PlayCurrency

Editorial transcript for review. Lightly edited for readability. Names and terminology have been standardized where the recording is clear; brackets identify uncertain wording. This is a first-person recollection and is not presented as independent documentary verification.

00:00 PlayCurrency was the first company that we did with MarketView Financial. When I first met Charlie McLaughlin, his partner Pat Meding and Charlie welcomed us into his office. It was Jason April and myself.

00:17 This is, of course, after 9/11. We had lost everything with the company NextLevel and Wiremix, and all that was terrible. One little side note is that we actually changed Jason April's wedding anniversary because we needed him, and his future wife was working at Cantor Fitzgerald in the Twin Towers, so we kind of dodged a bullet there.

00:46 Anyhow, we regrouped. Through one of Jason's friends, I went to Charlie to do some financing with CYOP. He said, "You know, I don't like this CYOP stuff, and I really like this Mitch White." I said, "We've got something in common already." He said, "Why don't you come here and do another deal? I think we can do some stuff together."

01:11 So we moved into 17 Battery Place. Jason said, "We're going to need to find a guy who can do good marketing." He knew a guy named Rick Ramos from one of his other companies and brought Rick in. Pat decided to design some of the back end for the website, which was going to be regular games played online for money and prizes. We needed an algorithm, and she was pretty good at that.

01:40 She took care of that. I took care of the overall vision. I worked with Charlie doing some fundraising—capital for the company. It looked like we might try to take it public, and we worked to get PlayCurrency up.

01:53 We finally got the website finished and did some testing. Chris provided us the games; we paid a monthly fee for them. Chris was a tough nut because sometimes we'd forget to pay him and he would just turn the games off—and away they'd go.

02:13 But PlayCurrency met an untimely death by not even getting out of the gate. We'd finished everything and were ready to launch, with marketing money in hand. We had a whole [unclear] business plan. Pat and Charlie started to fight. They'd been partners for twenty or thirty years, but the wheels were falling off their relationship.

02:37 Pat decided that she was going to take her ball and go home. She took the back end and kind of held us hostage with it; she said she wanted a bunch of money for it. They had a big blowout, and that was it. She went on her way. We were sitting there, basically holding the rest of it in our hands, going, "Now what?"

03:00 It basically faded into nothing and never even had a chance, but it was a great concept at the time. It was born from the casino games on the internet because we knew how to do that. We knew that by doing prizes, the regulatory people would let us do it. We did a lot of work, and it is unfortunate that it never got to see the light of day. It was a year-plus; it was a functioning company and business for a little bit of time, with a website. It is just too bad it didn't get to see the light of day.