(From left) I/Pro's
Ariel Poler,
Tina Lin, and John Kremer,
all MBA '94

TWO YEARS AGO, WE COULDN'T HAVE WRITTEN THIS STORY. TODAY, YOUNG ALUMS ARE SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES IN CYBERSPACE AND CREATING A WHOLE NEW BREED OF ENTREPRENEUR.

BY JENNIFER REESE

Ariel Poler, MBA '94, first heard about something called the World Wide Web in late 1993, about six months before he was due to graduate. He doesn't remember exactly where he had that first encounter with the Internet's graphic interface, but he does remember his reaction. "I was blown away. I said, 'Oh my God, this is it,'" recalls Poler, a native of Venezuela who had come to Stanford hoping to acquire the skills to start his own technology business. He immediately started looking for an opportunity related to the Web.

Three months later, he found it. He and some friends from a GSB marketing class were sitting around an apartment complex pool talking shop when one of them casually remarked, "There's going to be a need for tracking all this stuff on the Internet, something like a supermarket scanner."

"It was like a light bulb turning on for me. After that, there was no looking back," says Poler. The embryonic Web was a promising medium for exchanging information, and Poler predicted that people setting up Web sites would want to know exactly who was visiting them and how often. "The first thing I did was call my wife and say, 'I've got it,'" says Poler. "Then within a week or two, I wrote a draft of a business plan and began circulating it." By June, he was looking for people to staff his infant company, called Internet Profiles (I/Pro). "I was a little early," says Poler. "People were still concerned with setting up sites rather than measuring traffic. But better early than late."

A year and a half later, I/Pro's time has come. For a monthly fee of up to $3,000, I/Pro monitors traffic at customers' Web sites and can analyze the data for them any number of ways; for instance, showing frequency of visits by time of day or day of the week. Or, it can determine which are the most frequently accessed files. The company also is working on a system for figuring out the demographics of visitors to a site. So far, I/Pro has 75 customers, including Chrysler, Microsoft, and Time Warner, and the company recently announced a partnership with A.C. Nielsen, the television rating company. I/Pro provides the monitoring service, Nielsen the valuable brand name.

While its success seems at first glance unique, in many ways I/Pro is a standard GSB Internet business. Its founder first became familiar with the Net at Stanford, acted quickly, and turned to GSB contacts to fill top managerial positions. I/Pro's director of business development is Poler's classmate Tina Lin, a former investment banker; the director of product marketing is another classmate, John Kremer. They are all young: Lin is 27, Poler is 29, and Kremer is 30. And the company has gone from idea to actuality astonishingly fast. Says Kremer, "The lifespan of an Internet company is accelerated; everything goes much quicker. The start-up phase is quicker and the opportunity to be bought out or go public comes much quicker."

The speedy growth mirrors the recent surge of interest in the Internet. Five years ago the vast majority of people had never heard of the global network of computers that has become the world's de facto information highway. Today, thanks in large part to the user-friendly World Wide Web, thousands seek access every month. The business world is racing to keep up, and young GSB alums are investigating every commercial angle.

For example, if you want to find a date, you can do so through Match.Com, a division of Electronic Classified Inc., founded by Gary Kremen, MBA '89. Go to Match. Com's Web site, type in a personal profile and a brief description of what you're looking for, and the computer will make you a match. Exchange e-mail and if you like what you read, arrange a date. The rest is up to you....

You might want to drop your date a thank-you note by using Greet Street, founded by Fred Campbell and Tony Levitan, both MBA '93. Visit their Web site, choose from a large selection of cards, type in a personalized message and your credit card number, and you're set: Greet Street does the mailing for you. It takes about five minutes and you never leave your desk. While you're at it, you can arrange for Greet Street to mail cards to your mother on her birthday, Christmas, and Mother's Day.

If you're still in the spirit of giving after all this, check out Impact Online, an electronic clearinghouse for donors and volunteers, founded by Mark Benning, Joanne Ernst, and Steve Glikbarg, all MBA '94, and Cindy Shove, wife of Greg Shove, Sloan '93. Impact Online organized the first on-line fund-raiser, called "Cookin' on the Net." Visitors were invited to contribute to nonprofits that bring kids together with technology in exchange for previously unpublished recipes donated by celebrity chefs. Or, if you can't wait to eat and you're in the Silicon Valley area, order up a meal from World Wide Waiter, founded by Michael Adelberg, MBA '93, and Craig Cohen, MBA '94. Later, you might want to try, then buy, some computer software through middlemen Matthew Klein and Jeff Mendelssohn, classmates in the MBA Class of 1996 and founders of the firm Digital Money, who spent their summer vacation creating payment tools that allow users to securely purchase software on-line. Thousands of commercial opportunities on the Net are just starting to be explored, many of them by recent GSB alums -- or, in some cases, by students like Klein and Mendelssohn.

