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If one is not extraordinarily familiar with the details of programming, then the value of this will probably be less than clear. But most programmers will recognize the challenge of quickly moving information between different kinds of databases as both technically interesting and commercially important. It is the same kind of programming challenge that lies, for instance, at the core of shopping bots that compare prices across the Web. The value of Ootleworks was in the possibility of customizing it to solve any number of problems. In that sense, asking, "What does it do?" is like asking, "What does a computer do?"; the answer is "What you program it to do."

The problem is that creating a big, ambitious, free-form application meant Lieb and Tobaccowala had to sell to the same big companies they had tried to stay away from in the first place. It wasn't a happy marriage. Lieb says he spent one meeting with a corporate MIS manager thinking that in the time the executive took to explain the features he thought Ootleworks lacked, Lieb could have written the code that would add them.

That's when it became clear to everyone that something had to change. MIS managers didn't understand what Ootleworks would let them do. The small amount of money that Lieb and Tobaccowala had raised from parents and friends was running out. Meanwhile, Junglee, a company that had solved a very similar programming challenge to develop a shopping comparison service, was bought by Amazon, the giant Web retailer, for an astounding $173 million in Amazon shares.

Wait a second … if you can't sell a powerful database application with a myriad of uses, and you know that a comparatively simple product built from very similar code can bring you tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, what do you do?

You pare down your huge mass of code to come up with something simpler. And that's exactly what Lieb and Tobaccowala set about doing.

This is the point at which Silverman comes in. Silverman had gone from business school at Stanford to a senior job at ADAC laboratories, a maker of medical equipment. If that sounds like it could have been dull, it was. "I just didn't care about gamma cameras," Silverman says bluntly.

Silverman had been spending his Saturday mornings brainstorming with a friend, trying to come up with an idea for a Web start-up. He approached the problem with a sensibility very different from the programmer sensibility that Lieb and Tobaccowala had brought to their venture. He didn't start with the code; he started thinking of an application that millions of people might want to use.

The result of Silverman's brainstorming was ToGather, a Web-based event planning application. Silverman quit his job and got to work launching the company. Then a friend sent him an e-mail, telling him that Tobaccowala and Lieb were way ahead of him on a similar project, Evite. He sent back an e-mail filled with expletives. Then he met with Lieb and Tobaccowala, and promptly signed on to serve as CEO -- the guy charged with turning the idea into a business.

With Silverman's entrance, things went into overdrive. Through his Stanford connections, he arranged a $700,000 loan to keep the company going. Then Silverman, Lieb and Tobaccowala went on a search for venture capital, the big money that would let them advertise a Web site to millions of Web surfers, scoring $7 million in funding. Finally, Evite -- the tiny company that had its origins in a Stanford dorm, a complex masterpiece of code and the urge of both its founders and its new CEO to stay away from the corporate rat race -- was off and running.

Every high-tech entrepreneur I have ever talked to, without exception, has told me that his or her aim is to build a great company with a great product that will transform (fill in the blank). So let it be stipulated here that Lieb, Tobaccowala and Silverman all hope to build a great company with a great product that will transform event planning.

However, the striking thing about the reality of a start-up company is how little it is "about the product." The story of Evite, in fact, illustrates exactly how little of the excitement of the start-up depends on the product. The coolness of the start-up is in its aspirations, not in its reality. It is to be found in the big ideas and the tough code-wrestling of Ootleworks' early days. To a lesser extent, perhaps, it might lie in Silverman's Saturday-morning brainstorming sessions, in the frantic scrambling for a new idea that would get Silverman out of the business of selling gamma cameras. A part of the coolness certainly lies in the ground zero of the experience -- the simple realization that life in a big corporation sucks.

The Silicon Valley idea that doing a start-up is the height of cool is actually closely tied to the triumph of process over product. It's not what you're making, but how you go about making it -- a kind of notion of craftsmanship superimposed on the mores of the business world. (In fact, Tobaccowala has already consulted with an expert on corporate culture -- before the company is big enough for it to have any culture to speak of.)

The irony here is that the further along a start-up is in its life, the more the aspirations that went into its founding get narrowed down to a single idea, the product, and the more it becomes just like every other corporation. On the surface one sees a niche idea -- a Web site for what is essentially a niche application, one of scores of new companies trying to create just one more little use for the World Wide Web. And yet that one niche idea is the result of two years of work by extremely talented people, the final outcome of a lot of big ideas.

I have no way of knowing whether Evite will grow, or sell out for millions of dollars, or eventually disappear. My bet is that it will be the second. The business of the big portal sites is in aggregating niche applications like Evite, and Evite has already gotten offers of a buyout.

Then again, other outcomes are also possible. Says Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist with the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, "Look at eBay. Before it went public, nobody would have said this is an obvious stand-alone company. Everybody thought, 'Of course it's an acquisition play that will be bought by one of the portals.'"

Either way, however, Evite has already embarked on the trajectory that is moving it from the realm of cool to that of uncool -- the big companies with narrow aspirations and big-company ways of doing things. Already, there are hints of that, and Evite's founders are aware of it.

"When we did our last round of hiring," says Silverman, "we took only people who had already worked in exactly the same position at another Net company. If I applied to work here now, I wouldn't even get an interview."
salon.com | Sept. 22, 1999

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