Here is a copy of the article the courier-journal did on Andy and I today:
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Startup hotshots score
Louisville brothers capitalize on Web-based stock-trading businesses
Brothers Andy and Landon Swan are standing tall in the Louisville entrepreneurial community these days — and it’s not because the former Bellarmine University basketball players each stands 6 feet 9 inches.
Colleagues in the startup world are more impressed by the stature of their business success: The pair sold their first company, stock-trading advice website DayTradeTeam.com in January 2007. They announced this month that their follow-up, MyTrade.com, sold in December.
Details of the MyTrade transaction weren’t announced, but Silicon Valley Insider, a Web site that covers digital business, put the sale price at $3 million to $5 million.
Louisville could see more such deals from a growing base of enterprising young businesspeople, Landon Swan said. “Entrepreneurship in Louisville is underestimated.”
Andy Swan said: “It isn’t just a Silicon Valley or New York City where innovative new technology and new companies are being born and receiving success. It’s also Louisville.”
Others in their circle of Web-savvy business developers say the brothers’ success stems from their approach to launching projects.
Andy Swan, 30, and Landon Swan, 28, “are very strategic in the way they built their great companies to flip them, which is impressive,” said Todd Earwood, another Web entrepreneur in Louisville. The two “have an unbelievable eye for trends” and for planning their exit strategies, said Earwood, president of Simple Media and co-founder of the Web site DailyIdea.tv. “We need 20 more Swan brothers in town.”
“They’re hot,” said Roger Ehrenberg, an investor and board member for MyTrade who also writes the business blog Information Arbitrage. “They really have demonstrated that they understand the active retail investor and they’ve really got a keen sense of what the customer experience should be.”
The brothers, originally from Evansville, Ind., played basketball at Bellarmine from 1998 to 2000 and “always wanted to do something together” after college, Landon Swan said. He had transferred from Bellarmine to Fordham University in New York, and Andy Swan went to Boston College Law School.
They soon realized, though, that “we just had the itch to do something other than learn more from the school — so we both dropped out,” said Landon Swan, who later finished his undergraduate degree.
The Swans had done well trading stocks. “We started in October of 2000, which was when the market was crashing, and you pretty much had to either get smart or get out really quickly,” Andy Swan said. “You learn pretty quickly when it’s your own money on the line.”
The brothers also started offering other investors help. “That’s how DayTradeTeam.com was born,” Landon Swan said. “We found a new way to present trading advice.”
Subscribers could see a live Web broadcast of the brothers, watch their trading activities, ask questions in a chat room and view miniseminars. When DayTradeTeam.com began, “this was before YouTube and before any video-sharing sites. It was very cutting-edge technology,” Andy Swan said.
The site wound up with about 1,000 subscribers paying around $1,000 a year. When a buyer offered “the right price … the timing was really good. It allowed us to keep a small position in DayTradeTeam and still watch as it grew,” Andy Swan said.
The Swans already were planning their next venture: a Web site that would package a variety of investor applications and services and still be “completely customizable” to the individual investor, Landon Swan said. MyTrade.com pulls together real-time stock prices, charts, online trades, investment bloggers, financial videos and more. Registration is free.
The site was purchased by Investools, which owns brokerage company thinkorswim.
The brothers now are shareholders in Investools and continue as employees at MyTrade, working to build up the site.
While their dealings might have gone unnoticed by many in Louisville’s business community, that’s not unusual for the area’s Internet-driven startups, the Swans said. Such companies are “growing and flourishing under the radar” because they’re not rooted in a physical location.
When a Web-based company opens, “you’re not going to drive by it on Bardstown Road or Hurstbourne Lane,” Andy Swan said. The businesses have customers around the world, but “without a central location.”
The Internet allows startups in Louisville, “which is not known as a hotbed of entrepreneurship or technology, to flourish without even being known in their own city,” he said. “So that’s pretty exciting.”
Earwood said Louisville “is very vibrant, specifically the Web part of the entrepreneurial community.”
But members of that community might not know their neighbors. Despite living in the same city, Earwood and the Swans weren’t aware of one another until brought together by a mutual friend from New York. Now they participate in regular networking events with other technology businesses.
“We get together once a month” with five or so local entrepreneurs, Andy Swan said. “There is no formal name for the club, but it’s actually a really cool and really helpful group.” There’
