NearbyNow CEO In It For The Long Run (San Jose Biz Journal)

The San Jose Business Journal did a professional profile on me, and I thought it was neat how they incorporated ultrarunning into it. Lindsey Riddell is a talented writer, and Dennis Hendricks braved the storms and trails to take some great pics. Read on...

NearbyNow CEO In It For The Long Run
By Lindsey Riddell, 1/25/08 (edited by Scott for clarity)

In his 38 years, Scott Dunlap can pinpoint several transformational moments.

There was the canceled meeting on Sept. 11. There was the scene of that bike accident where Dunlap was one of the first to arrive. There was that first 100-mile race where he went down at mile 96. There was the birth of his daughter.

Dunlap says he's realized he's been given a gift. And he's using that gift to test his limits, to connect to people, and to, as he puts it, "Live in this world and not on it."

And now his company NearbyNow Inc. aims to change the way people shop, making malls searchable by Internet and cell phone and bridging that gap between offline and online retail.

It's a big gamble. But, if he can pull it all off, it might be his greatest transformation yet.

"NearbyNow is one of those that is still up in the air," says venture capitalist Howard Hartenbaum, a NearbyNow investor. "It could be really big. For other companies, people might be happy if we make two times our money or if it's big, then 10 times. NearbyNow, if everything works, could be a multi-billion dollar business."

And that probably won't end up being the most amazing accomplishment by the blogging, screenwriting, ultramarathon-running millionaire.

Born to a doctor father and a university professor mother, Dunlap was a music composition major at the University of Oregon with an aptitude for writing software, but more of an aptitude for selling it. Andersen Consulting gave him his first taste of the tech world.

He got an MBA from Stanford University in 1998, and interned at Netscape Communications Corp. during his MBA study where he met Netscape executive Ben Horowitz, former vice president at America Online Inc., and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. Dunlap then worked as vice president of e-commerce solutions for E.piphany Inc., a software company, until it went public in September 1999. In the same month, Andreessen and Horowitz summoned him to Loudcloud Inc.-- the company that eventually became Opsware Inc. before being acquired by Hewlett-Packard Co. last summer -- which helped Fortune 500 companies like handle their Internet traffic.

The move would make Dunlap a millionaire by age 32.

After four years of start-ups and IPO's, he wanted to slow down and catch his breath.

Around Sept. 2001, Loudcloud was preparing to sell part of itself to Electronic Data Systems Corp. It was at that time Dunlap would take a severance package and "get my life back."

At the time, he didn't realize how lifesaving that decision would turn out to be.

While at Loudcloud, Dunlap had gone to New York nearly every week to meet at one of the smaller World Trade Center buildings with a group of investors, investment bankers, and work associates. When he quit on Sept. 8, 2001, his meeting for Sept. 11 was canceled. Three of the people he'd met with regularly were killed that day in the terrorist attacks.

Dunlap had a hard time reading newspapers or watching television for some time after that. Instead, he hiked, admitting he'd never been "much of an athlete. "

And when his wife got him an abnormally active pug dog named Rocky a few weeks later, Dunlap took up trail running.

"People would always say to me: 'You shouldn't run your pug like that,'" he says, "but I was just trying to keep up."

The trail became a kind of therapy for Dunlap, a way to regain focus and keep life in perspective.

"On the trail, I had a lot of time to digest what had happened and that's when I realized I'd been handed this big gift," Dunlap says. "We spent the next couple of months running every trail from San Francisco to Santa Clara. And I got really fast."

Dunlap wasn't just fast, he won the Trail Runner Magazine Trophy Series in 2004 for marathon-and-shorter distance, the largest trail running competition in the nation. And he eventually worked his way up to ultramarathon distances -- 26.2 to 100 miles and beyond -- something even the most famous ultramarathon runners like Dean Karnazes, author of UltraMarathon Man, and a personal friend of Dunlap's, have noticed.

"The thing that distinguishes Scott is his range. From short distance all the way to the 100-miler, he's very competitive at all levels," Karnazes says.

And like with his running, Dunlap shows brain range, too.

His blog about ultramarathon running: A Trail Runner's Blog (runtrails.blogspot.com) gets 80,000 unique hits a month. Forbes magazine named it the Best Health and Fitness Blog on the Web in 2005. He's also written four screenplays, one that got optioned just after he started NearbyNow in 2006, timing that made Dunlap unable to pursue its production.

After two years as head of worldwide marketing and product management at Avolent and with three years ultrarunning guiding him, Dunlap decided to return to startups as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures in 2005, this time with "a much clearer focus and vision." Soon after, NearbyNow was born.

The idea for the searchable mall came to Dunlap on a shopping trip with his wife to the Stanford Mall. She wanted a pair of boots she had seen in a magazine and was going store-to-store.

The venture capitalists who have backed NearbyNow believe Dunlap's vision for the company could literally transform the way people shop.

"I thought, if I could just search the inventory of every store from my mobile phone, find that pair of boots in her size at a store they have here, I'd be out of here in 30 minutes," Dunlap says.

From that idea sprang NearbyNow, an Internet/consumer/mobile company that stores mall inventory data and allows shoppers in the mall or heading there to find exactly what they're looking for either through their computer or their phone. Shoppers can even reserve merchandise to pick up later, ensuring their size and color will be available when they walk in. And retailers can send text coupons and ads to shoppers through their phones.

Dunlap just had to overcome the first few challenges to prove that it worked. No. 1: getting stores to share their inventory data. And once they did, figuring out how to mesh all the data formats together into one giant database.

Once he convinced the stores within the malls that luring high-intent-to-buy shoppers was valuable, and soothed the fears of mall operators by promising his company would not use the inventory data for e-commerce purposes, they agreed to give him the information.

Then he recruited a team of founders from E.piphany and Loudcloud to figure out how to read all of that inventory and make it searchable.

"There's a $1 trillion trend of people who research online but buy locally," Dunlap says. "If we get it right, there's no need to sell to Google, Yahoo, or eBay. We can become a very large company, and create whole new ways for retailers to connect with nearby customers."

Draper Fisher Jurvetson was the first venture firm to invest, followed by Draper Richards and both were attracted to Dunlap's desire to do something market-altering.

"When we met Scott we said: 'This is a guy with a really big opportunity, who was passionate about it, and knows what he wants. He isn't in it for the short term,'" says Emily Melton, who led Draper Fisher Jurvetson's investment in NearbyNow.

NearbyNow, which has raised $7.5 million in funding, offers its service in 200 malls and expects to raise a Series C round of funding this year. It is already used by millions of shoppers each month.

Hartenbaum says he liked Dunlap from the first time he met him because of Dunlap's strong and convincing belief in himself.

Dunlap may have been born with that. But he might have developed it through those transforming moments of his life. On his first 100-mile run, Dunlap fell and injured his leg at mile 96, then hobbled for 2 hours and 20 minutes to the finish line. He calls the experience "refreshing in that I found out I had much more in me than I would have guessed."

"He has a clear vision for the future and doesn't waiver from it," says Hartenbaum of Draper Richards.

You can try out the NearbyNow service at these shopping centers in the Bay Area - Westfield Valley Fair, Westfield Oakridge, Eastridge Center, and the Westfield San Francisco Centre. Just search, click a product, and check to see if it is in stock.

[Note - I did edit this story a bit to correct spelling, a couple of factual inaccuracies, and add hyperlinks.]