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Still Writing His Own Script
Published: July 24, 2005
A career spent founding and running
companies, notably Tunes.com, that produce multimedia content has left Howard
A. Tullman, 60, with a thirst to create some original material himself.
Kendall College
Howard A. Tullman
So
he's shopping a screenplay and a book, both of which he wrote mostly on
weekends.
In his day job - make that
"jobs" - he is the president of Kendall College, a culinary arts
school in Chicago, and chairman of two companies: Experiencia Worldwide, a
company also based in Chicago that produces programs for fourth- and
fifth-graders on entrepreneurship and the environment; and the Cobalt Group, in
Seattle, a provider of Web services for car dealers.
Mr. Tullman is perhaps most widely
known for running Tunes.com from 1997 to 2000. During that time, the company's
projects included the addition of music archives from the late 60's to the late
90's for the Web site of Rolling Stone magazine. When Emusic.com acquired Tunes.com in 2000 in a stock swap valued at $130
million, Mr. Tullman headed in several directions.
"That seems so long ago,"
he said of his time at Tunes.com, "I guess because there's so much going
on in my life right now."
"I'm up most mornings at
5:30," he added, "and I have a loft near the college that gives me
about a 10-minute commute."
In some ways, he said, his
responsibilities at Kendall College have been more like his entrepreneurial
roles. He took the job in 2002 as a turnaround project when the college was in
financial trouble. He sold Kendall's campus in Evanston, Ill., and moved the
college to Goose Island, an industrial area on the Near North Side of Chicago
under redevelopment. He has raised $50 million for Kendall, some of it from the
sale of the old campus.
He is also trying to attract
interest in his screenplay, called "Finders Keepers." "It's a
story about some people who steal money from the president of the United
States," he said. He has also retained a literary agent to sell his book,
"The Perspiration Principles," which he describes as a how-to manual
for would-be entrepreneurs.
He and his wife, Judith, have two
daughters and a granddaughter. He does not take vacations, and he says he
relaxes by reading at night. "I think when some of us buy books," he
said, "we mistakenly think subconsciously that we're buying the time to
read them." Robert Johnson