who get together with their children and spouses for vacations and barbecues. For now, Burr, who is married with two young sons, is enjoying a brief period of quiet before beginning the next venture in earnest, but says he knows the tranquillity won't last long: "We'll be heading back into startup insanity soon."
