CHAT RETRO Jeff Jawer and Rick Levine, co-founders of StarIQ.com, joined us for a CNN.com/career live chat on Wednesday, October 11, 2000. Read the transcript.

Occupational occult

The mind of StarIQ.com

October 12, 2000
Web posted at: 12:50 p.m. EDT (1650 GMT)

In this story: 'As above, so below' Taurus rising StarIQ's galaxy so far Bigger pictures RELATED SITES

By Porter Anderson
CNN.com/career Editor

(CNN) -- "I was going out for a photo shoot in this wizard get-up. Nice hotel in London, in Kensington Gardens. I told the desk at this hotel, 'You know, you have to be a wizard to get a decent room around here.' Went out, did the shoot. By the time I came back, they'd upgraded my room."

Maybe that was when Jeff Jawer realized there might be something to a career in astrology. But in a wizard suit? Not anymore.

"We're educated to think of this as foolishness," Jawer says. "But one of the things I hope astrology can be is a bridge between the worlds of religion and science."

Not only is Jawer out of the stars 'n' moons robes that got him good hotel rooms -- that was some 25 years ago -- but what he's into nowadays may not leave him much time to talk about bridging theology and physics, either. Today, Jawer is an astrologer who divines the chances of selling editorial content to other sites and attracting venture capital to his own.

CHARTING THE CANDIDATES
	StarIQ.com's Jeff Jawer has an affinity for bringing astrological analysis to bear on current events. He calls it "astro-journalism." See what he found when he read the charts of the four main United States presidential candidates -- for Election Day.

He and his business partner Rick Levine founded StarIQ.com in Redmond, Washington, outside Seattle, in May 1999.

Although the company recently has considered a second round of fund-raising, "We only went for $500,000 on the first round," Jawer says, "and I'm glad. We have a staff of 11 people and that's enough. The dot-com slowdown has venture capitalists now covering themselves. It would be a lot harder if we had 20 people right now. I tell investors we're a comparatively cheap date."

Ask most Wall Street workers about last March and April's events in dot-com stocks, and they'll tell you the share prices "tanked" or "fell apart" or "went south."

But ask Jawer about that moment, and he'll tell you it was a "Saturn-Uranus square. That was the forces of condition and restraint (Saturn) saying, 'enough, let's slow that down.' Overnight collapse (the surprise element of Uranus). I think it was a fair adjustment to realize that you have to get profitable some day."

That, then, has become a goal of this astrologer-entrepreneur. "Get profitable some day."

Before the launch of StarIQ.com in the spring of 1999, Jawer's personal Web site and slogan were "As above, so below," a reference to the astrological tenet that the movements and alignments of the sun, the moon and the planets influence the moods and fortunes of people on Earth. The astrologer's intent is to plot these movements and predict what impulses may be felt, allowing people to either duck a rough moment or capitalize on a happy one.

The most popular and prevalent derivative of ancient astrological studies is the simple daily horoscope, found in many major media, including on CNN.com.

But increasingly elaborate sites are being mounted on the Web, exploring how much detailed astrological input the average user wants -- and how best to turn a penny in providing it.

"StarIQ is interested in getting information to people," says Jawer, "in a form that's more compact and digestible. In many ways, astrology information is made for the Internet. One of the great uses of the Internet is mass customization. Astrology lends itself to that very well, because you have unique information about individuals that's knowable in advance. It can be measured and delivered on just about any schedule needed."

As in many dot-com enterprises, StarIQ also can offer people in its industry opportunities to test and pioneer some concepts they feel strongly about.

"For example, we have a very good writer, Eric Francis, who's interested in the whole sexual world. We're developing a service we're tentatively calling 'Unlocking Desire.' That one should be a kind of regular notification of influences. I don't want to say it's going to be explicit, but it'll be more R-rated than, say, our 'VenusCycles,' which is really about the rhythms of the heart. "

As long as "heart" and "desire" have been uttered in the same breath, let's cover for you the fact that for Jawer, going into astrology was by no means a matter of fulfilling his boyhood heart's desire. This is a career field the man stumbled onto.