Over the past few years, there could hardly have been a more ideal place from which to launch an Internet business than the GSB. The timing and location have been exquisite. With its focus on entrepreneurship and its roots sunk deep in Silicon Valley, the GSB has offered a strategic vantage point for studying and seizing opportunities in an emerging high-tech market.

In some cases, coursework has led to real-life business plans. Campbell and Levitan came up with the idea for Greet Street in independent study with Chuck Holloway, the Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers Professor of Management. And it was in Holloway's Technology Management: New Product/Process Development class that Jason Strober, MBA '95, first learned of the Web in the spring of 1994. A guest lecturer asked the group if anyone had heard of the Web and not a single hand was raised, says Strober, who promptly made his way down to the computer lab in the GSB basement to check it out. "I got on the Web for the first time and I fell in love," says Strober. He spent the next year cooking up plans for a company with ties to the Net. Upon graduating last summer, he and classmate David Zinman started their own company, financed by the Mayfield Fund, called FocaLink Media Services, to help companies increase the value of their hyperlink advertising on the Web, a small but potentially profitable niche.

But probably the biggest business opportunity having to do with the Internet so far has been building its multibillion-dollar infrastructure. Although scientists and mathematicians have been using the Internet for decades, transforming it from a little-known communication network for academics to a mass market medium has become a lucrative business.

John McCrea, MBA '93, saw it happen before his eyes. A private school fund-raiser, he came to the GSB hoping to make a career shift into either multimedia technology or on-line services. After graduating, he took a job at Silicon Graphics marketing a 3-D workstation. "I figured this would be a great place to explore where the most interesting technologies were going," says McCrea.

Little did he know he would soon be watching the most interesting technologies converge: The Web would bring multimedia to the on-line experience. Around the time McCrea signed on with Silicon Graphics, Mosaic -- the software application that first made it easy to navigate the Internet -- became widely available. Bingo. A giant market opportunity right there: selling user-friendly Net-browsing software.

But McCrea says it soon became clear that access wasn't enough. People who were getting on the Net weren't going to stick around for long if Web sites remained as slow, clunky, and visually unexciting as they were at the time. McCrea's answer: more powerful Web servers. He tested a Silicon Graphics prototype machine at one popular but painfully slow Web site. Run by the turbocharged server, traffic at this site quadrupled in 24 hours. Another market was born.

To remedy the problem of boring content, McCrea thought it was essential that Silicon Graphics servers come bundled with the tools for making sexy Web sites, like software from Adobe Systems and from Netscape, which produced a robust line of commercial server software. It happened that Greg Sands, MBA '94, was the product manager for Netscape's server software and he and McCrea had played roller hockey together at the GSB. At crucial moments in the negotiations between the companies, McCrea and Sands met for coffee at an old hangout in Palo Alto to hammer out an agreement. Says Sands, "It laid the foundation for the relationship to work." McCrea agrees: "It was helpful to have a GSB colleague who was in the other organization to sit down and talk through our mutual business interests. We knew we could come to an arrangement, but could we get there quickly enough to make for a leadership position in the market?"

They could, and they did. In January 1995, McCrea rolled out the Silicon Graphics WebForce line and every machine was bundled with Netscape's server software. At that time there were 10,000 Web servers in the world. Less than a year later, there are well over 100,000 and Silicon Graphics is the leading provider, as well as Netscape's number-one OEM partner.

The people you play roller hockey with and sit next to in class are the people you hire, advise, network, and compete with in the Net business. And while there are influential players of all ages, it's largely a young person's business. "I'm 33 and I'm almost too old," says Mike Lanza, MBA '90, who consults with companies about their Web sites. "To some extent, the people who are best prepared to innovate on the Internet are the people who just graduated from college in the last few years. By virtue of the fact that you were in an undergraduate institution with access to the Net recently, you have a leg up. People who have been in industry may not have used the Net at all."

He has a point. Some of the most impressive Net ventures are run by kids. But by most standards, Lanza and the other GSB alums who have jumped into the fray are young enough. These are people in their late twenties and early thirties who are making decisions that could shape an industry. In most other fields they would dawdle in middle-management positions for another decade or so. Says I/Pro's Kremer, "It's great. It has given us the opportunity to make something. Ariel [Poler] gets to run a company and Tina [Lin] and I get to be his top executives." Says Lin, "Every time I make a decision, it's with the possibility of it setting a standard."

Precisely because the standards have not yet been set and because no one knows who the major players will be, in almost no other industry is there such a certainty of uncertainty. "In this world, five years seems like an eternity and two months seems like two years because everything moves so fast," says Fran Allocca Maier, MBA '89, marketing director of Match.Com. Says McCrea, "We discourage five-year planning."

