Porn to Win

WARNING
Please be aware that this article contains hot links that will point your browser to sites that may contain adult content.

THERE WILL BE NO naked women in this story. No shower-cams. No money shots. Andy Edmond's business may be pornography, but he isn't a pornographer per se. Instead, the 27-year-old Seattle entrepreneur is becoming a kind of gatekeeper for the billion dollar X-rated Internet, providing middleman services that make it all possible. "He who controls the distribution of content is going to be king," Edmond likes to say—and there is little doubt, among those in the porn business, that coronation is what Edmond craves. His Seattle company, Flying Crocodile, Inc., already dominates the market for a key piece of software that's "mission critical" to the porn market, and Edmond is moving quickly to take a bite from every other tier of this lucrative business. Says Edmond: "It's very likely that out of the $7 billion market this is going to be in five years, Seattle [i.e., Andy Edmond] is going to own $5 billion of it."

Though unknown in the high-tech city where he does business, Edmond has become a figure of considerable controversy in the anarchic and insular world of global Internet porn, and it's not hard to see why. Beyond his monopolistic ambitions, Edmond is a self-appointed ambassador for porno professionalism, promising to bring new corporate respectability to a wildcat industry, where underage models, credit card fraud, and scams of all kinds have proliferated. "He's a strong advocate of the industry cleaning up its own messes," says Stacy Boyd, editor of the industry trade journal Adult Video News Online.

However, his high-profile efforts have not always been appreciated. "He's made enemies out of a lot of the big players," says Mark Tiarra of United Adult Sites, an industry trade group. "Nobody elected him to be our mouthpiece," complains Lee Noga, a respected industry veteran who runs an online discussion board called OnTheRopes. Noga, and other detractors, contend that Edmond's own house isn't quite tidy enough for him to be lecturing the rest of the industry and that his business has benefited from child pornography and other unsavory practices.

Edmond runs his 100-person company from a purple-themed two-story office above the Icon Grill restaurant on Fourth Avenue. His massive collection of Internet servers is housed in the nearby Westin building (Seattle's high-security telecom nerve center), where Edmond clearly loves to take visitors. Among the racks of mute and blinking boxes, from which graphic images are being pumped out to all corners of the globe, he reels off an impressive list of indecipherable specs and says with a laugh: "RealNetworks [his onetime employer] didn't let me play with the really big toys."

Edmond's love of big-talk and lust for the spotlight inevitably call up comparisons with another young, self-aggrandizing Seattle porn geek: the mightily-fallen Seth Warshavsky, once a media golden-boy for the early promise of p-commerce, now a disreputable entrepreneur in retreat. Warshavsky has been subject to a steady stream of lawsuits alleging unpaid bills, overcharging of customers, trademark violation, etc., and is now reportedly under investigation by the feds.

Edmond's courthouse record appears clean, by contrast, save for a couple of early disputes with local porn purveyors. But there's no telling whether his claims of eight-figure revenue are for real. One former manager at Flying Crocodile asserts that, even now, Edmond's company is struggling to pay its bills, though Edmond denies it.

But the growth of Edmond's privately held firm and the dominance of its flagship product—a piece of software called SexTracker—are undeniable. Says AVN Online's Stacy Boyd: "They're smart, they know what they want to do, and they're going after it. I think if the consensus was that Edmond's odds of success were low, he probably wouldn't be getting the kind of attention he is."

IN PERSON, EDMOND is something of a chameleon. As the occasion demands, he can be the brusque, chain-smoking, speed-talking star of an illicit industry, waving his "I porn" cigarette lighter in your face with a grin. Or he can be the controlled, mainstream corporate smoothie, wowing the boardroom with his flow of MBA jargon, asking and answering his own questions ("Have we been effective? Absolutely"). Two years ago, associates recall, Edmond wore ragged shoulder-length hair and multiple piercings. These days he's more GQ-groomed and dons the shiny suit fabrics favored by the more stylish high-tech moguls.

Over coffee and cigarettes, with his brother and full-time public relations manager J.T. in tow, Edmond recently explained to me how he got into the e-porn business and how he sees it evolving in the coming years. "The biggest transformation you're going to see is our dominance of the way the entire adult Internet works," he opined.

Though a confirmed computer geek, Edmond spent two years studying "botanical shamanism" and the cultural uses of plants at the University of Wyoming in his early 20s. He founded and led a Web community known as the Lycaeum, which is devoted to psychedelic drugs of all kinds and which still thrives today. But, Edmond observes, "botanists make $16,000 a year. That's not my style." Upon arriving in Seattle in 1996, Edmond spent a few months at Real before setting out with his partner Ross Perkins to crack the adult business.