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By summer's end, he had been asked to stay for a year to run the camp's schools. "Essentially, I was the head of the board of education for a town of 35,000," says Ciporin, who had never studied the Khmer language. Working with 12,000 kids –- most of whom had had no schooling -– "was management baptism by fire," he adds. But it also taught him something about himself: "Organizing people toward a vision is enormously gratifying." Looking back, the 42-year-old calls it "the best part of my life -- next to DealTime." SHOPPING BOTS. He's referring to the three-year old Israeli Internet company where he's CEO. The 93rd-most-visited site on the Web, it helps consumers compare and price products from 8,000 online and offline retailers. In need of a new cassette player or a Three Stooges video? DealTime will dispatch software robots, or "bots," to snare info –- price, shipping costs, and product specs. It will then overlay a buying guide to help you decide which is the best purchase. The company takes a cut on products users choose through its listings. It also sells premium placement to retailers, allowing them to essentially buy their way to the top of each page. Sounds cool. But DealTime has yet to prove it can be a viable business. Last year's sales totaled just $525,000, as losses ballooned to $19 million. Even worse, the company has been stranded in the dot-com downdraft. It filed for a $50 million public offering on Mar. 23, just days before the Nasdaq began its long fall and investors soured on consumer-oriented Net companies. Now, Ciporin must again organize people around a vision -– but this time, a vision that continues to change. MAJOR TIES. Not surprisingly, he's revamping DealTime for Wall Street, offering its services for other companies looking to reach consumers rather than directly to consumers themselves. A big boost came from its deal with America Online, which will use DealTime to help members access its merchants. In a another key agreement, AT&T will add a wireless version of DealTime to its PocketNet mobile data service. Ciporin is also fashioning a consumer-research product, which will let retailers know exactly what consumers are -– or aren't -- searching for, in real time. A business-to-business site is in the works, too. "We would like to go public, but the market will need to decide that," says Ciporin, whose investors include AOL, Time Warner, and Bank of America. The stalled IPO is no small frustration to Ciporin. He's not one who typically leaves anything to fate. "I'd like to see him take a little more time off," says David Epstein, once his boss at management consultant Mars & Co., where Ciporin worked after earning an MBA from Yale. Ironically, Epstein is now Ciporin's employee, as director of corporate development. Adds Deborah Sachs, DealTime's marketing vice-president: "We always respond to his e-mails, because you know he could be checking them at any hour." "SKEPTICAL." After consulting, Ciporin moved to MasterCard, where he was eventually responsible for the marketing and product management of its Global Deposit Products unit, much of which was moving toward the online world. "It was clear to me that e-commerce was happening in a big way, and that it was something I wanted to be a part of," he says. Headhunters kept ringing. But Ciporin shooed them off: "Most everything seemed to me just taking a business idea and slapping a dot-com on the end of it. I was skeptical." Meanwhile, someone had spotted that year in Thailand on his resume. It was Nahum Sharfman, chairman and co-founder of DealTime. He was looking for a marketing veteran -– not an Internet geek -– to run his then-fledgling company. DealTime had just $500,000 in the bank and was based in a broom-closet office above a kabob shop in Tel Aviv. "That he'd been in Thailand as a refugee teacher suggested that maybe he had some chutzpah," laughs Sharfman. ""My thoughts were that we'd never get him." POTENTIAL. When they first met, Sharfman walked Ciporin through the Web site, only to find him a tough audience. "I couldn't tell what the hell the site did," he says. But digging beneath its clumsy design, he saw potential for reshaping how buyers and sellers communicate. DealTime could provide open access to information that was once impossible to find in one place. In economic terms, users could become "perfect consumers," knowing everything about a potential purchase. "But I'm thinking, 'This is not very well funded -- $500,000 in the bank, just a few guys in Israel. I'm going to leave a secure high-paying job at MasterCard and go to something like this? I must be crazy,'" recalls Ciporin. He took the job anyway. "He'd wanted to run something for so long," says his wife, Jill. "He goes to work every day totally stressed out, but totally happy." It's a balanced perspective reinforced by Ciporin's time in Thailand. Despite DealTime's challenges, they still pale to his months in that sprawling camp, trying to organize scared, often orphaned children into arts and vocational classes. "It was emotionally draining," he says. "But it thrilled me to the core." And that might be the best career inspiration of all. Berman and Brown cover e-business from Business Week's New York office |
