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Fall 2002

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What's the big idea, Jeff Taylor?
His monster is devouring the online careers market

Story and photos by Ben Barnhart




	LIVING UP TO HIS REPUTATION FOR ANTIC BEHAVIOR: Jeff Taylor '01 frisks with Technopillar, one of the resident monsters at the Maynard headquarters of Monster.

That sunset-orange surfboard in the corner of Jeff Taylor’s office is a decoy. He isn’t really a surfer (he has donned a pair of water skis but more about that later), yet he’s still riding the long, rolling Internet wave that has buoyed, then tossed mercilessly into the cold brine, many a dot-com CEO.

Taylor is the charismatic 42-year-old founder and chairman of the online careers giant, Monster. He sports a neat tuft of beard, moussed hair and chic wardrobe, and has a passion for thumping-bass dance music. While it’s not unusual for the head of an Internet company to be young, brash and hip, it is rare in these times for that executive to oversee a profitable business with a bright future.

Besides offering online help-wanted ads for job seekers around the world, the company’s Web site Monster.com also points visitors to employment resources, gives career advice, and helps users write effective resumes and post them on the site. Monster.com currently has 19 million resumes in its database.

In both his professional and personal lives, Taylor is known for taking the road less traveled, which may explain the use of that popular Robert Frost poem in a Monster advertising campaign a few years ago. When he returned to UMass to complete his bachelor’s degree in 2001, 23 years after he first enrolled, Taylor was already a multimillionaire businessman with an executive M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

"Always go after the fat rabbit," he was told by a Harvard professor, making the point that big, slow prey are the easiest to catch. But Taylor has done the opposite.

"I think I always went after the skinniest, wiriest rabbit in the yard," Taylor says from a plush leather camelback chair in his Maynard office, "and everyone laughed while I chased this little rabbit around. I don’t think I’ve chosen easy things to do but I’ve had the patience to stay with it because I like to create stuff."

Taylor should say he likes to create different stuff. It’s not enough simply to buy a yacht like your average executive; Taylor instead buys a 1954 tugboat and is having it restored under the moniker Sea Monster, with the aim of taking urban kids on educational trips in Boston Harbor. A sprawling new beach house on the Cape? No, Taylor undertakes a two-year renovation of an aging kit house on an island in Chatham’s Pleasant Bay.

Taylor’s offbeat style has earned him – and Monster – much name recognition in the business world. He is a free-thinking marketer whose ideas might be a little wacky but are often lighthearted and almost always attention-getters.

"Jeff is definitely an idea-person, especially around marketing," says Monster Senior Vice President Brent Pearson. "He does a lot from his gut. He just gets a vibe."

For instance, there was last year’s hiring of crop artist Stan Herd to create a 500-foot-wide likeness of Monster mascot "Trumpasaurus" out of oat and soybeans in a five-acre field that lies in the flight path of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Almost 1.5 million passengers fly into O’Hare every week and Monster advertising executives urged the airlines to ask their pilots to point out Herd’s artwork as they passed overhead. And in January 2000, one of the two Monster blimps just happened to fly over Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta on the day Coke announced 2,000 layoffs. Although Taylor plays dumb on this one, it’s the kind of stunt that is his trademark.

Among his antics, Taylor is perhaps best known for water-skiing behind one of the blimps in a direct challenge to Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, pioneer of the get-in-front-of-your-brand, celebrity CEO template that Taylor has followed. Monster leased its blimps from Virgin’s Lightship Group and when that management team suggested Taylor try to break Branson’s water-skiing record, he jumped in. On just his second attempt, Taylor gracefully zipped along the Florida coast for more than three miles behind the lumbering airship.

Taylor says the water-skiing antic was not an athletic challenge, but was all about branding.

"We got huge coverage in newspapers and television stations across the country and in Europe, where Richard Branson is a god," Taylor says. "What I’ve found is that the more effort I put into mixing my personal brand with the professional brand the stronger both become, and water-skiing behind a blimp is an extreme corner of being willing to put myself out in front of the brand," he adds.

