"You get a sense of relief for about five minutes, then you realise there is still so much more to do," Mak told ZDNet Australia.
Launched in March 1997 Start's first incarnation was as an e-commerce aggregation site, offering products from a range of different vendors. At that stage a small part of the Australian population was beginning to figure out how to use e-mail, situating the service just slightly ahead of its time. Undeterred, and sensing a myriad of other players moving into the field, Mak and Housman began looking out for other Internet-based opportunities. Seeing the success of Hotmail in the US, they soon began building a similar service targeted at the Australian market.
"We started off with no funding whatsoever, just a bit of pocket-money we had scraped together," Mak said. "So Bardia ran the Web site, while I built Web sites and e-commerce products for other companies."
Within two years the site was among the most visited in Australia, and in the then scramble for eyeballs Mak and Housman accepted an offer from LookSmart to buy out the company for AU$8 million. Still in their early twenties, Mak admits to becoming dazzled by the zeros in the offer, and -Silicon Valley promises".
-LookSmart had a strategy of providing users with communication, commerce and content," Mak explained. -We were supposed to provide the communication arm of things."
The transaction went ahead in December 1999 and Mak took his first holiday in three years.
But the honeymoon was not to last long. LookSmart set to work putting in place its experienced but pricey management team, whilst unbeknownst to all involved the tech wreck of April 2000 edged closer. In fact, it hit before the new CEO even had a chance to submit the business plan he spent his first four months working on.
In response to the stock market crash, LookSmart put the breaks on spending and Start found itself caught with a gaggle of high-priced CXOs, no clear business plan, and a market that didn't want to know about IT-anything.
-By June we were out of money and the CEO was putting together another plan, it was rejected and all the money LookSmart invested into the company initially was spent on salaries for people they appointed," Mak said.
Desperatly facing the collapse of a company they had worked so hard to build, Mak and Housman managed to convince LookSmart to give them some time to get the company back on track.
Granted a temporary reprieve but expected to work on the smell of an oily rag Mak and Housman set about reinventing themselves as a portal service, providing other companies with the infrastructure to offer community building services via the Internet.
-We'd already done the gold digging for ourselves and knew there wasn't much there," Mak said, harking back to a common tech boom metaphor. -After the crash everybody was talking about forming communities online and our software was going to do it for them."
In a minor coup for the company, Start managed to sign a long-term contract to host a European portal which kept the company operational while Mak and Housman set about ensuring the company's future. Having freed themselves from the -management team" appointed by LookSmart, the pair managed to go from imminent insolvency in July, to their first profitable month in November 2000, and after a dip in December and January returned to profitability throughout 2001.
Using this return to liquidity, Mak and Housman busied themselves developing a new range of software which enabled business to roll out communications systems in an Internet, or intranet context.
By December 2001 Start launched their new SMS-enabled corporate communications software suite to a welcoming audience, and this month managed to close a deal to buy out LookSmart's 51 percent stake in the company.
-I have put everything into this company, friendships, social life, health, my life depends on its success," said Mak, admitting to a short-lived sense of relief when the deal was finalised and Start was once again in the hands of its founders.
-The best persons to run a company are the ones that can't afford to lose it," he said. -We are just trying to keep alive."
