Razorfish redesigned Charles Schwab's online trading system and built the screens for Road Runner, the cable internet service owned by Time Warner and its partners. The New York firm also worked on theglobe.com and IBM's server pages. Two friends had started it in 1995. When it filed to go public in early 1999, every big company wanted a website, and few knew how to make one. Razorfish sold strategy, design and the code to make it all work.

Two Friends in Manhattan

Jeff Dachis and Craig Kanarick founded Razorfish in New York in 1995. They called the work digital communications solutions: consulting, information architecture, user interfaces and the custom software beneath them. The bet was that companies would pay premium fees for a firm that understood both design and technology. Razorfish grew by winning large clients and by buying other agencies in the United States and Europe, and became a name brand for the Silicon Alley scene.

A Long Line of Owners

Razorfish raised $48 million on Nasdaq in April 1999, at $16 a share. When the dot-com crash hit in 2000, its clients cut their web budgets, and the firm shrank hard. In 2003 SBI Group bought it and renamed it SBI.Razorfish. The agency then passed to aQuantive in 2004, to Microsoft in 2007 through its aQuantive purchase, and to Publicis Groupe in 2009 for $530 million. Razorfish still operates inside Publicis.

Cover: Carp in the Tone River (Tonegawa no koi), section of a sheet from the series "Cutout Pictures of Famous Places in Edo (Edo meisho harimaze zue)", Utagawa Hiroshige. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a leaping fish (Razorfish).