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Recently in Salon Technology

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 55: Barry's Singularity -- ship without a captain
By Thomas Scoville
[09/22/99]

Column
Domain name dunces
Network Solutions fumbles its free e-mail scheme. Can we trust it with our Net addresses?
By Scott Rosenberg
[09/21/99]

Books
A tournament of apes
"The Gorilla Game" goes out on a limb, encouraging us to invest in -- duh! -- big companies that dominate rapidly expanding markets.
By Thomas Scoville
[09/20/99]

Technology: View from the top
Mr. Fix-it
After a summer of outages, eBay recruited Maynard Webb to be chief of technologies and shore up the auction site's systems.
By Sean Donahue
[09/20/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 54: Kiki and Barry reunited by Iridium -- silence at $40 a minute
By Thomas Scoville
[09/18/99]

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Over the last three years, a few big Net players -- America Online, Yahoo, Lycos, Microsoft, Excite@Home -- have bought company after company to build out their portal sites. They have bought Internet chat companies, online white pages, Web-based e-mail and calendars -- everything they can get their hands on to make their sites "sticky" or to keep up with the rest of the bunch. The best-known of these acquisitions was Hotmail, the free e-mail company bought by Microsoft for $400 million. Even some of the less-publicized acquisitions have been tremendously lucrative for their founders. For instance, When.com, a company that developed a Web-based calendar, was bought by America Online only one year after launch for a rumored $225 million.

In this market, it's easy to see why one might want to build "an acquisition play," and I had Evite pegged as a company whose main reason for existence was the prospect of a quick sellout to someone bigger. However, in talking to the people behind Evite, the company's prospects (and, consequently, the financial motivations of its founders) seemed less and less important. What did become important was understanding what it was about a company like Evite that would engender the kind of devotion that would make an otherwise normal person perfectly happy to walk around a restaurant asking weird questions of total strangers.

In San Mateo, the San Francisco suburb where Evite has its offices, it seems that everybody is starting a company or hoping to start one. In Northern California in 1999, starting a company is seen as just about the coolest thing you can do, but simply describing what Evite does fails to capture that sense of cool -- the aspiration that goes into the start-up life. It was that aspiration that I went down to San Mateo to understand.

Evite has its origins in a company called Ootleworks, an ambitious venture started by two Stanford engineering students, Al Lieb and Selina Tobaccowala. At age 24, Lieb is chief technical officer of Evite; Tobaccowala holds claim, at the age of 22, to the title of vice president of engineering.

As computer science students go, Lieb and Tobaccowala were really good. Lieb graduated from Stanford with a 4.2 average, and while I am not generally impressed by degrees from expensive colleges, I am impressed by this one, simply because I had not previously considered that a grade-point average could go above 4.0. Tobaccowala, meanwhile, was one of only 18 women to graduate with computer science degrees from Stanford in 1998.

Both of them had sterling and well-compensated careers ahead of them. Lieb in particular was a star: During a short stint at Microsoft, he had developed a Java applet -- a small program -- for the Expedia travel site that was demonstrated on a huge screen at a key Microsoft product conference (this is a little like a congressional intern writing a piece of legislation) and was later licensed to companies like American Express. This means that as an intern, Lieb was generating a measurable revenue stream for Bill Gates.

The problem with having a talent for a very marketable skill like computer programming, however, is that it prepares one for a very lucrative job with a very circumscribed horizon. Lieb and Tobaccowala were sorely underwhelmed by their experiences in corporate America. "At Warburg Pincus," says Tobaccowala about her summer job at an investment bank, "people would see what I did and say, 'This is cool, but I don't use a computer.'" At a technology company, the prospects were a little more attractive.

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