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| First Person |
The Populist's Capitalist
Charlie Crystle
05/01/2007
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Charlie Crystle, 39, is a technology entrepreneur best known in
his home state of Pennsylvania as a man who tried—and failed—to unseat Arlen
Specter as U.S. senator in 2003. Now he is immersed in a startup software
company that he and two partners run from a space in a converted tobacco
warehouse in Lancaster, Pa. Fueled by profits from the sale of his last company,
Crystle has become a determined progressive thorn in the side of Lancaster’s
largely Republican populace.
 | SINCE THE sale of his software company in 2000, Charlie Crystle
(center) has worked to assist street children in Central America. |
Today I run a software company
called Mission Research, which I started in 2001 with Dave Weaver and Chris
Walker. It is the second software company the three of us have started together.
At this year’s DEMO conference, a convention where 70 emerging technology
companies with promise are invited to exhibit their projects, a Lancaster
reporter said our product wasn’t the most show-stopping. But we’re doing
something important that we are proud of.
Our company makes administrative software that is inexpensive
and easy to use. We have a program for small businesses, but our main line is
GiftWorks fundraising software for small and medium-size nonprofit
organizations. It lets groups track donors and trends and creates lists, charts
and graphs very easily. We are going to make the software free to customers in
developing nations. I don’t feel comfortable taking money from poor countries.
In America, the software costs $299, which is reasonable, but in other areas of
the world, you can hire someone for $14 a year. I’d rather have the money go to
people who need jobs than have it in our pockets.
I grew up in Lancaster, and it isn’t exactly a high-tech
center, but we would like to be able to create jobs here. The cost of living is
so low that it’s really attractive for people who have come up through the
high-tech industry in Silicon Valley or New York. We’re recruiting a lot from
both places. Ben Cohen from Ben & Jerry’s is one of our investors. This time
around there is a lot of venture capital out there; we continue to invest ahead
of our revenues and we have great growth prospects. I love going to work every
day.
But it wasn’t always that way for me. Chris, Dave and I started
a software company called Chili!Soft in 1996, which had a product that enabled
customers to build Web-based business applications. The software is still on the
market, and I still like my investors from that period. They made a lot of
money, and we all benefited. But I didn’t love the work environment. That was
partly because of mistakes in some of the hiring we did—and partly because of
the way I interacted with the staff. I was a hothead. I didn’t understand that
not everyone wanted to work all night long, then get up early and go to work the
next day and make it a great company. I was a very powerful force, and that’s
not always the best thing for a work culture. I burned out and left in 1999,
just before Cobalt Networks bought the company for $70 million (in March 2000).
Sun Microsystems bought Cobalt Networks just six months later for $2 billion. I
was still a shareholder, though, so I profited from the sale. And even though
this happened right before the markets started collapsing, I did OK.
After the sale, I went to Central America to learn Spanish,
surf and decompress. I’ve had a sense of social and economic justice since my
high school years, but in my travels I became a human rights activist. I met
someone who introduced me to the issue of street kids in poor countries like
Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. I didn’t really make a plan for how I would
support the cause, but I became very passionate about it. I even made a
documentary about the street kids called Children in a Jar to help advocate for
them.
Now I am very much into sustainability and socially responsible
business. My partners and I have donated 20 percent of our founding stock in
Mission Research to a foundation and a donor-advised fund. I’m looking forward
to the day when we have time to do something more with the money.
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