The unfounder

Thinking IPO: Julio Gomez.

Where's Julio?

Gomez Inc., the Lexington Internet service company named after founder Julio Gomez, is hoping to raise $80 million in an initial public stock offering. But you won't see Gomez the person mentioned in IPO documents filed this month by Gomez the company, other than a footnote reference on an old list of original shareholders. He's the unfounder.

That's what can happen at a small company that starts from scratch, soars, holds on for dear life, and eventually gets back on its feet over a period of 11 years.

Gomez, the person and the company, were hot stuff at the peak of the Internet era. Julio Gomez left his job as an analyst at Forrester Research to start a business targeting the burgeoning field of online stock brokerages and banks in 1997.

His research firm became known for its website-quality rankings of companies most people had never heard of at the time, like ETrade and Ameritrade. By 1999, Julio Gomez had made it onto Time magazine's Digital 50, a list of "the most important people shaping technology."

The company, then called Gomez Advisors, made its first attempt to go public near the height of the Internet stock boom, despite annual sales in the $5 million range and steep losses. It was a step too slow.

The summer of 2000 was no longer the time to sell an Internet-related IPO, and the deal was eventually pulled. Plans were scaled back, payrolls pared. Eventually, the company's original venture capital backers and other private investors were washed out. So was its founder.

Time marches on. Investors who recapitalized Gomez and followed a narrower business strategy have built a company with sales of $32 million last year, though it still loses a little money. It's focused exclusively on "Web experience management," which means helping corporate clients improve their online operations.

Meanwhile, Julio Gomez may have been erased from the company's official story, but he's hardly gone away. In fact, he's just back in business launching a new start-up from modest space in the old Bradford Furniture warehouse in Concord, six miles away from Gomez Inc. headquarters.

Gomez isn't bitter about the experience at his first company. He's proud. "I had a very good run, and it was a lucrative time for me," he told me yesterday. "I had the satisfaction of building that up and seeing it as far as I could. I'm just glad Gomez is alive and well."

Looking back on the heady days of a decade ago, he now sees a dangerous business landscape. "Everybody remembers it as days of gold in the streets, but it wasn't except for a few firms, and it didn't last long," Gomez says. He thinks the company wouldn't have been able to remain independent if it made the IPO happen in 2000. A sale of more stock would have been necessary, but impossible to pull off in the post-bubble market.

Gomez did anything but business after leaving his company. He traveled, he coached kindergarten soccer, he worked on a research project at Harvard Business School, and he learned Italian. Eventually, he went back to research work and penciled out the idea for a company called Gomez Markets this spring. He doesn't have millions in venture financing or a big staff. The basic idea: helping new financial-service companies get up and running using new technology platforms. A real launch won't take place before the fall.

And by then, we'll know how the other company called Gomez fared with its second crack at the IPO market, eight years later.

The Red Herring