InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 17, 1997
The Up & Comer: Gene DeRose, Jupiter
By Claire Tristram
The day he started, the research director quit, and DeRose got an instant promotion. He never stopped rising. A few years later, DeRose looked up to find himself chairman and CEO of a $10 million company. And Jupiter has become one of the fastest-growing, most influential voices in the new-media advisory market.
Ask DeRose about his meteoric rise, and he'll insist it was due to his habit of grabbing the best seat at Jupiter's conferences. "I'm the moderator, so I get to sit and talk shop in front of an audience wi
th people like [Netscape's] Jim Barksdale and [America Online's] Steve Case," he says. "That's put me in the spotlight, and it's one of the reasons I've been able to achieve any kind of punditry at all. And I smile, I guess, on TV."
Of course it hasn't hurt DeRose any to be smart, ambitious, and market-savvy. Underneath his unassuming exterior, he has proven to be a fierce competitor, outlasting scores of competing startups and now gunning for Forrester Research, the leader in his market.
DeRose isn't afraid to pull out all the stops in his bid for dominant mindshare in the new-media advisory market. On Oct. 30, Jupiter announced that Gartner Group had purchased an $8 million minority stake in the business. "Up to now, we've almost entirely bootstrapped our growth," DeRose says. "We think we're ready to go to the next step."
DeRose also isn't shy about taking credit when he's right. For example, he insists he predicted America Online's dominance in the consumer online services market before anyo
ne else saw it coming. Not surprisingly, AOL continues to be an enthusiastic customer. "With Gene, you get reasoned opinions based on original research," says Ted Leonsis, president of AOL Studios.
DeRose is also quick to say that luck has played no role in the impressive success rate of Jupiter's forecasts. "We've been able to come out of nowhere and be successful because we focused on this market long before anyone else," he says. "We have a history of anchoring our findings in data. We do primary research that's quantitative and rigorous. Because of that, we were first to understand the growth of online services through the desktop."
umble beginnings needn't lead to humble ends. Take Gene DeRose. In 1989, 26-year-old DeRose found himself in New York, a would-be novelist with a bachelor's degree in English and a rejection letter from a creative-writing program. With nothing better to do, he stumbled into a job as an editor for Jupiter Communications, a tiny three-man operation that published a newsletter and held an occasional conference or two.
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