Ruth Ann S. Basnillo                                                                                                 6/5/2008

SYSANAL

EXCITE

Story:

            The company was started by Joe Kraus in 1993 with his five classmates in Stanford. After their graduation, three of them lived in one in Palo Alto and three of them lived in another. They set up shop in the garage of Joe’s house wherein most of the things inside are stolen from Oracle Corp. like the small chairs and the VT100 terminals. They coded for around 18 months in the shop while doing some part time jobs for their living. Joe’s job used to be doing a phone call with the people he read from the Wall Street Journal that are interested in search stuffs. In 1994, while deciding between two technologies for the interface, their focus turned on to the web thing wisely chosen by Graham Spencer, the considered man among the group. A book called Accidental Empires given to Joe by his girlfriend paved way for him to know Bob Cringely, who introduced them his bosses at InfoWorld. InfoWorld became interested with the search stuff they’re doing so they were given a $100, 000 contract with the condition of indexing archives and making them available on the web. There’s also a deal that if they did a good job, they’d be introduced to InfoWorld’s parent company IDG. It turned out that they did a good job making them have the opportunity to attend a board meeting with IDG. After dealing with the questions as to how they would make money with that search stuff, they were finally introduced to Vinod Khosla who ultimately funded the company along with Geoff. They figured out how to answer Vinod’s question if their technology can scale until it did and they put together a $3 million financing with Kleiner Perkins and Geoff Yang’s firm.

            Excite was launched in Oct. 1995 and after some time, Microsoft made its buyout offer to them in $ 70 million. Excite didn’t agree with the price and asked for a $ 1oo million instead which was turned down by Gates. They aimed to have more people trying Excite which led them to go to Netscape and bid for the two buttons NetSearch and NetDirectory. They lost in the bidding but luck struck which made them got the deal back and which helped launch the company. They eventually acquired an editorially oriented search engine company called Magellan, and the Web Crawler. After they went public, they ran out of money but they were saved by Intuit with a $20 or $ 30 million deal. In 1999, they merged with high- speed Internet service @ Home.com to become Excite@Home. And in 2004, Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer founded JotSpot.

THREE THINGS I LEARNED:

            Excite was initially built out of friendship and that’s one thing for me. I learned from this startup that there are advantages if you’re working on something with your friends most especially if that is a very strong friendship. It’s because if you are really friends, then greed will be out of nowhere. Greed would never be seen when it comes to the distribution of labor, there would be no comparisons among the group like when money is involved or when sacrifice is involved. With this business involving friendship, there would be only one thing and that is teamwork.

            The next thing I learned is the virtue of persistence. In the story, the founders of Excite lose the bidding of Netscape which they joined. For others, it would be an easy giving up but Kraus learned from Vinod here that they should not easily give up because there would always be a possibility for them to won the deal back.  And that’s what happened; the winner didn’t make it to deliver to Netscape the service on time providing them the chance to grab the slot offered by the latter company.

            Lastly, I learned that each one’s work will always have value. Just like Kraus himself, his skill was not really technical but he did a lot of stuffs which are helpful to the company. At a first glance on his work, it seems that his work is just nothing and can be done by everybody else. But when his coworkers analyzed the situation and his work further, it turned out that they could not do better than him when it comes to that stuff making them realize that he really has a value as a whole.