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|
Terry Freeman |
Freeman pours heart, money into Internet
Chamber |
| 11/1/2002 5:20:00 PM |
| By Todd Neff |
Terry Freeman
Age: 54
Employer: Internet
Chamber of Commerce
Position: Executive director
Education:
Bachelor of arts in broadcasting, San Francisco State University,
1969
-----------------------
The Internet Chamber of Commerce,
one of Denver’s most consistent technology networking forums, should
no longer exist.
This is not because the events aren’t
interesting or valuable. After all, its Oct. 16 “Inventor’s Night”
at Denver’s 1770 Sherman Street Events Complex featured two panel
discussions and dozens of booths, with local inventors displaying
everything from collapsible cardboard gas cans to the BikerDog,
which helps connect bicycles to dogs.
There was a Webcast of
the happenings on every floor. About 350 attended. It was a
remarkable event.
The ICC shouldn’t exist because, with very
little assistance, Terry Freeman is
responsible for about every detail. This is a full-time job.
Freeman does it for free. He takes no
money from the ICC, which has none to give. He never has.
It
turns out that we have Freeman’s
mother, who lives in Tennessee, to thank for the ICC. “She gives me
$900 a month and then she pays the mortgage on my house,” he
said.
Freeman has had paying
jobs in the past. He fell in love with foreign film while a student
at the University of Florida, breaking off a pre-law course of study
to attend film school at San Francisco State. After graduating in
1969, he spent 12 years as a film editor at CBS affiliate KPIX and
then covering a 13-state region with CBS News.
He was
covering the Western Governor’s Conference in Denver in the late
1970s when a cameraman suggested that Freeman consider investing in penny stocks.
Freeman stopped by the Denver offices
of broker Blinder, Robinson & Co. on the way back to the
airport. “When I got back home (to San Francisco), I said, ‘I’ll
never see that $1,000 again,” Freeman
said.
The broker called some time later and suggested that
Freeman sell. The price was just 20
cents, but he had bought at a dime.
Freeman started trading penny stocks. At the
same time, he was burning out on news editing. In 1980, he put
$150,000 of his penny-stock earnings into a Denver-based paper
devoted to penny stocks called the Denver Stock Exchange.
He
became publisher of the weekly paper, changing its name to the OTC
Stock Journal. Its key asset: 3,000 penny stock quotes that,
pre-Internet, weren’t available elsewhere. The paper grew to 17,000
subscribers and had 22 employees, up from 10 when Freeman bought it.
The industry changed.
Blinder, Robin-son & Co. became better known as “Blind ’em &
Rob ’em.”
“I began editorializing that a lot of our
advertisers were crooks,” he said. The OTC Stock Journal’s last
issue was July 1990.
Freeman
sank into depression. “I spent months not getting out of bed, and
then only to get food at 3 a.m. because I didn’t want to see anybody
I knew,” he said.
He didn’t pull out of it until 1995. He had
begun attending ICC meetings, and ended up taking the then-declining
organization over in 1996.
He said he does so much himself
because, “I have a tendency to not get along in committee
environments. I can put my money where my mouth is, commit the time
and take risks.”
Freeman said
the ICC’s fortunes peaked with the July 2000 Tech Barbeque, which
drew 1,500.
A $55,000 kitty from those days has shrunk to
about $1,000, according to Freeman.
“Now, the challenge is to keep the overhead as low as possible,” he
said.
He doesn’t intend to quit. “I ran OTC longer than most
people would have and I’ve run the Internet Chamber of Commerce
longer than most people said it should have gone,” he
said.
Why?
“I still believe in the concept of having
an organization that people in this business can call home,” he
said. |
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