This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “Craig Kanarick: A Man Ahead of His Time Seeks to Revitalize the NYC Waterfront,” an article published in the September 2018 issue of B-Tank magazine. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published non-fiction writer. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
New York Cruise Lines CEO Craig Kanarick talks to B-Tank about the ups, downs and decencies of building — and preserving — great companies
Craig Kanarick raises an eyebrow if you call him a man ahead of his time.
But think about it.
He cofounded a company in 1995 called Razorfish that built corporate websites when most companies barely knew what the internet was.
With his partner and childhood friend, Jeff Dachis, he built graphical user interfaces, the easy-to-use display screens that ultimately shifted consumer services from human clerks to ATMs, airline kiosks and supermarket self-checkouts even while all too many businesses still could not foresee the value of websites.
In 1998 he partnered with Charles Schwab to build a website that let people buy and sell stock without using a human broker.
It staggers the imagination to consider just how many computing technologies Kanarick and his team at Razorfish helped implement a decade or two before they became part and parcel of the way we bank, shop, access lab results, travel, pay bills, buy company stock, read, watch movies, rent cars, do crossword puzzles and engage in virtually every kind of transaction. The list of clients that IT and media consultant Razorfish ushered into a digital economy currently valued at 3 trillion dollars includes Time Warner, IBM, KPMG, Ford, Nissan, AOL, Microsoft and Bank One, all of whom were experimenting with new and untested ways to advertise, sell and brand themselves. The digital transformation services that Razorfish sold to companies in nine countries became so indispensable so fast that they got the attention of some high-profile investors. Omnicom, the global marketing and communications agency, was one of them. Its strategic investment in Razorfish let Kanarick acquire several smaller web design firms and investigate nascent technologies such as interactive TV — one more area where Kanarick arguably was ahead of his time.
The fact that Razorfish stock fell from its Initial Public Offering (IPO) of $16 a share to less than a dollar during the dot.com bust of the early 2000s is no reflection on Kanarick’s youthful intuition that computing was going to pervade every aspect of our lives. If anything, the unraveling of Razorfish only brings to light the unforeseen factors that can sabotage the most innovative, forward-thinking business when the world isn’t ready for it.
“Imagine that your business is on track and things are going well,” says Max Hockley, a New York-based management consultant who studies entrepreneurship. “All of a sudden there’s the dot.com crash and investment money dries up. If you don’t have enough runway to get to your next milestone, the whole thing falls apart. Your company could just as easily have done extremely well in a different time and a different environment.”
That’s the funny thing about timing and genius. Ada Lovelace, a mid-nineteenth-century British mathematician, wrote the world’s first algorithm a hundred years before the development of digital electronic circuits. In 1502 Leonardo da Vinci drew a sketch of a single 720-foot span bridge for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II, a project the sultan rejected as an impossibility. Leap ahead to the early days of the 21st century, when pets.com, broadcast.com, theglobe.com and napster.com were among the World Wide Web’s most spectacular business failures. What else but timing and better technologies explain why chewy.com, iHeartRadio.com, facebook.com and digital music provider pandora.com are thriving today where their like-minded predecessors went up in flames?
“Companies like Chewy and iHeartRadio are using the same business models of companies that failed during the dot.com bust and they are doing incredibly well,” Hockley says. “That’s because the infrastructure is there, the trust is there, the ability to process payments better is there: There are a million different factors that could be summed up in, ‘A good business in a wrong time will fail, and a good business in a right time will succeed.’”
In the dot.com turmoil of 2001 — after 24 straight profitable quarters and two unprofitable ones — Kanarick and Dachis agreed to relinquish their executive positions and resign from the Razorfish board. Unlike many of their investors, who profited early from their Razorfish stock, Kanarick and his partner held onto their shares, ultimately selling them at a loss once they exited the company.
“I made some money, but there was no way it was going to last long enough to retire on, especially in an expensive place like NYC.” Kanarick says.
Looking back, Kanarick offers that Razorfish grew faster than it should have. And, he says, he should have been more cold-blooded about firing low performers. Both might be real factors in Razorfish’s decline, according to Medium blogger and entrepreneur Bram Krommenhoek, who speaks as a “failed founder” of Zero to Traction, a Tel-Aviv-based consultancy.
“Premature scaling basically means doing too much, too soon,” Krommenhoek says. “Seventy percent of startups simply scale up before they have found a way of acquiring customers in a reliably reproducible way.” As for keeping only good employees on staff, Krommenhoek asserts that the right people will make sure the startup focuses on making something customers want. “And they will do so by spending as little company money as possible,” he says.
