In 2000, Web Business Development, Inc. paid me $20 a day, in cash, to write ASP out of an office unit in 20810 Plummer St, Chatsworth, California. It had real consulting clients and twenty-five websites of its own. Most of the money, as far as any of us could tell, came from four massage parlors in the San Fernando Valley. They were rub-and-tugs.
The owner was Jason Stavitsky, a smooth-talking salesman whose half brother, Doug Friedman, worked there, along with his nephew and his niece.
Jason’s mother was a famous singer from the 50’s, Deborah “Debbie” Haley Stavitsky and she used to frequently stop by the office for visits.
I’d spent the year before carrying furniture for US1 Moving and Storage at $8 an hour, which I wrote about in the previous piece in this series. Of my first two employers in America, the moving company was the conventional one.
The dot-com bubble usually gets told as a Silicon Valley story. Pets.com went public in February 2000 and announced it was shutting down that November. Webvan lost more than $800 million delivering groceries and filed for bankruptcy in July 2001. Most people writing code in 2000 never got near any of that, and a lot of us worked for guys like Jason instead, in office parks in places like Chatsworth, where a domain name and a good pitch were enough to make a company.
Jason had twenty-five and he believed in them so much that after we built each one he told us we are all going to be millionaires. At first we all believed him.
Some of the work was real, in the sense that clients paid for it. I spent my days writing the ASP behind usetheexperts.com, a contractor directory, while Lowell Hausman did the design. You know Angie’s List. You’ve probably never heard of this one, and I’ve written about why.
Late in 2000, WBDI was hired to finish the site for MyOnlyCatalog.com. The company sold its stock through cold calls from late 1999 until California ordered it to stop in August 2002, and it raised $10 million without a working product. Jason was asked to present to its investors.
Then there were WBDI’s own businesses. I am sure I missed a few but list was:
National Search Directory
American Savings Club
Coupon Web Book
Domain Fulfillment
Domain Gift Card
Magazine Madness
Internet Card Service
Internet Language Translation
Virtual Minders
My Local Sources
Simple Riches
Shop And Charge
Web Charging
Non Stop Giveaways
Parent Sources
Premiere Benefits
Saving Sources
Shopping Rewards
Super Search Results
Web Boom
Web Appraisal Service
Web Business Sources
Your Dollar
Internet @ The Mall and Internet @ Agent.
Most of that list was coupons, web directories, and credit repair. Coupon Web Book and American Savings Club were the coupon side. National Search Directory, Super Search Results, and most of the names ending in Sources were directories, which in 2000 still looked like a business. Yahoo had started as one in 1994, and its hand-built directory stayed on top of its search results until October 2002. Credit repair was the third leg, and it fit with the coupons better than it sounds, because the person clipping coupons and the person trying to fix his credit are often the same person. The rest covered domain names, magazine subscriptions, appraisals, translation, and a mall.
In 2000, that was a business plan.
I Took the Bus to Work
Every morning I caught the 167 bus from Bob’s place in Northridge, where I rented a room with a couch and a desk, and in the evening I’d get a ride back, usually from Lowell, Tim, or Dann.
Tim and his girlfriend, Carly, had moved to California from the Midwest. He wanted to be an actor and went to auditions whenever he could, and I’m fairly sure he landed a Jack in the Box commercial. He was Jack. The Jack in those commercials wore a giant ping-pong-ball head, which makes it the rare acting credit nobody can check. When Tim wasn’t auditioning, he and I spent more hours than I’m going to admit at the Candy Cat, the topless bar up the street.
Dann Gillen’s claim to fame was that he’d been the drummer for a band called Venice and had also played drums for Annie Lennox. At WBDI he was the webmaster.
Lowell drove a black Mitsubishi 3000GT back then that he kept spotless except for his hocky gear in the back and was dating a girl he refuses to talk about until this day, so she shell remain anonymous. One day after lunch buffet as Sergio’s Italian, which shut down years ago, he and I were playing mercy in the parking lot, the game where two people lock fingers and bend each other’s wrists back until somebody gives up, when a police car drove past. On the way back to the office, it followed us. Then it pulled us over.
The officers asked if they could search us and the car. We said yes. One of them reached into my pocket and came out with candy, and you could see on both of their faces the exact moment they understood they had pulled over two morons. They explained that from the street it had looked like a drug deal, had a laugh between themselves, and left.
At five o’clock we all opened No One Lives Forever, Monolith’s 1960s spy shooter that had come out in November 2000, and played it against each other in multiplayer, sometimes until the late hours of the night. Lowell was always Mustafa, after Will Farrell’s Austin Powers henchmen character. I still miss that game.
The Data Entry Staff Came From the Parlors
The parlors weren’t on the list of websites, but they were never far from the office. Jason rotated some of the women who worked at them through WBDI for data entry.
