Lucrative Gig

How Mike Hutchinson '93 went from student to millionaire in just a few short years.

Mike Hutchinson ’93 tended Ithaca College’s computers back when the World Wide Web was little more than a clever experiment and America Online was geekdom’s joke, a cheesy tool for computer illiterates. But few laugh at AOL anymore. As for Hutchinson, now a senior staffer at the world’s largest on-line service provider, he’s working on ideas that could weave themselves into our lives as much as the Internet has.

About five years and 15 million members ago, Hutchinson turned a job at Ithaca College’s Academic Computing and Client Services into a post at AOL, the Virginia-based giant that has done as much as any other company to make Internet access a household staple. Now Hutchinson’s tasks involve putting the household on the road: as the senior product manager in AOL’s client development group, he’s working on ways for customers to get their e-mail fixes on Palm, Windows CE, and other hand-held devices. The wireless movement is picking up steam; some expect 4.5 million people to be connected to the Internet without benefit of cables by 2001. That access will be gained via laptop computers, handheld tablets — even cell phones.

Hutchinson never processed such thoughts at the start of his AOL career, when he signed on after a few short office stints immediately after graduating from IC. "It was pretty much another gig," he says about joining the company, even though AOL at the time had two million customers. Prodigy and Compuserve — now also-rans — were still around and considered to be competition for AOL. The Microsoft Network, the megalith’s stab at Internet service, was a looming threat.

"Nobody could have predicted the way AOL took off," says Hutchinson. Nor could anybody have predicted the way his own fortunes took off. One nice benefit of getting an early toehold in a company at the head of the dot-com pack: Hutchinson is rich — a millionaire, courtesy of AOL’s generous stock-option plan. The package could have amounted to nothing — in less heady days, according to some accounts, the company handed out thousands of options at a clip as if they weren’t worth the paper they were printed on — but share prices have exploded over the past couple of years.

Hutchinson doesn’t talk much about the money. That’s not why he’s at the job. But he says that the option package he has is the same as that of an Ithaca classmate, Darren "Hal" McCabe, who, according to a Washington Post article about AOL jet-setters, cashed in his shares earlier this year, took the $2 million, and ran. McCabe recently settled back in Ithaca, where he has bought a house and is contemplating writing a book and starting a political consulting firm.

Hutchinson recently bought a new Volvo C70, lavish for most 20-somethings, perhaps, but not considering the luxury-car showroom that is AOL’s parking lot.

In his job Hutchinson must take technical concepts and break them down for nontechnical audiences (" ‘Pezzifying’ the information," as he puts it). The telecommunications major says his Ithaca College career didn’t directly lend itself to what he’s doing now, but it did give him the tools to succeed at it. His natural curiosity helped, too.

"He was always interested in investigating and learning about the newest technology and the way it could be used," says Dave Weil ’87, M.S. ’88, ACCS’s assistant director and a former supervisor. He remembers Hutchinson selling Apple Macintoshes on campus and servicing the College’s collection of computers, from green-screened dummy terminals to then–cutting-edge 386s.

Now, as stories start to mount about so many of the brains that started AOL jumping ship with their opulent options, Hutchinson is sticking around — at least he’s waiting to maximize the return on his options. He’s already maximizing it when it comes to influencing technology. And he truly likes what he does, bringing technology to the masses. "If you have to work," he says, "it’s a hell of a place to work."