Taylor’s branding of Monster isn’t just about himself and attention-grabbing tricks. He has also undertaken a Nike-like media campaign to get his brand into the homes of millions of people around the world. Monster was one of the first Internet businesses to buy advertising spots during the Super Bowl back in 1999. That ad featured kids looking blankly into the camera and admitting to career goals like: "When I grow up I want to file all day" or "become a yes man" or "have a brown nose." The spot made Monster the subject of watercooler conversations everywhere the next day.

"A corporate brand can be a very squishy thing," Taylor says. "Look at Coca-Cola. They’ve made Coke a lifestyle type of brand, and Nike has been made into a kind of personal inspirational brand. I want Monster to be an aspirational brand."

With a $100 million-plus yearly advertising budget, Taylor has remained committed to high-profile events like the Super Bowl and the 2002 Winter Olympics, which listed Monster as an official sponsor. His involvement in the Olympics went beyond simple monetary support, too. Monster developed a jobs Web site specifically for U.S. Olympic athletes, many of whom find their employability limited after devoting so much of their young lives to training.

Although he couldn’t have guessed it at the time, Taylor’s executive training began when he enrolled as a freshman at UMass in 1978. By his own admission, Taylor wasn’t a great student in those days.

"I was the screwball," he says. "I couldn’t get anywhere on time. One of my most dreaded sounds was the bus going by at 8 a.m. and I wasn’t on it."

He spent six years in Amherst before "drifting away" without completing his degree, but Taylor excelled in the school of experience during that time. He ran the campus tour service which, he says, taught him public speaking skills that he uses today when he takes on about 75 speaking engagements a year. During his freshman year, he took a job as advertising salesman for the Daily Collegian and within a few years had worked his way up to business manager, supervising a staff of 30.

"So while most people were going to class I was actually running a business," he says.

Taylor was also a budding entrepreneur. He created a survival kit for final exams ("for $13.95 they got a Snickers bar, toothbrush and not much else") which he marketed to the parents of freshmen.

He was a leader in his fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, where he served terms as president and vice president, and organized rush which, he says, is all about recruiting. And recruiting, according to Taylor, is an integral part of any good business model and one of his concerns at Monster today. It was also at Pi Kappa Alpha that Taylor began spinning records at fraternity parties because "if the music was bad and nobody danced, then nothing else happened. I soon realized that if I played good music it improved my lifestyle and everyone else’s."

Taylor learned that he could control the mood of a large crowd of strangers without uttering a single word simply by playing music. He landed deejaying jobs at Amherst dance clubs and started a business called Party Mix Productions that catered to college parties. After he left UMass he took a full-time job as deejay at the Palace in Saugus, and later at the Metro in Boston. Music, especially its influence on a roomful of people, has remained a passion for Taylor, and he now provides the dance tunes for Monster’s celebrated houseparties, and occasionally even steps out to guest deejay in Boston dance clubs.

Taylor made another important connection through Pi Kappa Alpha. While "dorm-storming" to raise money for charity, he knocked on the door of Janet Buchanan, a student he recognized from his high school in Needham. He introduced himself, but, he says, "she had no idea who I was." Undeterred, Taylor wooed her. The two have been married for 16 years and have three children.

"My wife has a different skill set than I do. She’s much more organized, much more ‘let’s get it done,’" he says. "The combination of the two of us together has really gotten us to a good place in our lives."

In 1989 Taylor started Adion, an advertising agency which focused on recruitment and help-wanted advertising, and in 1994 he literally dreamed up The Monster Board, an online bulletin board for job seekers. Taylor created the original user interface and even drew the first mascot for the forerunner of Monster. The Monster Board was only the 454th commercial site on the World Wide Web (today there are 30,000 career-related Web sites alone), making Taylor a true pioneer in the online business world. The wave was beginning to form and he was already in line to catch it.

Just a year later Taylor sold Monster to TMP Worldwide for a mere $900,000, a pittance compared to the selling price for Internet companies during the boom years to come and Monster’s worth today, but the deal allowed Taylor to stay on as CEO. Taylor says he reaped financial benefits in 1996 when he helped take TMP public.