"I'd been an indifferent student in high school," he says. "I was an accounting major. And I was too immature to go out into the world, but I wanted out into it. So I went into the Navy. I discovered there that everybody isn't from Long Island. They don't have a Long Island dialect, either. I got out of the Navy, went to school in communications at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"My (first) marriage was breaking up. And somebody did my chart. It was my 27th birthday. I was fascinated by the system. In the past, I'd been interested in martial arts, piano -- nothing stuck. But this did. After six months of heavy study, I was starting to do readings for people.

"Astrology, it turns out, has a logic that's entirely graspable for me. You have planets, signs, houses and aspects. The combinations are almost endless. While I was at school in Amherst, what was available was called a 'BBIC,' a bachelor's degree with independent concentration in astrology -- its history, psychology, mythology.

"So I came out with a BA in the history and science of astrology, a completely legitimate degree. I moved to Atlanta and was doing personnel assessments of potential employees for a businessman, David Smith. We developed the "Astro," a handheld astrological calculator.

"To make it, I went to Georgia Tech -- to physics people because astronomers don't like astrologers too much. We sold it to retailers. I ended up promoting it in Europe."

And that's how Jawer came to be running around London in a wizard suit. The Astro didn't fare well on the market, but Jawer was learning the business of retail and developing a private practice as an astrologer. "I remember," he says, "doing Maynard Jackson's chart more than once," he says of the first black mayor of Atlanta.

Becoming interested in astrological software, Jawer did a couple of years "freezing in Michigan" to work with Astrology Matrix software in Big Rapids. After that, he says, he and his wife "figured we deserved San Diego."

She is Danick, a French astrologer whom Jawer met "at an astrology meeting in a convent in Paris." They have two daughters, aged 9 and 11, and in California were reunited with Rick Levine, then in the natural-foods business. An old friend, Levine now was talking about using the Internet to deliver news of transits -- supposedly influential planetary positions. Jawer, who had been working with a traditional publishing company, was ready for Web publishing and signed on.

"We basically raised the first $500,000 from the health-foods industry," he says. "Juice companies, tea, one construction company in Atlanta."

Jawer moved his family to Redmond for the development of StarIQ.com. And when he and Levine want some astro-guidance for their young company, they use May 18, 1999, as its "birth" date.

Currently, Jawer says, StarIQ.com has affiliate relationships -- content-partner agreements -- with several sites including LohasJournal.com for daily and weekly stock-market astrology; WhoDoYouLove.com for relationships material; and HealthWell.com for health and celebrity content.

The company, he says, is in negotiations for more such partnerships. So are some others. The competition includes YourAstrologySite.com, which delivers some personalized readings by e-mail, as StarIQ.com does. Rob Brezsny's FreeWillAstrology.com site is a favorite among fans of the astrologer's weekly rhapsodic meditations. And AstrologyIS.com includes among its content partners HBO's "Sex and the City" Web site.

Here's a look at some of the services StarIQ.com offers at the moment.

•  Each day, the site pumps out free "PlanetForecasts" e-mail notices to subscribers, letting them know precise astrological influences they may feel, based on the dates, times and locations of their births.

•  "VenusCycles" reports go to paying subscribers ($10.95 for 60 days) who want a transit-by-transit guide to the possibilities of their love lives.

•  In the community of professional astrologers, Jawer and Levine are getting a reputation as the Tom and Ray ("Click and Clack") Magliozzi of the occult set. Jawer and Levine's free daily audio "Planet Pulse" at StarIQ.com delivers their rational, calm, friendly "CarTalk"-like discussion of the day's planetary transmission with neighborly hints on how to get your career and home life into gear and keep them from stalling out. "Chart-side chats," if you will.

•  And there are articles at StarIQ.com, new ones posted daily, on a host of current issues in business, politics, sports, health and entertainment. StarIQ.com has an editorial board that each Wednesday reviews and processes work from some 50 free-lance astrologer-writers. Its home page is designed as a magazine targeted at two types of reader -- the astro-savvy one who knows a "Mercury retrograde" from that check that got lost in the mail, and the general-interest reader who's never given his or her horoscope a thought.

•  NewsScope, published on Mondays, is Michael WolfStar's look at major stories. On Monday, WolfStar writes about Israeli-Palestinian crisis and explores the chart of Yugoslavia's new president, Vojislav Kostunica.

