Head count: Ascends Treasurer leaves to goto a new start-up in St. Louis, Missouri
By Owen Thomas
Red Herring Online
December 30, 1998
This time, says Tim Roberts, he's getting it right. In January 1998, the St. Louis entrepreneur left the company he founded, Savvis Communications, to start a new Internet service provider, the Digital Broadcast Network.
"We've learned from our mistakes at Savvis to build this thing the right way," said Mr. Roberts.
DBN and Savvis bear some family resemblance; both have a nationwide network on rented fiber lines with network access points concentrated in the Midwest and South. But DBN has already outstripped Savvis in its reach and is focusing on new kinds of data traffic, like streaming video, to bolster revenues.
Not that Savvis is doing that badly; the ISP has gotten top ratings for service quality, and recently hired Clyde Heintzelman, a Digex veteran, as its CEO. (Insiders say former CEO Sam Sanderson had been ousted for not meeting financial targets.)
A move like that naturally called for a riposte, and Mr. Roberts found it with a hire of his own: Bernie Schneider, a vice president and treasurer at networking equipment maker Ascend Communications (ASND). He starts work next month, but he's not likely to meet Mr. Heintzelman in St. Louis; Savvis's CEO is staying in northern Virginia, and has moved sales and marketing operations to the company's Reston offices. |