Kanarick concedes that reckless spending contributed to some of Razorfish’s unwise financial decisions, as when a likable company director opened a Razorfish office abroad. “He spent something like a million dollars on office design when a million dollars was a huge amount of money,” Kanarick recalls. “Instead of firing him, which we should have done, we relocated him.”
Razorfish must have been doing something right: Since its delisting from NASDAQ, one media conglomerate after another has acquired its assets and clients: SBI Group took Razorfish private in 2003; aQuantive inherited Razorfish from SBI during a buyout in 2004; Microsoft acquired it in 2007; and Publicis Groupe bought it in 2009, with Microsoft retaining a 3 percent equity stake. In 2016 SapientNitro became Razorfish’s latest overlord.
And what if Kanarick had cofounded Razorfish in a technologically more mature time of cloud computing, big data analytics and social media? Who’s to say that he would not be sitting at his old Mercer Street office in Soho today instead of an office at Pier 83 on Manhattan’s west side waterfront where he is CEO of New York Cruise Lines.
Bringing pizazz to an old mainstream company
Wooed by New York Cruise Lines’ board of directors, Kanarick took the helm of the city’s best-known sightseeing company in October 2017. Not surprisingly, one of his first decisions was to make the company’s website more hospitable for the millions of people who visit it every year.
“Everything about the site was cumbersome,” Kanarick says. “Buying a ticket, finding out what we have to offer, all kinds of things our visitors need to know. I worked with a design firm in Brooklyn not just to improve the website but to reorient it altogether. That meant designing the site first for a mobile phone and only later for the desktop. When you’re walking around Manhattan figuring out what you want to do, you’re not looking at your laptop. You’re looking at your phone.”
Another early to-do involved taking down a billboard that blocked his employees’ view of the pier.
“I came in and I was, like, ‘What? This doesn’t make any sense.’ You do not want to create discomfort for the sales team that is making you money. I took down that billboard in my first week here, and I hope it made people happy.”
More strategic — and more lucrative — are the joint programs Kanarick has hammered out with lifestyle companies, such as Crunch Fitness, a fitness franchise with 265 clubs. Bundled into seven sessions, the fitness series debuted in mid-June with cardio workouts and green juice health drinks.
What’s next? A book club cruise co-sponsored by Barnes & Noble? You get the feeling that Crunch Fitness will not be the only money-making venture at high tide. Indeed, Kanarick emphasizes that his mission goes beyond crafting tours and partnerships for the company’s six brands: Circle Line Sightseeing Cruises, New York Water Taxi; World Yacht Charters; North River Lobster Company; The Beast Speedboat Ride; and Hudson’s at Pier 81. Central to his agenda is making New York Cruise Lines the anchor of a revitalized New York City waterfront.
“In New York’s earliest days, the city’s most valuable real estate faced inward toward Central Park, away from the Hudson and East Rivers,” Kanarick says. “Now we are going to become more like London, Singapore, Sydney — all places that treat their waterfront as a valuable asset for non-commercial activity.”
Kanarick points to the city’s renewed interest in its waterfront: The recent construction of apartments overlooking the water, for one, as well as a growing fascination with getting around the city by boat. In 2017, for example, NYC Ferry announced five routes connecting 19 ferry piers in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. And when New York’s L subway line suspends service in 2019 for reconstruction, ferries will pick up the commuting slack between Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Manhattan.
“I hate to use the word ‘wave,’ but I believe this 73-year-old company will ride a wave of explosive growth,” Kanarick says.
As Kanarick speaks with B-Tank, a Circle Line boat blasts its horn at top volume. Kanarick counts off three more earsplitting blows and it is clear that in eleven months as CEO, he has fallen in love with the maritime meter of the west side waterfront. Not so different, really, than his first love of digital when he designed brand-building websites on the high seas of industry.
From hipster entrepreneur to seasoned executive
How did Craig Kanarick go from flamboyant Internet darling with tons of celebrity friends to the unorthodox but mature CEO at New York Cruise Lines?
Marriage and fatherhood helped tame the wild beast, but so did his educational background — a Minneapolis high school with an independent TV station, University of Pennsylvania and the MIT Media Lab. Kanarick also credits his parents for standing by him as he worked through the emotional devastation of losing Razorfish.
“It was incredibly painful and it’s not clear that I’ve completely recovered from it,” Kanarick says. “I went from being important in my company, signing documents, delivering talks, granting interviews, to sitting home alone. The phones were not ringing. I was not important anymore.”
