The Barbarian Group is seven years old today. (note, well, actually, yesterday. I wrote this yesterday but didn’t get a chance to post it)

Seven years. Wow.

The date was sort of picked arbitrarily. We already had work. We had a check in hand from our first client, the estimable Wieden & Kennedy. What we didn’t have was a bank account. Or a business license. So we couldn’t cash the check.

So on December 11, 2001, Brian Costello, our lawyer and an early partner in the company, went down to the offices of the State of Massachussetts, and filed our dba licence. He was also kind enough to loan us the $500 – the only equity stake we’ve ever taken, so far – since the partners were, shall we say, experiencing some liquidity issues. He then wrote us:

And with that, The Barbarian Group was born. The company consisted of its founding partners – Benjamin, myself, Keith, Robert, Jay and Brian – and our soon-to-be additional partner, Aubrey Anderson, who served as our first CTO.

We were already working on our first two projects, the Nike ACG Go site and the VW Design minisite.

Today we opened up job number 1048. We now stand at 70 or so full time employees and partners, with a host of associates and contractors (though not nearly as many as you’d think for a company our size). Our most recent hire was Jen Jonsson, our new director of production. We’ve been so insanely busy that I haven’t had a moment to write a welcome email for her. We’re that busy.

I’m in the New York office today, and the energy is amazing. The projects are… unbelievable. I’m wandering around from room to room and there’s ground breaking work with amazing teams being done for a major consumer packaged goods brand, a major entertainer, and one of the craziest projects we’ve ever had to work on for an large asian transportation system. Discussions are flowing around the future of interactive marketing and the music industry. I’m watching another team bring Benjamin’s vision of branded utilities come true on a massive scale. On another conference call, Amazing discussions are going on between Noah and Shelby and the creative team on Kashi and what it means to be a responsible brand in the world of social media. Every day, serious, intense process conversations happen between the directors hammering out different nuances of our sales, production, concepting and strategy processes. Ideas brandied about about how to buffer the new biz machine as we going into this horrible economy. Interviews with more amazing people, left and right, even as we all fret about what a company like this means in an economy like this.

And there’s that, of course. Layoffs are happening left and right, around us. Not so much at our clients’ companies, but of course at some of our agency clients. And we’re pretty integrated into the ad worlds of the cities we operate out of. Friends are losing jobs left and right. It’s hitting our friends at the tech companies in the valley, of course, are feeling it too, though not as much as last time.

It’s pervading the atmosphere, of course. We’ve not gone without feeling it here, just like everyone – especially on the payments front

Talking about the economy is a ridiculous exercise, fraught with missteps. Everyone’s so afraid to talk about how they’re doing. There’s all this “perceived wisdom” about how you should make no promises, no prognostications, leave every door open, etc. etc. We’ve had no layoffs, we don’t plan to. It’s weird saying that, even. Like you’re tempting fate, or somehow making it worse. But it’s the truth. It’s interesting, though. I feel a heady thrill even saying it, just like I felt a rush of excitement just coming out and saying a week before the election that Obama was gonna win and we should all calm down. I feel free!

I’m thirty-six years old. I went to school as an economist, and I graduated in 1992, in the middle of a pretty hellish recession. There wasn’t a job to be found in economics, or international relations (one of my minors). I did many of the things people do in recessions – took the foreign service exam, contemplated grad school – but in the end, my actions and career paths inextricably set me on the course to be where I am today. In 2001, in the middle of the dot com downturn, we founded this company. It was a crazy time to start, but it had its advantages – good talent was easy to find. The agencies needed reliable partners to work with since they’d trimmed staff. That feeling is back, of course.

There are a lot of kids here who have never been through it before. We’re watching the pennies like everyone else – we managed to keep our famous holiday party, though seriously cut back, and sadly couldn’t fly the entire staff to Boston for it this year. There’s a palpable sense of concern about the economy, of course. Before every company meeting, we take a poll and ask the employees what they want us to talk about, and the economy is looming large, of course. But this is in our DNA. We’re good at recessions. We’ll be okay. I can feel it. We’re breaking every rule in the book – completely at odds with the conventional wisdom. I find it horrible and scary that so many people are so quick to lay people off. I don’t really know what the purpose of a company is if it’s not to be some sort of benefit to the people who work in it. I’m sure if I brought NIck Denton in here to consult or some person from Bain they’d tell us we were the worst business managers in the world. But fuck it. We own the company, profits come and profits go and I just feel it was right to keep everyone here. And I think they’re happy for it. Two minutes ago, while writing this paragraph, Ashley just came by and said “oh hey thanks for not laying anyone off.” That felt good. That made it worth it.

It’s helped, of course, that we recently won a large global client, and other clients are doubling down. We provide quality services, and it’s heartening to have our clients see value in it. But i also think it’s a belief. In the people here. In what we’re all doing.

I have this working theory that this company follows the logic of economics, not business. We pursue the ideal, what’s right, the broad trends, what makes sense in theory. I often wonder how different we’d be if Ben and I had MBAs instead of economics and physics backgrounds. We come from the world of the empirc, the theoretical, the logical. It’s an interesting contrast.

Seven years of massive technology change. What did we do in 2001? We made cool flash websites, and there was so little content on the web, that was the marketing. People heard about them, and they came there. Viral videos? A far off dream. Viral Marketing? The purview of people like Neil Stephenson and William Gibson. YouTube wha? I remember when Google Maps came out and I thought “oh my god, we are fucked.” Mike Rubenstein the other day was hosting a design class in the Boston office and he was rattling off watershed events in the history of interactive marketing. He got to Friendster, which was, of course, a major moment in the viability of social networking and its marketing implication. The kids looked blank. They hadn’t even heard of it. (And I was so proud when Wired’s first article on friendster featured my picture. Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Processing. Facebook apps. The iPhone. I hit upon the theory this summer that there have been 2-3 disruptive events in interactive marketing every year since we started. It’s been hell accommodating for them all, especially with no funding. But we’ve done it. And it’s been awesome and fun as well.

Seven years. Seven years of constantly trying to reinvent advertising, to push the limit, and to reshape what communications mean in the modern era. Seven years of doing it without any money. Seven years of 100%ish growth each year. Seven years of thinking, every year “oh, it’s gonna get easier” and having it get harder, even as the opportunities and the resources get better.

It’s to the point where I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. And it warms my heart that I know I’m by no means the only one here that feels that way.

So thank you, Barbarians, for all your hard work. And happy birthday. And thank you, all of our amazing clients, for working with us.