“He was just a great leader,” said Mr. Petrie, who grew up watching Mr. Staubach battle his beloved Cleveland Browns.
Mr. Petrie still adheres to a few “Rogerisms,” inspirational expressions that Mr. Staubach would deliver to his team of brokers, like “There is no traffic on the extra mile.”
He landed at CresaPartners in 2003. He now lives in Scarsdale with his wife, a real estate attorney, and his two children.
In 2006, Mr. Petrie noticed the venture capital firms starting to give seed money to a lot of East Coast tech firms.
“I said to myself, ‘They have a bull’s-eye on their back, and I want to get that business,’” he said.
One company that had a bull’s-eye on its back was Datran Media, a tech and marketing firm that had millions of venture capital funding headed its way.
His obsession with snagging Datran as a client eventually led to an in-person meeting.
“They had just leased expansion space in a small building on the Upper West Side, which they had to build out,” he recalled. “So I offered them project management services.”
He helped the firm, which merged with CONTEXTWEB in September to become PulsePoint, grow from 5,000 square feet in 2006 to 30,000 square feet, at 22 Cortlandt Street and 345 Hudson Street, today.
And he’s bullish on PulsePoint’s Hudson Square neighborhood. The area is still seen by some as a “value play”—especially as it has yet to develop into a 24-hour community. That, in turn, does not make it a space for every company.
But it remains a tech hub.