Stacy: If you are reading this: How you doin’
One time Lowell half jokingly asked another girl, Tasha to marry me and turn me legal. She looked me and him in the eyes and said: Ill have to ask my mom.
The next day she brought her kids to the office so I can meet them. Needless to say I shut that entire idea down.
He also sold sex toys online. The inventory lived in the back room. I helped myself to a few when I was dating my ex-wife. Maybe that’s why she married me. It couldn’t have been my sense of humor.
Jason and Tim once tried to teach me what a hummer was. I thought it was the car.
Jason’s car was a white Jaguar that one of his investors had given him. One day somebody stole the hood ornament, the chrome leaping cat, and instead of paying us, Jason bought a new one. He explained that he was trying to close an important deal and couldn’t show up to the meeting in a Jag missing the cat.
He then proceeded to give all of us a long speech explaining we are going to be competing with Yahoo in two years tops. We tried not to roll our eyes too much.
Going Legit Is What Broke Him
The deal that was supposed to make him legitimate was with Cardservice International, which sold credit card merchant accounts through independent sales agents, and the deal was built around Internet @ Agent. Then Cardservice started looking into him.
Jason closed all four parlors. After that the money dried up, he got kicked out of his apartment, and he started sleeping in the office. He kept driving the Jaguar to meetings.
His marriage was falling apart too. His wife was having an affair with her personal trainer, Dave Nelson, an actor and bodybuilder who had at one point been Mr. LA, and eventually she left Jason for him. That turned out to be a mistake. Nelson beat her so badly that the police went after him, and he fled to Las Vegas. I told Jason they wouldn’t have much trouble finding him. All they had to do was check the local gyms.
Maybe the marriage is why Jason started hitting on Carly, who was Tim’s girlfriend at the time. He married her. They had kids together, and then they got divorced.
VNC Was Hours of Entertainment
I got him once. I came in early, installed VNC on his computer, and went to hide in the back of the office. In 2000, VNC was a free download from AT&T’s research lab in Cambridge, England, built so researchers could reach their own desktops from anywhere. It worked just as well on someone else’s.
When Jason sat down and started working, I moved his cursor. Then I started playing with his desktop. Finally I opened Notepad on his screen and typed “Hello Jason...”
He freaked out and started frantically calling for Eric in fear. Later he said he’d thought it was his dead father trying to communicate.
I’m fairly sure the engineers in Cambridge never pictured that use case. I still crack up.
I Just Bought the Domain
Two things from WBDI lasted. Lowell became one of my best friends, and he was later responsible for the first iteration of both Inverted Software and ShopSnap. The other took longer to show up. Jason used to talk constantly about Christina from Cardservice International, and years later, when I went to work at Volusion, I met Charles Serian and found out his wife was that same Christina. Charles and Christina are two of my best friends today.
Eventually I met my wife at the time, married her, became legal, and went to work for Kelsey National, which I’ve also written about. It was a far more normal, but simply a boring company and i missed WBDI and the gang terribly the whole time I worked there. Yes Dental Insurance is important, but you simply can’t beat Doug telling me and Lowell he cant go to lunch with us because “Jason needs me“ and then promptly taking a nap at the back of the office next to a set of furred handcuffs...
Web Business Development has been gone for years. Jason manages a thrift store now, for a chain whose sales pay for cat and dog programs in Ventura County, and on October 17 he was on The Kim Pagano Show talking about its new superstore. The money goes to cats on purpose these days. I talked to him recently, and he still hustles. Maybe he’ll make it someday.
While researching this piece I found out the domain had been abandoned, so I bought it. Go to webbusinessdevelopment.com and see what I did with it.
Honestly: aside from the pay WBDI was the best job I ever had with the coolest people I ever met and I had tons of fun there. If Jason would have actually made it and could affords a real payroll, I would probably be still working there, building more of his wacky ideas, playing video games and having too much food for lunch at Brent’s deli.
C’est la vie
About the Author
Gal Ratner came to Los Angeles from Israel in 1999, spent a year as a mover, and wrote his first American code in Classic ASP for $20 a day in Chatsworth. He has nearly thirty years of production experience on the Microsoft and .NET stack, with clients including Microsoft, Sony, Rockstar Games, 2K Games, Best Buy, and Allegiant Air. He was the sixth employee at Break.com. He built the store provisioning systems at Volusion and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Business Journal’s CTO of the Year.
He is Chief Architect at Prana Entertainment, a Las Vegas enterprise software and AI consultancy, and the founder and CTO of Inverted Software and WhiteStar Labs. He also runs ShopSnap, a zero-transaction-fee commerce platform. His current work is agentic AI in production, including MCP servers, the Microsoft Agent Framework, SQL Server 2025 vector search, and PLogger, his open-source observability framework. He is the author of the novel The Archive of Lost Suns.
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