Kanarick didn’t have a Plan B. Starting a new company in a different time, a different economic universe — more easily said than done. The only “job” that appealed to him in 2001 was an unpaid restaurant internship. And not just any restaurant. Babbo belonged to celebrity cooks Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, and it was famous for its innovations in Italian-American cooking. Kanarick suggests that his stint at Babbo as a prep cook was therapeutic.
“Maybe I wasn’t going to be flying all over the world anymore, but at least I could cook,” Kanarick says. “All those knives, all that fire, all that flesh!”
Kanarick did not care that two months after leaving Razorfish — his life’s work to that point — he was at the bottom of the heap chopping onions.
“This was a restaurant where people went to get engaged, to celebrate the high points in their lives,” he says. “I was playing a tiny little part in people having a great experience.”
Moreover, Kanarick says, cooking is like driving: Your body is occupied but your mind is partly free to roam. “You get to process a lot of thoughts,” he says.
One thought he processed involved his roles as Razorfish’s chief strategic officer and chairman.
“I’ve always loved being liked,” Kanarick says. “That’s not necessarily the best quality in a boss.”
Kanarick definitively came to that conclusion the day after September 11.
“We kitchen scrubs came into the restaurant on September 12 to make meals for the first responders, and to give people in the neighborhood a place to be with other people,” Kanarick says. “To me this was really great. But the cooks and chefs in the kitchen were badmouthing Mario and Joe, the owners, complaining how they’re greedy and just want other people to do all the work.
“In my head I realized these were exactly the same things my employees had once said about me. That was their job, to grumble about management. Hearing all that negativity — I could now let go of an emotional burden that was hobbling me.”
Kanarick’s insight into employer-employee dynamics helped free him to start Studio Red, a multidisciplinary “innovation studio” at Rockwell Group, an architectural firm. Once again the high-profile clients lined up to work with the dot.com phenom. Coca-Cola, Mercedes, Club Med, Subway and McDonald’s, among others, sought Kanarick’s design-and-technology expertise — strengthened now through the best and worst of times. In 2008, five years into his new life as a brand consultant, Kanarick worked exclusively with Blockbuster, the brick-and-mortar video and gaming rental company vanquished inevitably by Netflix and its rental-by-mail subscription service. Undeterred, Kanarick joined a small team that helped redesign samsung.com.
Losing Razorfish may always hurt, but Kanarick’s gift for sailing onward softens the blow — and prepares him for his next step.
A love of food leads to greater managerial skill
One more Internet-based venture put Kanarick on solid footing to lead a hospitality company where food plays as big a role as sightseeing.
“I get very anxious when I hear people talk about mouth.com in terms of ‘success’ and ‘failure,’” Kanarick says.
He prefers instead to speak about Mouth, co-founded in 2011 with two partners, as an outgrowth of his love of travel — and as a way of getting back into the startup saddle. “In my search for adventure, I developed a taste for foreign spices, which is why Mouth carried za’atar crackers, Indian curry popcorn, pickled bamboo, chocolate halva spread and Szechuan peppercorn-spiced peanut butter. I married my love of food with my love of commerce.”
“Mouth was successful in many ways, and it failed in many ways,” Kanarick says. “During my five years with the company, I employed a lot of people. We helped a lot of indie food companies get distribution and build out their brands. I made lots of people happy on their birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings and anniversaries, because they got gifts from our company. I learned a lot about food and helped create a great corporate culture. From that perspective, Mouth was a success. Was it a smashing financial success? Only time will tell.”
High-water mark or point of departure
While his career trajectory seems at first glance to be a goulash of unrelated businesses, Kanarick says he can trace a wavy line from Razorfish to Mouth to Circle Line.
“Everything I have ever done has involved being a good host,” he says. “When you are visiting in my world, whether physical or virtual, I need to be as hospitable as possible to you. That’s true if I am creating a welcoming website for a major corporation, a distributor of mouth-watering foods or a travel and transportation company whose goal is to delight you all day long. That’s sort of the way I operate.”
With his investiture as CEO at New York Circle Line, has 51-year-old Craig Kanarick hit the high water mark of his career?
No one with business or people savvy would ever say Kanarick is a “be here now” kind of guy who no longer scans the horizon for new and promising possibilities. He is too much the composite of all the sea swells and storm surges that have made him a chief executive who now knows the difference between a business and a “boys’ club” — a failing once lobbed at Kanarick and Dachis by Wired magazine. Yet at his current posting, Kanarick stands solidly on deck to make New York Cruise Lines a single sea-worthy vessel, turn New York into a waterfront city and grow into a CEO with the tailwinds ever behind him.
