Moore, J. Stuart

views updated

MOORE, J. STUART

J. Stuart Moore is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sapient Corp., an Internet integration services provider—one of the leading such firms in the U.S.—whose clients include traditional businesses like WalMart and Staples, as well as Internet firms like iwon.com. Moore oversees the internal operations of Sapient, including employee recruiting and retention and corporate strategy, while Jerry Greenberg, the firm's other co-founder and co-CEO, handles the more external components of operations such as sales, marketing, and public relations. In 1999, both men made Fortune magazine's list of the 40 wealthiest Americans under the age of 40. With revenues of more than $500 million in the year 2000, Sapient became the first Internet integration services provider to be added to the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. Moore and Greenberg each own 18 percent of the firm.

Moore earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. Upon graduation, he began working in the information technology industry, eventually making his way to Cambridge Technology Partners, where he met Greenberg. In 1991, Moore and Greenberg—at 29 and 25 years of age, respectively—created their own company, Sapient Corp., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rather than attempt to secure funding from outside venture capitalists, the partners used $40,000 of their own savings and charged nearly $70,000 on their credit cards. Sapient's initial contracts focused on client-server integration. Moore and Greenberg worked to set themselves apart from competitors by not only assisting clients in determining how technology could eradicate problems and boost operational efficiencies, but also by creating, executing, and supporting whatever applications they decide to use. Moore and Greenberg were also unique for offering set fees and deadline schedules at the onset of a project and connecting employee pay, including their own, to customer satisfaction.

The number of employees jumped from 95 in 1994 to 213 in 1995, and revenues and earnings both doubled. Moore and Greenberg, each retaining roughly 36 percent of the firm's stock, took Sapient public in April of 1996. The $33 million raised was funneled into expansion efforts. After realizing that an increasing number of Sapient's clients were delving into e-commerce, Moore and Greenberg began repositioning the firm to offer e-business integration services. Four small acquisitions—including Adjacency and Studio Archetype, two World Wide Web design firms—augmented Sapient's offerings. To make the best use of Sapient's new holdings, Moore began to reorganize the firm into smaller, more autonomous, industry-based divisions. Eventually, Sapient was able to offer a full range of e-commerce services that included the planning and creation of online stores. Unlike many e-business service firms emerging in the late 1990s, Sapient kept its advertising budget in check, careful not to spend more than it could afford. Moore and Greenberg saw their efforts pay off as Sapient's growing profitability set the firm apart from rivals. In 1998, Sapient earned $9.4 million on sales of $165 million. Those numbers were upped to $30.3 million in profits and $277 million in sales in 1999. According to a November 2000 article in Computer Reseller News, Moore and Greenberg successfully transformed "a nine-year-old consulting and integration company grounded in client/server computing into one of the foremost Web integrators on the scene."

Roughly 2,600 employees staffed 18 offices around the world by the end of 2000. Despite Sapient's strength, however, recessionary economic conditions in North America, along with a slowdown in the e-commerce sector, did undercut the firm's profits in the first quarter of 2001. As a result, Moore and Greenberg announced that the workforce would be reduced by 20 percent, the office in Sydney, Australia, closed, and U.S. operations consolidated.