Building a career on taking things apart
By Jim Malone

04/15/2004 15:38 PM John Moss had a decision to make. Should he go to medical school, as his plan called for? He'd been accepted at places like Yale and UMass. Or should he follow his lifelong knack for taking things apart and putting them back together?

Twenty-five years or so later, Moss, who apparently had little problem explaining his latest business venture, S2 Security Corp., to his investors, still can't explain why he chose computers over medicine.

"There are a few of those decisions in life where you look back and go 'Wow.'"

S2 Security makes an integrated security network appliance, an all-in-one box that uses a browser interface to provide video, audio and other physical security protection for buildings and other facilities.

S2 was launched April 1, 2003, with the announcement of what Moss calls a combined seed and A-round of funding. Investors - "Fifty-eight of my closest friends," Moss says - put in "north of $3 million" in exchange for common stock in the company.

So far, Moss says the company is on track to meet milestones: alpha testing within a year (at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline) beta testing at up to six sites, and a product within 15 months: he hopes to launch by the end of June.

He's approaching a personal milestone as well: he and his wife, Amy, are preparing to send their 17-year-old daughter to college this year.

An instrument-rated private pilot, Moss has sometimes winged it in business.

"When I went to college (Brandeis class of '78) computing was in its infancy, and it was very exciting. Computing was the ultimate take-it-apart, put-it-together toy," he said. "I always took stuff apart. I was the kid who would rather get an old alarm clock than a toy."

Moss took his biochemistry/psychology degree from Brandeis and went to work for a small company called Software House writing database management applications. Truth is, most of his work in both majors involved computers - statistics crunching and modeling.

On the side, he wrote a program - in Fortran on a PDP-11 - that managed the card key system that locked the company's doors at night. Their alarm vendor told him he could commercialize the program.

"I decided to see if he was telling the truth. I looked around to see the state of the industry, and there was no software (for physical security) in 1981. Remember, this was my first job out of college. I thought 'There must be an opportunity here because nobody's doing it.' I was unencumbered by facts. Of course now I know that can mean it's a bad idea."

Moss hit the trade shows, came back and "wrote the commercial version of the product myself. I literally made up the ads, placed them in the trade magazines. If you responded to one of my bingo cards, I showed up at your door."

The company grew into a $50 million a year enterprise. In 1996, Moss and company sold to Sensormatic, which in turn sold the firm to Tyco Industries.

Then it was non-compete time, a five-year period whose purpose seems to be to give guys like Moss time to cook up their next big thing. For him it was S2 Security Corp. It plays into his vision of small companies serving as breeding grounds for innovation.

What makes S2's box so special?

"Our principal protection does not derive from patents," Moss explained. "Our principal protection comes from the fact that what we're doing is not easy."

As Jimmy Dugan, Tom Hanks' character in "A League of Their Own," said, "It's supposed to be hard! If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it."