Startup Survivor

It’s a tough time for technology startups in Seattle.

Many have already endured more than one round of layoffs. Others have scaled back their business plans. Venture capitalists are tightening the grip on their wallets. Even Microsoft has announced a hiring freeze.

Terry Drayton has seen this all before. The 48-year-old Calgary, Alberta, native is best known for co-founding in 1997 one of the companies that came to epitomize the dot-com bubble: HomeGrocer.com, the personal-delivery grocery service famed for riding the dot-com wave until the sector collapsed in March 2000. Drayton is bracing for an even worse recession this time.
“This is the fourth down cycle I can remember,” says Drayton, a compact man with a strong Canadian accent who says “frickin’” just about every other word. “When the economy is booming, people think it will never frickin’ end. When it goes bust, people say they never frickin’ saw it coming.”

Like many back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Drayton is one of those people who never saw the end of the tech bubble coming. “One week in 2000, you could raise as much money as you wanted,” he says. “A week later, there was no way to raise any money at all.”

After the dot-com bust, Drayton moved on. In June 2000, he resigned from HomeGrocer as part of the Webvan merger. In early 2001, he co-founded two startups—The Ramp Group and The Arena Group, both based in Bellevue. Ramp is a computer programming and application development consulting firm with about 100 employees, and Arena, now with 12 employees, is an online registration and management software company that is really six companies in one.

The Arena portfolio inludes Count Me In, a business that produces software to help individuals manage sports leagues of all types. It also has charge of Powered by Eastbay, which offers software to manage sports organizations. A third firm, Turnstile Systems, makes software that assists event managers with registering people and running events. Another similar Arena company is All Registrations.com, which provides online registration software for any need. Alumni Software lets individuals manage alumni organizations, and Youth Sports World creates and supports internet communities dedicated to youth sports.

Drayton knows how to keep a startup alive during a recession. But those lessons weren’t easily learned, and he has the scars to prove it. To this day, the fall of HomeGrocer.com stands as