BEN URETSKY HAD a shoebox filled with $10,000 in cash.
He worked for a company that rented computer power from a data center in Brooklyn, New York, and this was a company where “cash was king.” “I was paid in cash, and I literally had a Nike shoebox where I would put the money away,” says Uretsky, who immigrated from Russia at the age of five and grew up in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. “Don’t ask me why.”
The company was called Like Whoa, and it no longer exists. But with that $10,000, Ben Uretsky and his brother Moisey set up their own computers at a data center across the river in Lower Manhattan, hosting websites and other software for anyone who came knocking. When sending emails to customers, Moisey would hide behind a few fake names, just so their operation would seem bigger than it was.
Dispatches From The Front 