Peninsula People Sept 2017

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For many years, David Lord’s morning routine was to walk from his
Terranea condo to the trail along the ocean bluff and walk several miles
listening to Boston sports radio over headphones.
“Boston sports radio,” the New England native said after a moment,
laughing in spite of himself. “I liked to get clarity on the sports scene, and
I wouldn’t be able to check in all day,” said the Boston native and CEO of
Torrance-based, education software developer JumpStart.
The past season belonged to Boston Celtics point guard Isaiah Thomas,
the 5-foot-8 basketball superstar who seemingly scored at will against much
larger competition.
“He’s a fighter, and that’s Boston at its core – just a bunch of dopey, working-class
people. I’m the same way,” Lord said. “There are no blue bloods
in our family.”
Lord cashed in on a tech startup at the height of the late 1990s dot-com
bubble, helped build a major ticket reseller, and most recently, helped lead
JumpStart through a six-month-long acquisition negotiation with Chinabased
game developer NetDragon.
Lord is no longer living at Terranea, the sale to NetDragon closed this
month and the youngest of his three daughters has moved out. But he isn’t
slowing down.
“I’m still hungry,” Lord said.
Lord is the son of a factory worker. He spent his youth playing football
and Lord graduated from Northeastern University with a B.S. in accounting.
Through there, he found his way into tech.
“After college, I went with a reengineering group, doing tech accounting,”
Lord said. “The first eight to 10 years of my career led up to when the dotcoms
were starting.”
After a year of incubating the idea, Lord helped to found Toysmart, an e-
commerce company that specialized in developing educational, or what
Lord calls “good” toys, as opposed to Barbies and Hot Wheels. To keep
prices down they marketed directly to consumers, rather than through retailers.
But they had a problem.
“I was there at the beginning, when you couldn’t convince investors that
people would buy online,” Lord said.
Fortunately for Lord, concerns that consumers wanted to touch what they
bought and wouldn’t wait for a product to be shipped, passed.
“It got to the point where we had term sheets (investment agreements)
rolling in, each one with a $10 million higher valuation of the company
than the one before it,” Lord said. “All the biggest leaders in [venture capitalism],
everyone wanted to invest. It was an unbelievable time.”
Those were the Wild West days of the web, when companies such as
About.com, Yahoo and Pets.com were booming. New initial public offerings
for companies were hitting the stock market every day, starting at $15 a
share and increasing in value by 2,000 percent by day’s end.
In August 1999, Disney bought a majority stake in Toysmart for $45 million.
In May 2000, eight months after the acquisition, Toysmart shut its
doors. The company lagged behind its contemporaries, eToys and Toys-
RUs.com. Lord left Toysmart in August 2000.
He worked for three years at Intel as the President/CEO of its New Business
Ventures department. But the transition, he said, was rough.
“Going from a start-up back to corporate…that was a punch in the nose,
after working at a dot-com,” Lord said.
In 2004, Lord began re-exploring the world of startups, and found an opportunity
with Razorgator, a then-minor player in the nascent world of online
ticket reselling.
He began as a consultant while still working on the East Coast. At the
time, the secondary ticket market was illegal in Massachusetts.
“There were plenty of scalpers, but you couldn’t do it online and get away
with it,” Lord said. “No one cared, but it wasn’t legal, so a corporation
wasn’t going to work.”
by David Mendez
David Lord conquered the educational software markets in North and South America and Europe. Now he’s targeting China.
Investors were eager to work with the company though. Razorgator drew
interest from major venture capital firms, such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers, and Oak Investment Partners.
“When you get a blue-chipper like that [backing you], you have to go for
it,” Lord said. He and his family moved to Agoura Hills. Within four years,
the annual sales hit $150 million and it became the official ticket reseller
for the NCAA.
“Our first big event was the Rose Bowl — and it happened to be the USC
vs. Texas Rose Bowl,” Lord said.
The game was an instant classic, a 41-38 shootout between star quarterbacks
Matt Leinart, of USC, and Vince Young, of the University of Texas.
The game’s final scoring play, with 19 seconds left on the clock, sealed a
three-point victory for Texas at one of college football’s most historic venues.
And though the loss was hard for the newly-minted Californians, Razorgator
was thrilled with the association.
But Lord was unhappy. He and Razorgator’s investors had irreconcilable
difference of opinion over the company’s future. Time with his family over
the holidays in 2007 led him to move on.
“I hate seeing you so miserable – why’re you doing this?” Lord recalled
his father saying. “You should consider other things.”
Four months later, in April 2008, Lord joined JumpStart.
It was a natural fit for Lord. He was able to apply lessons learned and relationships
developed with Toysmart. He brought his team from Razorgator
along with him.
“It goes back to those days at Toysmart — we called it ‘good toys,’ and it
felt like we did something worth doing,” Lord said.
He and his team were focused on making learning fun for kids, building
on their Knowledge Adventure, JumpStart and Neopets brands.
Jumpstart now has over five million monthly users in North and South
America, Europe, Oceania and Asia.
Key to the company’s success was building a partnership with Dreamworks,
that allowed JumpStart to build the “School of Dragons” series
around Dreamworks’ “How to Train Your Dragon” franchise.
The demographics served by “School of Dragons” are unusual: Ages 7-13
make up 50 to 55 percent of the player base. The rest is made up by players
aged 13-25.
“People get associated with a brand at age 10 and they stay loyal to it,”
Lord said. “It’s an interesting phenomenon.”
Just as interesting is getting feedback on the way kids interact with their
games. The “Dragons” games are based on the scientific method: pose a hypothesis,
test it, interpret the results and duplicate the results.
“We got the perfect review: a kid wrote ‘I was having so much fun, until
I realized I was learning.’” Lord recalled. “We checked, and the kid had been
playing for six months. It just clicked.”
New owner NetDragon focuses on mobile application development and
online multiplayer gaming. The company offers JumpStart the opportunity
to move from selling solely to consumers to working with schools.
JumpStart, he said, has the opportunity to become the biggest educational
brand in China, where education providers must be approved by the government.
“No one is doing what we’re doing over there,” Lord said. “The gaming
market is unbelievable and NetDragon has an incredible portfolio.”
Lord is staying on as CEO of JumpStart, where his daughter who just
moved out will be joining him and her older sisters.
Having kids, Lord said, is the perfect training for being a CEO. “You’re
always sleeping with one eye open,” he explained.
Though still hungry, his goals have changed.
“I’m in a different place than I was five years ago. I like mentoring. Watching
them be successful is awesome,” Lord said. “I don’t base success on revenue
and losses anymore. But people, that’s what matters.” PEN
September Month Year 2017 • Peninsula • Peninsula People 21