Thursday, July 3, 2008

Galleher jumps back in the ring as CEO of Basho

By Jay Rizoli, Special to Mass High Tech

Basho Technologies Inc. didn’t have to look far when it came time to name a CEO. The Cambridge-based developer of sales training software and workshops, founded in December 2007 by “chief Basho” Jeffrey Hoffman, chief operating officer Antony Falco and chairman Earl Galleher, searched for a chief executive and tapped … Earl Galleher.

Galleher, a former executive vice president at Akamai Technologies Inc., took the reins at Basho last month, having developed Internet companies since the mid-1990s.

But before he got caught in the web, Galleher followed his first inclination into the world of advertising. “I guess I didn’t have a particularly strong sense of what I was going to be. I approached life as just trying to survive,” Galleher said. “Back in the 1960s and 1970s advertising was a career that seemed kind of sexy but I didn’t have any particular reason other than a knee-jerk attraction to it.”

Still, it was sexy. Galleher worked in advertising, marketing and fight promotion in the late ’80s, when a Trumped-up Atlantic City was trying to lure marquee boxing matches such as 1987’s War at the Shore between Gerry Cooney and Michael Spinks.

“That was just a generalized experience and you could liken it to a precursor experience because it was not dissimilar to the turbulence, uncertainty and pace found in startups,” said Galleher, who soon hooked up with a big one, American Mobile Satellite Corp. Cellular technology made the company’s technology obsolete, but American Mobile Satellite ultimately thrived as TerreStar Corp., an investor in satellite radio.

When the web arrived, Galleher was awed, and he landed at Maryland-based Digex Inc. to create the Web Site Management Services Division there. “That was exciting, because the Internet was on fire in 1995, and that’s where I stayed for the rest of my career,” he said.

His next startup, My World Connect Inc. in Washington, D.C. didn’t fare well, but he and a handful of colleagues from it — including Basho COO Falco — landed at Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM), for which he had consulted and was a Series A investor.

Web services company Akamai saw business swell to $165 million in two years and organically hired 625 people, later weathering the bubble-burst and the death of CEO Daniel Lewin in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “Akamai is just a wonderful example of a great, great startup,” Galleher said.

Galleher today lives in Wilmington, N.C., and commutes to Cambridge but says his family sees him three times as much as when he was at Akamai. He also serves as chairman of the board of KIPP DC, the highest-performing charter school system in Washington, D.C. But his excitement about Basho is palpable.

“We had an assembly of great, bright, competent, enthusiastic people at Digex and Akamai, and I see that here also,” said Galleher. “This one I just feel really good about.”

 

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.