Joseph Tang

President, Chief Technology Officer

Guidance Solutions Inc.

Joseph Tang co-founded Guidance Solutions Inc. in 1992 as a database consultant. But the Marina del Rey-based firm didn’t stay that way for long.

“In the early days, we traveled all over the place,” said Tang, a former systems integrator. “There were months when every single Monday I’d wake up at 5 in the morning, fly out to wherever, and (work for) these large-scale clients at their companies. It was pretty tiring.”

It was a chance relationship with one of Tang’s clients, Celebrity Sightings, a Web-based fan club for teen TV stars, that got Guidance Solutions into its current business of designing Web sites and integrating them with databases such as archives of articles, or customer lists.

The two companies merged and the head of Celebrity Sightings, Robert Landes, became chief executive. Tang stayed more behind-the-scenes as president and chief technology officer.

The company now employs 100 people at an average age of between 25 and 30 and Tang expects it to do about $10 million in revenues this year. It boasts a client list that includes footwear retailer Foot Locker and sports and nutrition authority Met-Rx. But it’s the start-ups that get Tang, 31, most excited so much so that Guidance Solutions often invests in many of its upstart clients.

“The Web and Web space is like a gold rush,” he said. “People who build … sites are like selling pickaxes. You’re going to need a pickax. But doing this fee-based work, you’re never going to be as successful as those people who find gold. So while we sell pickaxes, we find the especially strong miners and take an equity position in them.”

“I like Joe, I like his guys, I like his software people,” said Willy Kraiem of Orange County-based Job Exchange, one of Guidance Solutions’ clients.

“There’s always correctness there. For example, a month ago, some piece of software was getting delayed. After the second or third delay, I finally got a call from Joe saying he would get it done immediately. He didn’t have to do that.”

D.B. Young