Entering the fifth floor of Five Clocktower Place, the sprawling mill complex in Maynard that is Monster’s world headquarters and workspace for some 600 employees, is a little like entering a carnival arcade. The historic building originally housed a 19th-century woolen mill and was later home to Digital Equipment Corporation during the 1980’s high-tech boom in Massachusetts. Its wood-beam skeleton is just visible behind Monster’s mod-style purple walls, brushed stainless steel desks and chairs, and green-and-purple striped carpeting.

An eight-foot-high model of Trumpasaurus, with his huge orange feet, yellow bugle-shaped nose, and a toothy but playful snarl, stands guard at the elevator. Nearby is a glass-encased rotating diorama of other Monster mascots with names like Technopillar, Nettie, Swoop, Al-Ert and ’Cruiter, along with a computer terminal that lets visitors browse the Monster.com Web site.

The atmosphere inside is relaxed and there are few suits in sight. The building houses a fitness facility for employees that is occasionally the site of storied Monster parties that Taylor hosts for his staff. Typical of these bashes is the suitcase party on a cold wintry night a few years ago when everyone was told to bring a suitcase packed for Las Vegas. After an evening of boogeying to Taylor’s dance music, two names were drawn and the lucky pair were whisked off by limo to Logan airport and a flight to Vegas.

While the bursting of the stock market bubble in 2001 brought the new economy to a screeching halt and sent many Internet companies crashing back to earth, Monster has expanded its dominance of the online employment services sector. More than 50 percent of all Web traffic that visits job sites lands at Monster.com, and 14.6 million unique visitors hit the site every month. The company has recorded a profit for 17 consecutive quarters – last year’s revenue was $535.8 million – and has 1,500 employees in 16 countries.

Naturally, Taylor is optimistic about the future of online business.

"You can’t confuse the demise of the dot-coms with the march of technology," he says. "The Internet continues to go forward despite the fact that a bunch of people tried to get rich quick and didn’t. Many of the companies that failed, Taylor adds, indulged in "rest-on-your-laurels" business practices.

"The Internet is a platform. It’s a vehicle for communication, not in its own right a reinvention of business. What’s important is how you apply these tools to your business," he says.

Taylor’s graduation from UMass as a successful 40-year-old businessman attracted much media attention back in 2001, but he says the decision to complete his degree was not about branding or marketing. Instead, he says, it was about building his own self-esteem and finishing a job he started years ago, as well as a tribute to the importance of education. To qualify for his B.A. through University Without Walls, Taylor taught about a dozen classes on campus and wrote a 130-page paper titled "Human Capital and Marketing in the New Economy."

"I was tired of being introduced as ‘having attended UMass,’" he says. "I don’t think it’s fashionable to drop out of college. I dropped out of college because I couldn’t do it at that place at that time." Taylor, whose parents are both educators and were "quietly disappointed" when he left UMass in 1984, says he also wanted to set an example for his own children.

"I’m a non-traditional learner," he adds. "My UMass experience was full of building life experiences but what I’ve tried to do is go back and say ‘yes, it’s absolutely about the classes. You have to do better in school than I did.’"

Addressing his fellow graduates, Taylor brought his own brand of pomp to the 2001 commencement ceremonies when he clipped a wireless microphone over his ear and paraded through the long rows of his classmates on the grass of McGuirk Alumni Stadium with the fervor of a tele-evangelist. Within minutes he had the crowd chanting phrases like "I believe!" and "We rock" in response to his words, and even President William Bulger bellowed on cue "Our soul, our spirit!" For a few brief minutes, the 30,000 people who filled the stadium were under his spell, and Taylor showered them with the aphorisms that he’s fond of when he speaks publicly:

"If you coast, you only coast one way and that’s downhill.

"You can reinvent the world in a half an hour shower.

"Eighty per cent of life is showing up.

"Earn, learn, yearn."

When the degrees were finally conferred, Taylor was just one of the thousands of cheering students standing in his chair with arms raised high.

With his degree in hand and his business success established, Taylor has become an icon for public education in the state and its mantra that publicly educated minds stay in Massachusetts. He’s been honored by the university and the Alumni Association and has appeared in TV ads along with other famous alumni touting UMass. Taylor says he’s happiest that his success has taken hold here at home.

"I’m absolutely proud of the fact that one of the hottest dot-coms in the country is located here in Massachusetts, not California," he says.

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