In the middle 1990s, Timothy M. Armstrong, the young co-owner of a struggling small newspaper in Boston, had lunch with some people from Mosaic, an Internet browser.
“I just saw the future and I think it’s the Internet, so I’m going to go find Internet stuff to do,” he told his parents afterwards, as reported in Greenwich Magazine.
Since then, Armstrong, 38, found plenty of Internet stuff to do, eventually becoming Google’s president of North American sales.
In March, he left Google for AOL, the once ubiquitous online powerhouse that has been overtaken by Google and will be spun off from Time Warner by the end of the year.
Armstrong wants “the weary and beaten-down company to grow again,” The New York Times reported last week.
He’ll do this, he hopes, by adding specialized content and by gaining more display advertising.
Armstrong told the Times that AOL has the advantage that comes from 25 years of collecting data on customers.
And even though AOL has lost millions of customers, it still has 6.2 million dial-up Internet customers. In addition, AOL.com had over 100 million visitors in June.
“If you tried to recreate AOL’s assets, it would be incredibly expensive,” Armstrong told the Times.
Nonetheless, Armstrong has taken on a difficult task, one that a revolving door or other executives in the past few years hasn’t mastered.
But he does have the reputation as a visionary salesperson, someone who helped Google become the dominant advertising force that it is.
After graduating from Connecticut College in 1993, Armstrong spent three months working for an investment firm before he left to start a lifestyle newspaper for twenty-somethings in the Boston area.
When that venture went nowhere, Armstrong and a friend bought Square Deal, a newspaper for Harvard University students. Things didn’t go well there, either.
“We were probably fifty or sixty thousand dollars in debt each,” Armstrong told Greenwich Magazine. “We were back due on our rent. We didn’t have money for furniture. We barely had enough money for food.”
It was then that Armstrong left the old medium of print to take on a series of jobs in the new media world of the Internet.
He joined Google in 2000 when the company was still very much a work in progress.
Armstrong brought with him 15 of his former employees at Snowball.com, an Internet site for young people, and began to assemble an advertising sales force. He worked out of a Starbucks or from his cramped apartment in New York City.
Led by Armstrong, the ad staff successfully sold the idea of search-related ads, the sponsored links that connect Internet users to products they may want.
Google went public in 2004, making millionaires of Armstrong and other workers who joined the company early.
Armstrong’s move to AOL was something of a surprise, but he may have risen as far as he could at Google, according to reports.
And, though AOL has lost its luster, he sees the company as well positioned to grow again as the economy improves and advertisers began to spend money again.
“AOL has a choice to make,” he said. “We either lose slowly or win quickly. We are choosing to win quickly.”
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