Market Maker
Kevin Prigel made his first mutual fund investment at age 8. In 1998, before he could legally order a drink, Prigel founded StreetAdvisor.com, a stock advice site that's gained a reputation for ferreting out inside information. The 20-year-old CEO/analyst's secret: Speak to the geeks. "Every week I'm talking to engineers, and most people never listen to them," Prigel says. "They're the ones who really know what's going on inside tech companies." After one such chat in June 1999, Prigel posted a sell on Excite@Home while the company's share price was flying at 117. The (split) stock has since dipped below 30. And forget plastics. Prigel's word of advice for future investing: Wireless.
Hammer Time
"My transformation happened in about 20 minutes," explains Jonathan Hammer, a San Francisco-based artist who has pieces in the permanent collections of both the Whitney and SFMOMA. "I was drinking negronis in SoHo with my gallerist and wondering how many of the dot-coms that sold artwork had a real artist on staff." Though the online trade in fine art is booming, the answer, it turned out, was none. A few emails back and forth with eArtGroup.com - which reps dozens of prominent New York galleries online - changed that. Hammer is now the company's official artist-in-residence. He consults on the look and feel of the site and posts The Hammer Hits, a dishy weekly column about the art world. "Basically it means I'm their mascot," he says. "They fly me to parties all around the world and I spread fairy dust."
Razor's Edge
"The biggest challenge in my life used to be disk space," says Razorfish cofounder Craig Kanarick. "Now it's time management, but they're very much the same problem." With his digital consulting house posting record revenues, Kanarick's been putting his precious mindshare into other projects. One is RSUB (www.rsub.com), a multimedia entertainment company he cofounded, which in April acquired a majority stake in REM frontman Michael Stipe's two film companies. Then there's the Slipper Room, his newly opened burlesque revival club on the Lower East Side, where scantily clad women and pie fights are weekly fare. Plus, he's writing a book on the history of candy design, due out next year. Says Kanarick, "I feel like if you have an idea, you just gotta do it."
Out of the Box
Megan Smith likes a challenge. She helped build a solar-powered car, then drove it across Australia; she worked with a team that constructed a space shuttle experiment; she's designed a new bicycle lock. In her year and a half as CEO of PlanetOut, Smith has turned the gay and lesbian portal (www.planetout.com) into a multimedia powerhouse. Launched in 1995, PlanetOut has built strong content partnerships with AOL and Yahoo! and a thriving print presence (recently acquiring The Advocate and Out Magazine), touching off rumors of an IPO. In June, PlanetOut staffers travel to the local Pride Month celebrations and film festivals that the site sponsors in 40 cities worldwide. "I like adventure, steep learning curves, and making an impact," Smith says. "PlanetOut lets me apply that to a community."
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