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Last year was a great one for Stephen Messer ’93, who was named Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year and had the company he founded, LinkShare, purchased by the leading Japanese Internet portal, Rakuten, for $425 million.
“We allow merchants to increase their sales and leads and acquire new customers for their web sites,” says Messer of Linkshare. “Merchant sites earn revenue by selling products and services. Affiliates, looking to earn revenues from site traffic, promote those merchants. LinkShare facilitates the partnerships between the two.”
LinkShare tracks and reports on every ad or placement in the network, manages payments to affiliates, and provides tools to help merchants optimize their performance. With over 10 million partnerships, it is the most successful pay-for-performance network of its kind.
“We have been recognized by Deloitte and Touche for the last two years as the fastest-growing technology company in the New York region,” notes Messer.
The idea for the company came to him during his senior year at Lafayette.
“I was living off campus and so I had the time to start the research needed to explore a business plan,” he says.
Throughout law school the idea remained burning in Messer’s mind and he continued to refine his plan. In 1996 his dream became reality when he founded LinkShare.
“For the first two years we bootstrapped it,” he says. “It was a typical garage start-up, except we worked out of my apartment in New York City.”
In 1998 the company raised $4 million from Comcast Interactive Capital group and has since rocketed to success. Its innovative affiliate marketing concept garnered immediate interest and LinkShare became profitable in 2001. Growth has accelerated exponentially from there.
Messer credits Lafayette with playing a part in his overwhelming success.
“It was the best education I could have asked for,” he says. “The diversity of the liberal arts curriculum prepared me to deal with all the various aspects of developing and running a business.”
He also credits John McCartney, associate professor and head of government and law, with helping him to learn how to think critically, as well as inspiring him to major in government and law.
“He was amazing — so passionate that he drew you in,” says Messer, “and so detail-focused that you understood the implications of why things happened as they did.”
Messer notes that few people start a technology firm from scratch.
“Raising money is difficult, as it is hard to value what the product is worth,” he explains. “Understanding the market and how the technology will fit the market is a science. And staffing, through what may be huge periods of growth, is an incredible challenge.”
Through both his experience at Lafayette and at LinkShare, Messer has developed two traits that have been important to his achievements.
“I learned patience and perseverance. Nothing happens as quickly as you’d like it to,” he says.
Those traits will serve Messer and LinkShare well in the future. He is confident the company will continue to adapt and persevere over the inevitable tides of technological change. He is patient in his own plans, trusting they will evolve in the manner they have done in the past.
“Five years from now, I can tell you where industry is going. The goal will be to stay ahead of it,” he says. “But as far as what I will be doing then, I don’t know.”