Features

Dot Com Entrepreneurs

Dot com companies are now a distinct flavour of the nineties, as many start ups at the time were formed at a rapid rate to take advantage of the surplus of venture capital funding. We have even witnessed both a boom and bust otherwise known as the ‘dot-com bubble’, yet what has lately been disregarded is the innovation that has been undergone over the last four years across online-based ventures and indeed traditional business models that have decided to create a profitable online platform as an extension of their business.

In the nineties many were launched with very thin business plans, sometimes with nothing more than an idea and a catchy name. The stated goal was often to “get big fast”, i.e. to capture a majority share of whatever market was being entered. The exit strategy usually included an IPO and a large payoff for the founders. Others were existing companies that re-styled themselves as Internet companies, many of them legally changing their names to incorporate a ‘.com’ suffix. With the stock market crash around the year 2000 that ended the dot-com bubble, many failed and failing dot-com companies were disregarded and once again underestimated. Whilst in 2009 there may not be another short term gold rush, in its place there is a more solid vehicle, with companies that have a long term strategy and are evolving over the web. Through navigation, SEO, developing the existing ‘network effect’ and making rid of all the inherent flaws that were part of the original dot com model. It’s good to remember that the likes of Google and Amazon were not clearing any profit in their primary years although huge success stories now and that has mainly to do with their long -term strategy. There have been less catastrophic failures too in the last seven years as approaches change. Gone are the days of Boo.com spiralling out of control after spending over £115 million over six months. So this issue we celebrate not just the successful online companies but those who have revolutionised and innovated their business through this medium.

In the nineties the initial revenue avenues were the three C’s, which have long been the regarded template for being profitable over the Internet and much of the basic structure still stands. They are Commerce, Content and Connection. Commerce is about selling products over the Internet, as Amazon.com does. Content, refers to placing content on the Internet, varying from news headlines to web-logs. Some examples are BBC News and Facebook. And lastly, connection where one can do business by supplying an internet connection as do AOL. Of course now many do all three of them much like Google, Microsoft and AOL and many do more still.

Bill Gates
Founder of Microsoft
He is now responsible for employing more than 78,000 people in 105 countries and regions. Under Gates’ leadership, Microsoft’s mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of approximately $7.1 billion on research and development in 2007 fiscal year. In 1999, Gates wrote Business @ the Speed of Thought, a book that shows how computer technology can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. The book has received wide critical acclaim, and was listed on the best-seller lists of various newspapers and sites.

Steve Jobs
Apple
Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976. Apple leads the industry in innovation with its award-winning Macintosh computers, OS X operating system, and consumer and professional applications software. Apple is also leading the digital music revolution, having sold more than 200 million iPods and over eight billion songs from its iTunes online store. Apple has also entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone. Steve also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, which has created eight of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars and Ratatouille.

Around the same time, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced; however, it was largely dismissed by industry as cost-prohibitive. Among those who could afford it, however, the NeXT workstation garnered a strong following because of its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated (such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port).

The NeXTcube was described by Jobs as an “interpersonal” computer, which he believed was the next step after “personal” computing. That is, if computers could allow people to communicate and collaborate together in an easy way, it would solve a lot of the problems that “personal” computing had come up against. During a time when e-mail for most people was plain text, Jobs loved to demo the NeXT’s e-mail system, NeXTMail, as an example of his “interpersonal” philosophy. NeXTMail was one of the first to support universally visible, clickable embedded graphics and audio within e-mail. An innovation that has had profound influences on online business trends.

Steve Rose
Founder of Digg
Rose is known well for his numerous Internet start-ups. He is the co-founder of Revision3, Pownce, WeFollow and the social-bookmarking website Digg. Rose hosts a weekly podcast Diggnation with co-host Alex Albrecht where they discuss popular stories on Digg that users submitted. When Rose was starting Digg, he invested $6000 into the site, which was supposed to be for a deposit on a house for him and his girlfriend.

On July 1, 2005, Rose and former The Screen Savers co-host Alex Albrecht began releasing a weekly podcast, Diggnation, summarizing the top stories submitted by Digg users. The show has become a success, averaging over 250,000 downloads per episode. Through his show he has also become known as a beer lover, as he and Albrecht almost always open the show describing which beer they’re currently drinking. During the live Reno, Nevada episode, Albrecht became sufficiently intoxicated such that he immediately regurgitated his beer after the taping. Rose, although not as inebriated, was still noticeably affected.