Web consultant Kevin Han, MBA '91, has gone so far as to predict the forces he believes will drive a lot of people in his segment of the industry out of business. "Right now there are far more people who want to get on the Web than there are qualified people to help them," says Han, who has worked with companies, including Clorox, on their Web marketing strategies. "There are some consulting firms that won't accept a contract of less than $100,000 to get a Web site going. But capacity is building as everyone from MBAs to college graduates is getting into the industry. At the same time, the tools are getting easier and corporations want more control over a product. So it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that at a certain point there will be a shakeout in the mini-industry called Web consulting."

Han recently joined a firm started by Mike Lanza, called Just in Time Marketing, which helps companies like Oracle and Visa International design their Web sites. But Just in Time Marketing has a strategy for surviving Han's predicted shakeout: Lanza aims to figure out a way to package Web services with a standard price and level of quality. He sees Just in Time Marketing becoming the Kinko's of Web consultants. Just as people go to Kinko's for fast, reliable, customized service when they want a brochure, companies will come to Just in Time Marketing for fast, reliable service when they need help getting on the Web or maintaining a site.

Setting standards seems to be a goal -- both ambitious and wise -- of a lot of alums doing business on the Net, whether with large, established companies or small startups. Standard-setters have a better chance of becoming the industry's giants. It is inevitable, of course, that some of these businesses will collapse; some will become successful and then sputter; and maybe one or two will become its enduring fixtures. It's fascinating -- but futile -- to speculate which of these firecracker businesses run by alums will be the next Silicon Graphics or Sun Microsystems. "It's exciting, it's churning, and it's very unclear how it's going to sort itself out," says Chuck Holloway. "But I believe it will be a major source of business activity." Netscape's Greg Sands says the same thing, but in the more blunt language of the entrepreneur. "The fact that there's enormous turmoil," says Sands, "is an indication of opportunity." n

Setting standards seems to be a goal -- both ambitious and wise -- of a lot of alums doing business on the Net, whether with large, established companies or small startups. Standard-setters have a better chance of becoming the industry's giants. It is inevitable, of course, that some of these businesses will collapse; some will become successful and then sputter, and maybe one or two will become its enduring fixtures. It's fascinating -- but futile -- to speculate which of these firecracker Net businesses run by GSB alums will be the next Silicon Graphics or Sun Microsystems. "It's exciting, it's churning, and it's very unclear how it's going to sort itself out," says Chuck Holloway. "But I believe it will be a major source of business activity." Netscape's Greg Sands says the same thing, but in the more blunt language of the entrepreneur. "The fact that there's enormous turmoil," says Sands, "is an indication of opportunity."

Photography by Mark Hundley

What a Web We Weave

Where do you find out about alums on the Internet? On the Internet, of course.

Before Jennifer Reese wrote the accompanying story, we queried several GSB alumni/ae bulletin boards for information on "alums who do business on or about the Internet." More than 100 replies later, we realized we had to narrow our scope to entrepreneurs on the World Wide Web.

Although we haven't space for all the alums who are plying the information highway, here's what we learned from two who seem typical -- Todd McIntire, MBA '94, whose Internet-related firm uses the Web to advertise, and his friend and classmate Seth Skolnik, who's carved himself an entrepreneurial niche within an established company.

Wrote McIntire: "In our final quarter at the GSB, I worked with two other students, Ariel Poler and Seth Skolnik, on a restaurant guide to the Bay Area under the sponsorship of Professor Bill Miller. (The restaurant guide continues to live at http://ekele.stanford. edu/goodlife, and apparently it's still quite popular -- if a little out of date.) I'm now working in Seattle at a start-up company called Notable Technologies that is involved in extending the Internet into the wireless realm. We created a product called AirNote that enables a user to have e-mail delivered to a wireless device such as a pager or a palmtop computer equipped with a paging card. You can find out a lot more at http://www. airnote.net.

"Ariel went on to found Internet Profiles Corporation [see above], while Seth helped form the Paramount Digital Entertainment division of the Paramount movie studio. So each of us has, in our own way, parlayed our GSB independent study experience directly into a real-life enterprise. That's the B-school at its very best!"

Skolnik checked in from Los Angeles a few days later. After spending several months working as an Internet consultant, Skolnik wrote, he became involved with what was then called Viacom Online, where he helped develop the first Web site to promote a motion picture, Star Trek Generations, and an on-line interactive experience for Star Trek: Voyager. "Later we formed Paramount Digital Entertainment (PDE), a new programming unit of Paramount Pictures. I am the producer for PDE. We create promotional areas for Paramount's motion picture and television productions (current work may be found on the Web at http://www.paramount.com); rich on-line environments for those Paramount brands that we feel are a good match for the medium (Star Trek, for example); and original programming for the medium. PDE is fun. It's a start-up operation in a corporate environment (which, unfortunately, means corporate politics and no equity). But at least I get lots of free Star Trek stuff."--Janet Zich

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