Know More Media is a skilled team of people that have come together to make business information more accessible by bringing business writers and readers together through our business trade blogs. We believe in participatory journalism. We believe there are many talented business writers out there that have important and relevant business knowledge, expertise, and perspective to share.

We find new authors all the time, and they are adding to the value we offer our readers every day. You can access their expertise daily on the Know More Media Network. They are an impressive and gifted crowd.

Know More Media was founded by Tim Stay and me, Hal Halladay.  We started Know More Media because we saw the tremendous need and opportunity to connect experts in business disciplines with business professionals. The flexibility and scalability of blogs is powerful and fits our vision. This is not our first - nor likely our last - adventure in building a rapidly growing business.

What is important to know about us?
We think the following items are worth knowing about us in this context:

An Experienced Team...
Our executive team has a diversity of experience. We have lived through fledgling start-ups as well as worked for billion dollar companies. Most importantly, each of us has started our own firms. We know this drill. We have enjoyed a mix of success and some failures. As a CEO, each of us has had to go through the heart-wrenching process of laying people off or shutting the doors on a business. We have had enough gut punches to not be too arrogant, but still respect business realities and cycles. We all feel a sense that there is a real opportunity here to create a new kind of media property focusing on business.

...That Worked Together Before...
We are a team that has worked together before and have chosen to work as partners again. Back in 1999, Tim Stay hired me to be CEO of freeservers.com, a company that Tim founded. Freeservers.com grew to be a top 50 web property, reaching more than 1,000,000 users, and was eventually renamed NorthSky, Inc. and sold to About.com.  After the sale, Tim and I continued to work together and launched an online business through a business incubator. One of the companies was called Humanlink, a social media start-up that, unfortunately, could not secure additional funding in the aftermath of the crash of 2000. The fallout from this time period found us all going separate ways until the spring of 2004 when Tim co-founded an online media company, Tornado Solutions, a publisher of niche webzines that outsourced its creation of content to independent writers. Nine months later, I joined Tornado Solutions and the seeds of Know More Media were nourished. Only a few months later, Dan Smith joined the team. Dan had worked with both Tim and me in different ventures and had recently completed writing his first novel.

...With Complementary Skills...
Coming together to create Know More Media seemed natural. We share a similar vision and a commitment to business principles and ethics. While we have complementary skills, we also have different strengths and viewpoints; to wit: electrical engineer, writer, civil engineer, and investment banker. A strange brew indeed, yet all entrepreneurs, all data junkies, all MBAs, all committed to that peculiar concept of profitability, and we all value the potential of human capital when combined with financial resources and technology.

As entrepreneurs, we have have raised capital, cleaned bathrooms, manned the phones, and made presentations at conferences. Nevertheless, we have individual abilities that provide value to this effort. 

Dan understands risk. He left a job with Tim as VP of Marketing to move to the beach and write a book. He writes, knows writers, and understands the writer's psyche. He has successfully managed large and small groups of people in many different organizations. He has worked in online businesses and start-ups, and has been responsible for driving millions of dollars of business through online properties. Dan is our VP of Publishing.

The former civil engineer, Tim is a visionary with an uncanny ability to smell market opportunities and apply technologies to create unique products and services that can be monetized. He has a creative streak running through his engineer's mind and has been the primary architect of the design, structure, and direction of our publishing platform. He understands the impact of these products on the company's strategy. Tim is our Chief Innovation Officer.

Dropping the Hermes tie and blue suit like a bad habit, I provide direction to this cadre of talent. I do my best to motivate and inspire the team and keep all eyes focused on the right priorities. My experience has been primarily bringing together the people, technology, and partnerships to create a business that can scale rapidly. I carry the mantle of leading and optimizing the resources at hand. I also  am repsonsible for designing systems and processes that keep us on the critical path. I am our Chief Executive Officer.

...With Online Publishing Experience...
As early as 1994, Tim started an online company that eventually morphed into a paid and then free hosting provider called FreeServers.com. As CEo, I guided this community to more than 1,000,000 web sites. The free hosting was supported by advertising. Our product provided our user an ability to publish their own content about their interests, likes, hobbies, and expertise. We talk about the democratization of media, but we sometimes felt this was closer to anarchy of the media rather than democracy! Some of the sites were junk, but others were outstanding. A few years after it was sold, Rich became the General Manager of this division that was then owned by About.com and Primedia, and from this relationship, became very familiar with the publishing business, especially the online niche publishing industry. Today, FreeServers still stands, having passed through the hands of About, Primedia, and now is within the United Online household - the owners of Juno and NetZero. FreeServers was sold before we were able to create communities of websites around specific topics such as car aficionados, a group of garage bands, or travel experts. We knew that to maximize our advertising space, it was important to offer relevant and topic-specific content that would attract niche advertisers.

Fast forward to 2004 and our second online publishing company, Tornado Solutions, where we focus on publishing quality (not quantity) websites with niche content written by experts. We rely on contextual advertising that is relevant to the content we publish. We published more than 60 websites about various topics, with most written by independent experts from around the US. We are able to get very relevant advertising, and it monetized better than the run-of-network traffic we sold at FreeServers.

...And Experience with Scaling a Business...
Tim and I experienced scaling a business through FreeServers, growing it from zero users to over a million users within an 18-month period. FreeServers became one of the few privately-owned web properties to show up on the Media Metrix Top 50 websites by volume. We were able to accomplish this growth with very little increase in staff or personnel and thereby operate profitably. This was because of our focus to deliberately build the business so it could scale very large with minimal incremental cost.

...With Creating Value...
While we have all been involved in building various businesses, our biggest success was NorthSky, Inc (formerly freeservers.com). I was hired by Tim as CEO of NorthSky to help refine the company's strategy, write a business plan, build a team, sharpen its focus, and create a structure around a previously loose operation. The result was positive and after 18-months, it was sold to About.com for a stock purchase valued at approximately $44 million. Tim and I succeeded in creating an exceptional amount of value in NorthSky in a short period of time.

...And We Believe in Giving Back.
We all believe in giving back. You may notice that Know More Media has a link to Unitus. Tim is a co-founder and current board member of Unitus, an organization that is working to alleviate poverty around the globe.  I am Chairman and a charter member of the Brea Education Foundation , a non-profit that develops resources to provide students of his local school district the tools and materials needed in order to maintain and advance their educational opportunities. We feel that giving back is a critical part of our responsibilities.

Why Do We Believe We Can Succeed?
We are building a network that can scale quickly, and the incremental cost of each additional media property will be a miniscule variable cost. We believe that by using the blogging publishing model, we can provide current, unfiltered, and relevant business information written by experts from around the world on a continual basis, and that we will offer a platform for conversations between our experts and our readers. Our revenue will primarily come from a mix of contextual advertising, affiliate advertising, direct advertising, and sponsorships. We believe our niche publishing model will be attractive to advertisers who want to be very targeted in their ad spend.

Why do we think we will succeed? When we hear that there are over 100 start-up blog networks, we feel confident that we will be one of the networks to survive and thrive. Why this confidence? We have a team with as much experience as any company out there in this space. We have struggled in the trenches on the front line, as well as directed from senior executive offices. We have started and run a dozen or more companies. We have created extraordinary value. We know the pain of having to close businesses and lay off close friends and associates. We hope we have enough realism and humility from these occurrences. We have experience with online niche publishing and the various revenue models possible. We know how to build value and believe in the basic fundamentals of creating a solid and sound business built to last. We think we have the right combination to make something valuable out of this company and provide a product that will be of value to its readers.