Be a Bigger Magnet

Both men interviewed for the same job after graduation, as general manager of Zpix, a Twin Cities company that provided digital prepress services. Mallin turned down the job and signed on with 3M instead; Litman took it. But after only a year, Litman left Zpix and—together with Zpix colleagues Bruce Greenberg and Ray Uppaluri—started his own company in 1991: Minneapolis-based Imaginet, Inc.

“I saw the opportunity to help various businesses, such as advertising agencies and corporate marketing departments, make the transition internally to digital prepress,” Litman says. The change would allow his clients to do professional-quality typography and design on their own desktop computers, rather than hiring typehouses to design their printed materials. “So I signed with Apple and NeXT Computer and found a small sublease in a building downtown.”

In the beginning, Zpix resold hardware, networking equipment, and graphic-design software, setting up organizations such as Target Corporation and MSP Communications (the parent company of Twin Cities Business) with Macintosh computers they could use to do digital page layouts in house.

When Skip Gage left a position as CEO of Carlson Companies in 1992 to open his own marketing firm, he hired Imaginet to consult. The little start-up worked hard for Gage, bringing in dozens of desktop computers and training Gage’s employees to use the graphic design applications.

It was the start of an important alliance: Gage has been a supporter of Litman’s ever since. Between stellar references from that job and a worldwide turn toward in-house, computer-assisted design, Imaginet flourished.

Finally, in 1994, Litman and Mallin met on what they both refer to as a “blind date,” a happenstance introduction that resulted from Mallin’s wife knowing one of Litman’s former business associates. They quickly discovered the weird convergences in their lives, and Mallin joined Imaginet as a fourth partner before the year was out.

He and Litman were a perfect match. Litman brought business acumen, sharp ideas, and plenty of raw ambition to the equation, while Mallin was a charming and nearly savant-like techno-geek. Together, they grew Imaginet even faster and moved it into digital marketing.

“We saw that what we were doing in terms of digital prepress was becoming a commodity,” Litman explains. “Dan and I have always wanted to be leaders, and we saw that the ability for companies to use the Internet in order to reach their customers was on the horizon. So we went that direction.”

As a result, in 1994, they were an early local entry into the field of Web services: site and software development. Two years later, their then 20-person company launched imation.com for 3M’s spin-off business in data storage media.

“This was the first multibillion-dollar company we knew of to live on the Web long before it was bricks and mortar,” Mallin says. “The day they announced the existence of Imation, there was already a 1,500-page Web site in place.”