The Proxibid team had to be on site with a jury-rigged solution. What’s more, the European auctions themselves occurred in buildings that were many centuries old and not wired at all for technology. “If we were to have even a multi-second delay, it could impact our ability to function correctly,” said Petsick. Proxibid was attempting to do real real-time streaming that would work on a 56K modem. The technology doesn’t even exist,’” said Maxwell.Īnything streamed online had large amounts of buffering built into it-a non-starter for a live auction. Maybe in a few years you could build this. “A lot of the people we were interfacing with at the time said, ‘You can’t build this. and Europe in an era with major latency issues that don’t exist today. The Proxibid team was pioneering truly real-time online streaming between the U.S. “We thought adding this tool could really disrupt the space and at the same time open it up in a way it had never been exposed,” Petsick. The market was highly fragmented with few dominant players. But not many people interfaced with it all the time so they weren’t aware of it,” said Petsick.Īuctions in the 1990s were basically functioning as they had for thousands of years, and the geographical limitations of traditional auctions made scaling impossible. “The live auction industry at the time was well over a trillion dollar industry. Nearly everyone was still accessing the web via dial-up services.īut Proxibid founders Joe Petsick, Ken Maxwell, Andy Liakos and Andrew Letter (who has since left the company) saw an opportunity in a huge industry that nobody was paying attention to: Auction houses. The founders of Proxibid look back on their 15 year journey from Dot-com dream to high-growth startup.Įven for people who lived through it, it’s hard to remember what technology was like around the year 2000. Proxibid co-founders Joe Petsick, Ken Maxwell and Andy Liakos.
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