People

By JANET ZICH

Rian Schmidt, MBA '96

PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTINA SALOMON

AS THE NEWS unfolded on September 11, everyone who wasn’t immediately affected by the attack on the World Trade Center wanted to do something: rescue victims, contribute money to their families, fly Old Glory. Rian Schmidt reacted the way he knew best. He created an online database.

“The database was always meant to be a stopgap,” Schmidt explained on a bright San Francisco afternoon four weeks later. On September 11, he had received a full mailbox of emails asking for news of friends believed to be in the vicinity of the Twin Towers. He decided the best way to thwart the terrorists’ intentions was simple: “to just keep doing what we do naturally.” For Schmidt, founder and owner of the 11-person Web maintenance and design firm Fine Brand Media, what came naturally was to design a Web site for friends to track their loved ones. In the following week, Schmidt’s Friends and Family Database grew to some 10,000 people. Roughly 250,000 people visited the site, registering about 1.5 million page views, he said.

After looking in vain for another host for the list, Schmidt took the site down within a week. Not only had he been putting in 16- to 18-hour days manually entering data, but after three days his company was so jammed with computer traffic that it couldn’t conduct business. “Our customers were understanding, but we couldn’t expect them to stick with us forever,” Schmidt said. And he started to hear stories about electronic scavengers who were mining the list for names and email addresses.

“Fine Brand isn’t a glamorous company,” he said at a sidewalk cafe near his office. “You could call us the janitors of the Web.” To make sure Fine Brand’s clients— key to its continued success— be around for the long run, Schmidt scrutinized their business plans before he signed them on. What made him so sensible when everyone else was caught up in dot-com mania? He glanced at the sun-drenched October scene. “I’m from Minnesota,” he said.

Pete Pond, MBA '39

PHOTOGRAPH BY SAUL BROMBERER/SANDRA HOOVER

I CONSIDER MYSELF a work in progress,” 87-year-old Samuel A. “Pete” Pond wrote in a 1997 memoir. A visit to the Woodside home he and his wife, Kip, built when Pond joined the Business School administration in 1961 confirms this. The former acting dean writes, hikes, travels, and devotes much of his formidable energy to the Southern California prep school he attended some 70 years ago.

Pond retired from the GSB in 1981 after serving as an associate dean under Ernest Arbuckle and Arjay Miller and as an acting dean in between. At 67, he was expected to retire, he says. But surmising he had a few years of lucidity left, maybe five, the Ponds bought Bricker’s International Directory, a guide to executive education programs, and edited it until they sold it to Peterson’s, the college guide publishers, five years later.

“So there I was at 72. When you’re 72, they don’t exactly come running to offer you directorships.” So Pond threw himself into his work as a trustee at the Thatcher School in Ojai, Calif., and, with Kip’s editorial assistance, he turned family historian.

Pond’s fourth manuscript, titled simply “And Then I Wrote...,” centers around family, friends, and mentors. As an MBA student, Pond met GSB economist Theodore Kreps. The teacher taught the young man to question his values. “He turned my life around,” wrote Pond, adding, “I’m still a Democrat.” Then there was Pond’s youthful buddy Ernest Arbuckle, who introduced Pond to pt boats. (Arbuckle later earned a Silver Star in a Mediterranean torpedo boat; Pond skippered PT-108 in the Pacific.) Two decades later, Arbuckle asked Pond to leave Chemetron Corp. in Chicago to help him run the Business School.

Pond has had three brushes with serious illness since he turned 80. Typical of the man, the first happened in Fez, Morocco, the second in Quito, Ecuador, and the third in Paris. After successful open-heart surgery in 1997, he noted wryly: “Three times and out were not to be my fate. Here I am faced with the prospect of eternity. Now there’s something to think about.”