JibJab Co-Founder Shares Success Story With Honors College Students
Rutgers graduate Gregg Spiridellis says reinvention keeps the 16-year-old web-based animation company ahead of the curve
“I spent four years in banking. I was just bored. And there was this amazing thing called the internet that was going to change everything. I would have made so much more money on that other path, but I’m so much more fulfilled and grateful to be on this path and at the forefront of something.”– Gregg Spiridellis
The finance industry was giving Gregg Spiridellis the green light.
He’d earned a bachelor’s degree in finance magna cum laude from Rutgers in 1993, hustled his way into Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, and earned his MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.
But instead of returning to Wall Street after graduate school and reaping his rewards, the one-time investment banker was surviving on ramen noodles and launching an internet startup with his brother Evan. The Marlboro natives pooled a few thousand dollars and a lot of chutzpah to found JibJab, one of the world’s first web-based animation companies.
What started with cheeky stop-motion political parodies distributed via dial-up modem has grown into a nationally recognized brand of personalized eCards and videos that are ubiquitous on social media. If you haven’t cut and pasted your face into one of the Spiridellis’ bobblehead-esque creations, it’s likely you’ve LOL-ed watching others who have.
“I spent four years in banking. I was just bored. And there was this amazing thing called the internet that was going to change everything,” Spiridellis said during an April 4 visit to his alma mater’s Honors College. “I would have made so much more money on that other path, but I’m so much more fulfilled and grateful to be on this path and at the forefront of something.”
At the brink of the new millennium, that something was email. With it came the potential to reach mass audiences with minimal costs. So when Evan, who’d studied animation at Parsons School of Design, approached his brother about breaking into television, Spiridellis suggested they try new media.
“I told him, ‘Don’t do television. Don’t bang out horseshoes. The Model T is rolling off the line over there,’ ” Gregg said to 10 honors students at a roundtable discussion during Rutgers’ Digital Leadership Week. “It was brand new territory. YouTube wasn’t founded until 2006. There was no such thing as videos on the internet.”
JibJab started in a Brooklyn garage with Gregg writing copy for Evan’s animated shorts. They designed eCards for other websites to pay the bills. That worked until the dotcom bubble burst, taking out JibJab’s eCard clients. The Spiridellis brothers spent the next several years scraping by in Los Angeles, creating characters for “Arrested Development ” and Sony and publishing the best-selling children’s book “Are you grumpy, Santa?” for Disney.
“We were on the cusp of giving up. We were wondering if the internet was ever going to be used for entertainment,” Spiridellis said. “Napster and Kazaa were the only ones doing that, and they were stealing music and getting shut down by the record industry. After five years of believing, you go, ‘Maybe we’re wrong about this.’ ”
That’s when their “This Land” parody of the 2004 presidential election catapulted JibJab into our national consciousness.
Who hasn’t seen the political satire featuring George W. Bush and John F. Kerry? One of the first-ever viral videos, “This Land” was viewed 80 million times in all seven continents and prompted ABC News anchor Peter Jennings to name the duo “People of the Year” in 2004.
After that, JibJab videos appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” at the Sundance Film Festival and on other new media platforms. Gregg and Evan were making audiences laugh, but they weren’t making much money. So Spiridellis put his finance hat back on, and figured out how to replug JibJab into the resurging eCard business while tapping into the growing social media phenomenon.
“People were uploading all these photos to Facebook,” Spiridellis said. “We thought, ‘If we can access people’s photos, we can cut their heads and inject them into our videos. It will be fun.’ ”
Millions of social media users agreed. Launched in 2007, their “Starring You” platform’s personalized videos – from Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” – have been viewed more than 1 billion times.
Spiridellis traces his entrepreneurial roots to Rutgers, where he ran the now-defunct Livingston’s Own Concert Organization (LOCO), combining his love of music with his fledgling business acumen. He brought the Beastie Boys, Rage Against The Machine, Chris Rock and Adam Sandler to Rutgers.
“It was awesome,” said Spiridellis, who was a drummer for several high school bands. “I got to run my own business putting big-budget concerts on campus.”
Today, JibJab is in the black and employs a staff of 80 who are always searching for ways to entertain new audiences. Two of the company’s latest innovations include StoryBots, a collection of web and mobile apps with educational songs and animation designed for the Pre-K crowd, and JibJab Messages, an app that allows users to personalize shareable emojis and GIFs.
Does that mean it’s time for the brothers to sit back and survey their successes? Not a chance, Spiridellis said.
“Realize what you just did is in the past and don’t get stuck to it,” Spiridellis advised his roundtable audience. “Reinvent yourself – that’s how we’ve survived 16 years. You can’t sit still.”