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From dot-com darling to disaster: The spectacular flameout of Andrew Gladney, Part 1

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Both men were fascinated with the World Wide Web, then in its infant stage, and before long they decided to build a business around it. In November 1995 they incorporated Diamond.Net, aiming to construct a super-fast network that corporations could use for internal and external Web communications. Gladney, with a 75 percent ownership stake, was president and CEO. Roberts, who says he got the remaining 25 percent, was chief operating officer. Gladney ponied up all the startup money. (Roberts would later claim Gladney's investment totaled $600,000; Gladney said it was $1 million.)

Less than a year after Diamond.Net's startup, the company was in dire straits. Customers were few, Gladney's capital infusion was gone and tensions rose.

"Tim and Andrew would go at it left and right, with Andrew screaming at Tim, 'It's not your money you're spending!' after Tim would run up Andrew's credit card," recalls Gary Zimmerman, a telecom executive who joined the company in November 1995. "I don't think people realize what all we did to keep the doors open. There were days when some of us had to help make payroll. I know I put in $30,000 to do that."

Roberts says Gladney was long on "IQ" and "morale" but shortsighted when it came to the business model. He says Gladney even threatened to shutter the firm in 1996. "I think he'd thought it would be fun and games — that we'd spend a minimal amount of money every month, we'd have a bunch of employees that would go out every night and we'd all be friends."

Local venture capitalists Dick Ford and John McCarthy came to the rescue. Their firm, then called Gateway Venture Partners, pumped and steered millions into Diamond.Net, encouraged a name change — to Savvis Communications Corporation — and overhauled management. Roberts left the company in 1997, and Gladney was demoted from CEO to vice chairman, a position that paid $150,000.

"Andrew never wanted to get into the details. He never really ran the company," explains Zimmerman, a VP at Savvis until last month. "He had a Bloomberg machine on his desk. We always thought he was in there day-trading."

On January 20, 1999, a little more than three years after Andrew Gladney founded the now-burgeoning firm, Savvis fired him.

"Andrew was a very bright guy and a great cheerleader," explains Bob Murphy Jr., CFO at Savvis from 1996 to 1999, "but we were preparing to be acquired, and he just didn't have any experience as a marketing officer or chief executive of a major company."

Gladney initially filed suit, claiming Savvis owed him money, but he dismissed the case two months later. Shortly afterward, in April 1999, Bridge Information Systems bought Savvis for a reported $90 million and took the company public in 2000. (The company was renamed Savvis Inc. in 2005.)

His ownership having been diluted over the years, Gladney never made it into Savvis' millionaire-executive ranks. By the time of the IPO, in fact, his stake had dwindled to less than 1 percent. And by early 2001, he'd cashed out for $150,000.

Gladney wasted little time rebounding from the Savvis heave-ho. In the spring of 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, he made a cold call to Mark Newman, managing editor of The Sporting News' online edition, and invited him to lunch to discuss a new business venture. The accomplished Newman had recently won a National Magazine Award for revamping TSN's Web site.

In short order Gladney and Newman, along with Robert Cordova, a Yale pal, opened an office on Brentwood Boulevard and prepared to launch MAX Broadcasting Network, a suite of Web sites featuring sports video content.

Gladney partly financed the startup and scoured New York and Silicon Valley for more capital. "There was a little objection because we were St. Louis-based," Newman remembers. "But Andrew's a very powerful personality — very persuasive and energetic."

Gladney put together an initial $3 million and set his sights on raising $30 million in 2000. The goal was an IPO within three years. "I'm sure there will be many other endeavors beyond this one," Gladney told the Post-Dispatch in March of 2000.

In nine months' time, the MAX team rolled out two different Web sites, featuring high-profile commentators including Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Cris Carter, ex-National Football League coach Jerry Glanville and hometown Post columnist Bernie Miklasz.

Former employees say Gladney, a sports fanatic, was extremely passionate and enjoyed appearing as an analyst in the videos. Once in New York, recounts Newman, Gladney got the itch to get in front of the camera. "We were shooting in the production studios of 20/20 and Andrew wanted to get on, so he told me to go over to some shop near the Four Seasons in midtown and buy him some kind of special jacket." Adds Newman: "He's a very snap-your-fingers type of guy."

MAX's former producer, Jeff Fowler, now associate vice president of marketing and communications for Saint Louis University, remembers Gladney as demanding but generous. "He would walk around the office trying to prop you up," says Fowler. "Every Friday he would buy lunch for everybody, and we'd all sit around telling stories."

Gladney's assertiveness didn't always work. "In the big opportunities we had, whether it was NBC Sports or Times Mirror or whatever, Andrew rubbed people the wrong way," Newman says. "I found myself defending him afterwards a number of times. Braggadocio was a very big part of it. He was an evangelist for what we were doing — and I was pretty much saying the same things — but when you go in to meet people from NBC, you don't want to be God. He was pretty much told not to be God, and he was himself. We didn't get that deal."

Those were heady times, when recent college grads were becoming Internet millionaires by the minute, and aspirants like the MAX crew were spending money they didn't technically have. Gladney was one of a number of Savvis alums in St. Louis staking out new Web ventures and hoping to strike gold. "I'm the father of this whole high-tech revolution," he boasted to the Post-Dispatch.

And then the Internet bubble burst. By the end of 2000, MAX was jettisoning staff and preparing to file for bankruptcy. (A judge later ruled the company had to pay back all its creditors.)

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