QUICK VOTE Would you consider a career in astrology a realistic option? Sure, why not? It's a popular part of many people's lives. For enough money, I'll wear anything, even a wizard suit. Not a chance on Pluto. Astrology is pure horo-hogwash. View Results

SIGNS OF YOUR TIMES Here are StarIQ.com's short descriptions of the characteristics normally found in each of the 12 signs of the zodiac. Star-gaze on yours. Or your office mate's.

•  Aquarium Age is Ralfee Finn's weekly commentary on general astrological patterns. She also has a column, "StarIQ Advisor," in which she answers reader questions.

•  "Cosmic Cafe" is a kind of serial diner-romance in which Kim Rogers-Gallagher envisions the planets as characters in a real-time arrangement of astrological alignments. "Venus straightened her dress and combed her fingers through her hair," Rogers-Gallagher writes in a recent installment. "She was absolutely lovely in Libra."

•  "Market Week" is Raymond Merriman's stock-watching column. "Our long-term time zone for this trough," he writes in this week's overview, "remains between September 26 and December 15 ... but the exact center is right now, October 6 through 9."

For serious followers of astrology, "AstroPort" at StarIQ offers such resources as a detailed schedule of upcoming industry conferences. Jawer and Levine were in Anaheim, California, last weekend for the International Society of Astrological Research's conference. Levine was one of some 50 speakers on the agenda, the gathering's title being "The Future of Astrology: Cutting Edge Skills for the 21st Century Professional."

And StarIQ staffers have encouraged the founding of Kepler College, a new four-year program authorized by the Washington State Higher Education Board to issue bachelor's and masters' degrees in astrological sciences. The school is named for Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), the German astronomer credited with describing the planets' movements around the sun and relative distances to each other. He also pursued astrological studies.

"It took nine years to get Kepler established," Jawer says. "It's an attempt to look at astrology intellectually and academically."

Jawer concedes that StarIQ.com has a kind of Futurama-"Jetsons" look on the screen -- spacey yellow ribbons orbiting a bright star in a blue firmament. "We have in our minds many changes in design," he says, "but it's not priority, not essential."

Jeff Jawer, Rick Levine

What interests Jawer more -- true to the supportive personal readings he's known for giving -- is the service the site offers its users and the dynamics of the staff at work in Redmond. "We're very sensitive to process, Rick and I," he says. "We're into human behavior. If you're in a bad mood here, you don't push it away or have therapy, you talk about what's going on.

"We're interested in those emotions. One of our workers said she likes the fact that she doesn't have to suppress her feelings. They're valued here."

And in this week's run-up to Friday's full moon -- with the sun conjuncting Saturn -- Jawer might enjoy reviewing the deeper place he sees for astrology in world societies that may scorn it but never seem to discard it, no matter how advanced they become.

"In some churches in Europe," he says, "you can still see zodiacal signs, even though the Church (by doctrine) can have no authority above it. And rabbinical authority says astrology works only on non-practicing members of a faith. Science, in the meantime, can only talk of formulas. If something can't be defined or measured, then it doesn't exist.

"So there's still a battle for the mind. Science and religion. Astrology can bridge the two because it addresses the spiritual. It says there are higher forces. Life is a dance that has meaning."

Drop in on StarIQ and you'll see that the "dance," in fact, has many speeds and styles. It sometimes looks more like a cha-cha than ballet.

If Jawer's fondness for what he terms "astro-journalism" is evident in the current-events analysis, another part of the dance floor is heaving along with a conga line of stories with such titles as "The Televangelist and the Transvestite" (Tammy Faye Baker and RuPaul); "The Strange Musical Path of Bjork" (on the singer's film work in "Dancer in the Dark"); and "Picture Perfect Couple: Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston."

As in the something-for-everyone effort for readers, "What we're trying to do here at StarIQ among our own people," Jawer says, "is balance relationships in a task-oriented process. "

In other words, they don't show up in wizard suits and wait for upgraded rooms anymore.

"Instead of expecting the world to come to astrology," Jawer says, "we're going to bring astrology to the world."

'Weird Science' examines the realm of the paranormal
October 7, 1999
Horoscopes go high-tech
June 5, 1998

Astrological Association of Great Britain
Astrology IS
Free Will Astrology
Kepler College
National Council for Geocosmic Research
SEP Hermes, French Astrology Congress
StarIQ.com
Your Astrology Site

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