Start-ups

I was COO and Co-founder of Angry Coffee, where we thought Napster was obnoxiously playing in the supposed “grey area” of copyright law. We took it into our own hands, building a competing service that would be legal. How? We hacked into Napster,and made the front page of The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, July 26, 2000. 3 months and 80 major media mentions later we entertained a $300K acquisition offer from Listen.com and shortly thereafter a $20M Letter of Intent from Vitaminic S.P.A. I gained invaluable experiences in writing product specifications, M & A and due diligence processes. And not least, learned how to navigate the landscape of personalities and power brokers in the space.

I am always open to joining new or existing companies as a team member or advisor. Please feel free to reach out to me.

The start-up is immortalized on Wikipedia and reads as follows:

Angry Coffee, led by Adam Vincent Powell, Todd Tate and CTO Jeff Burchell, deployed the first publicly available web interface to P2P networks when they launched Percolator in June of 2000. When Napster denied Angry Coffee users access to their database, the story appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

On June 27, 2000 Angry Coffee made this statement: “Napster has shut us out of their network. We think it’s lame that a company that built its business through unauthorized distribution would consider Percolator to be an unauthorized use of their resources, but they’re entitled to their opinion.”

Soon after this event Angry Coffee went on to assist EMI and Capitol Records with the marketing and promotion of internationally famed band Radiohead, with the release of Kid A in 2000.