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Perchance to dream: Young entrepreneur Joe Ordia leaves college to pursue Internet vision Laughing off the dot.com shakeout Thursday, May 03, 2001 By Eve Modzelewski, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Joe Ordia, 20, lives in a slightly unkempt townhouse in Swissvale, just across the Pittsburgh boundary. On his front porch, in a gesture of irony, a 3-foot-tall Santa Claus statue greets visitors even in late spring. And sprawled nearby, mismatched lawn furniture is worn and inviting.
Walk through the front door, and everything about the place -- from the hand-me-down couches to the liquor bottles atop the cabinet -- says "college pad."
But don't be fooled. It's not an Animal House at all.
In fact, Ordia isn't in college.
Last fall, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., native made a risky move of which most parents wouldn't approve: He dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University so he could devote more time to his software start-up.
Instead of schlepping himself to class every day, he threw himself headfirst into Ordia Corp., which he incorporated in November and now runs from his low-key home.
And, believe it or not, his parents approved of the decision. They even invested in the company, Ordia said.
Since he left school, Ordia has worked 60 to 80 hours a week developing the company's main product, JBlurb, a software package that gives users secure access to each other's files. In January, Ordia Corp. launched JBlurb Community Edition, which could be downloaded free from the company's Web site, and the product quickly attracted thousands of users.
At its peak, more than 15,000 users were logging onto JBlurb, which may have been a great omen of Ordia's success -- except most users were illegally swapping copyrighted files.
It was the same problem Napster got tangled up in, and Ordia decided Saturday to discontinue the free community edition of JBlurb and focus on the JBlurb Professional Edition, which is offered for a fee.
"The market for illegal file sharing is huge, but it's not what our technology is designed for," Ordia said.
Ordia Corp. is in its earliest stages, and Ordia is still shaping and reshaping the product. His eyes light up when he talks about the company, and he exudes energy and optimism despite an unstable economy.
"Even in the hard times, smart money is going to find smart people, so I'm not worried," Ordia said.
So far, he hasn't needed a whole lot of money. Creating software is relatively inexpensive, and the company has raised about $30,000 in private investments, mostly from family and friends. It's now seeking a first round of formal investment funding, Ordia said.
JBlurb uses the same peer-to-peer technology Napster used to link users' computers and enable them to swap music files. Pure peer-to-peer technology, shortened as P2P, eliminates the need for a central server by connecting individual computers in a network.
Both Napster and JBlurb, however, require some use of a centralized server.
Napster's popularity was owed to the commodity it offered: free music. But it and other P2P providers have struggled to find a money-making outlet for the technology.
Ordia thinks he's found a profitable niche.
"I saw the opportunity to take the technology and give it a much broader application," he said last week during a chat in his living room. "I saw a lot of possibilities for P2P in the collaboration market -- not just for individuals sharing music files."
For example, employees at a small advertising agency could work from their homes but still collaborate on a project by sharing each other's files on the network created by downloading the JBlurb software on their individual computers.
That's why Ordia and his three business partners -- all CMU students -- decided to target JBlurb Professional Edition at businesses, which have the need for file sharing and the resources to pay for it. The problem with Napster is that students, who make up the bulk of its users, aren't willing to pay for the service, Ordia said.
Other companies have launched similar business-oriented file-sharing products, but none have been met with anything close to the widespread success of Napster.
The JBlurb product was born a little more than a year ago, when Ordia and his friend Christine Hardtman, 21, a junior fine arts major from Huntington, N.Y., started kicking around ideas about what kind of products people needed.
Hardtman, who had done a lot of collaborative graphic design projects at CMU, said she often needed access to other people's files, but she didn't have an easy way to get to them. That was part of what sparked the idea for JBlurb.
Ordia took the file-sharing idea and ran with it. No stranger to computer technology, he had been a computer engineering major at CMU and, while still in school, had taken a job at Downtown software firm SkyMark to help pay for tuition. In addition, he had worked as a systems engineer at CMU throughout his last semester.
So, barely out of his teens, Ordia started developing the mechanics of JBlurb. To keep himself updated on the latest technology, he and his roommate, Kevin Black, took frequent trips to the bookstore to read up on programming and P2P.
Black, a senior information systems management major, was one of Ordia's fraternity brothers and worked with him at Skymark. He's now the database manager for Ordia Corp. A third friend and also Ordia's fraternity brother, Ikonya Nginyo, a senior business administration and policy management major, also joined Ordia's team as a marketing strategist.
Hardtman has joined Ordia Corp. as its graphic designer.
The four friends rarely assemble in the house to discuss the company. JBlurb allows them to share the files they need, and they also collaborate via e-mail or over the phone.
The team has tried to make the file-sharing software appealing to businesses by adding security encryption and privacy features. Instant messaging and group conferencing functions also are part of the package.
Hardtman designed the look of the software, which, appropriately enough, bears a resemblance to Napster's format with its blue tones and stylized logo.
Ordia has done all of the programming, which was more labor intensive than financially draining, but now the infant company is faced with the daunting task of marketing itself.
"The real expense is grabbing people's attention," Ordia said.
By making the community edition available for free, the company got some notice. And it hopes to get an even larger audience through listings with several search engines. Ordia said he also was planning to relocate the office from his home to separate space, possibly in Shadyside.
Perhaps it's his youth or his firm belief in his product, but Ordia is very idealistic about his endeavor. Not for a second does he seem to regret leaving CMU, and he leaves the idealistic impression that his company is on the brink of success:
"I'm confident because we have a very legitimate market."
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