Mediaboss Marketing

Read the second in this series here.

Razorfish founders Jeffrey Dachis (right), who studied ballet, and his childhood friend Craig Kanarick (left), a tech whiz who had recently graduated from MIT Media Lab, plucked the digital agency name out of the dictionary. (Yes, its a real fish.)

In four years, Razorfish exploded from a pair of 27-year-olds laboring in a New York apartment in 1995, to more than 2,000 employees and about $250 million in revenue. More than just a hive of techies, Razorfish and its Silicon Alley digs were considered cool and urban. Kanarick remembers the office as a place you could stay up late and rollerblade around while inventing the future. The hip agency and outspoken CEO Dachis quickly became lightning rods for both fans and foes of the Web "revolution."

Razorfish relished the attention, opening offices across the U.S. and snapping up other interactive agencies, including Spray in Scandinavia. In 1997, Omnicom bought a large minority stake. And during 1999, the agency went public, raising $48 million at $16 a share.

When revenue fell off the cliff in 2000-2001, the pair - not yet 35 - was forced to resign.

Kanarick later co-founded a retail marketing studio and digital design lab for architecture firm Rockwell Group. This year, he unveiled New York Mouth, an online store for local artisanal foods. For his part, Dachis, 45, established the Dachis Group in 2008. The Austin-based social media marketing agency is hosting a social business summit in Shanghai in mid-April.

Photo: Jeffrey Dachis and Craig Kanarick (center left and center right) at the Razorfish/Plastic merger party (with Shane Ginsberg, left, and Len Sellers, right) in San Francisco, 1998.

ClickZ: What in the zeitgeist of the '90s moved you to start a Web services outfit?

Dachis: I was all about the expression of ideas through the arts, like dance, theater, photography and magazines. But distribution of these expressions was controlled by a few wealthy institutions. We saw that digital changed all that, distribution became cheap and it was democratized. Frankly, I sucked at creating those [art] forms. But I saw how I could be part of distributing them digitally.

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Digital Mad Men: Razorfish Co-founder Jeffery Dachis