The website Digg was officially launched to the public on December 5, 2004. In October 2005, Digg.com received $2.8 million in venture capital from major investors, including Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners. In September 2008, the company received a further $28.7 million round of funding led by Highland Capital Partners.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
Founder of Facebook
The computer programmer and entrepreneur was only a Harvard student when he created the online social website Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Facebook is a social networking site popular worldwide. Zuckerberg serves as Facebook’s CEO. On September 5, 2006, Facebook launched News Feed, a product to show what your friends were doing on the site. Zuckerberg was criticised as some saw News Feed as unnecessary and a tool for cyberstalking, some called it innovation. On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform, a development platform for programmers to create social applications within Facebook. This announcement sparked a great deal of interest in the developer community. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some already had millions of users. Today, there are more than 800,000 developers around the world building applications for Facebook Platforms.

On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook Platform for building social applications on other websites. On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a new social advertising system at an event in Los Angeles. A part of the new program, called Beacon, enabled people to share information with their Facebook friends based on their browsing activities on other sites. An eBay seller, for instance, could let friends know automatically what they have for sale via the Facebook news feed as they list items.

Pierre Omidyar
Founder and Chairman of eBay
Omidyar was 28 when he sat down over a long holiday weekend to write the original computer code for what eventually became an Internet superbrand — the auction site eBay. The word ‘eBay’ was made up on the fly by Omidyar when he was told that his first choice for his web site, ‘echobay,’ had already been registered. Not wanting to make a second trip to Sacramento, he came up with ‘eBay.’ The site was launched on Labor Day, Monday, September 4, 1995, under the more prosaic title of “Auction Web”; it was hosted on a site Omidyar had created for information on the ebola virus. Auction Web was later renamed “eBay”. The service was free at first, but started charging in order to cover Internet service provider costs. In September 1998, eBay launched a successful public offering, making both Omidyar and Skoll billionaires. As of July 2008, Omidyar’s 178 million eBay shares were worth around $4.45 billion.

Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim
Founders of YouTube
Formerly employees at Paypal, they soon left to create the multimedia platform, You Tube. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, the BBC, UMG and other organisations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program. They pioneered the initiative for a content monitoring across video platforms. Currently unregistered users can watch videos but registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users over the age of 18.

Sir Philip Green
Founder of Arcadia
Owner of one of the United Kingdom’s largest retailers, including the Arcadia Group, he is Britain’s ninth richest person with assets worth around £4.43bn in 2008. He owns 2300 shops in the UK and his assets currently control 12% of the UK clothing retail market, making his empire the second-largest in the sector.
He is also the co-owner of media company Greenwell Entertainment, a coalition with music mogul Simon Cowell. Next, Green purchased the Arcadia Group, which owns well-known High Street chains such as Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Outfit, Topshop/Topman and Wallis in 2002. Recently he has added the Etam chain to the group. Green paid £850m, and repaid the £808m he borrowed to finance the deal in two years, a move that stunned commentators when it was announced. The Arcadia Group has been enormously profitable, and currently has pre-tax profits of around £380 million due to Green’s foresight to take the brand further by creating modern online shops with personal online
shopping for each of his stores.

Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou
Founder of EasyJet
An early pioneer of budget retail sites Easyjet was infact Stelios’s second venture. Prior to founding the low-cost airline that revolutionised European air travel, Stelios created Stelmar, a shipping company which was floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 2001 and subsequently sold to it’s rival in 2005. Since then his company Easyjet has grown into one of Europe’s leading airlines with some 170 aircraft flying over 400 routes between 103 airports in 26 countries. Approximately 45 million people a year fly with easyJet enjoying more value for less. Today, Stelios remains the biggest single shareholder of easyJet PLC and a non-executive director. In parallel, before the IPO in 2000 and true to his beliefs in serial entrepreneurship, he consolidated the ownership of the easy brand into his private company, easyGroup, and launched several easy-branded businesses. The group currently includes easyCar (car rental), easyHotel (budget hotels), easyBus (airport transfers), easyOffice (low-cost, serviced office rental for small businesses), easyPizza and easyCruise, all dedicated to offering more value for less to millions of consumers online. His budget sites have been an inspiration to many start ups.

Jimmy Wales
Co-founder of Wikipedia
In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal that targeted males, and which hosted, and provided the initial funding for, the peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia (2000 – 2003) and for its successor, Wikipedia.

In 2001, together with Larry Sanger and others, Wales helped launch Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia which subsequently enjoyed rapid growth and popularity. As Wikipedia’s public profile grew, Wales became the project’s promoter and spokesman. Wales has been cited as the co-founder of Wikipedia, though he has disputed that designation: Wales has said that he was the sole founder of the encyclopedia. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organisation which operates Wikipedia. He holds its board-appointed “community founder” seat. In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a privately-owned, free web-hosting service, with fellow Wikimedia trustee Angela Beesley.

Natalie Massenet
Net-a-Porter
Net-a-porter, the brainchild of Massenet was created as luxury online model where high-end names like Chloe, Jimmy Choo and Marc Jacobs as well as a clutch of up-and-coming designers that Massenet champions could retail their items in a way that still kept their individual prestige. Items are swiftly delivered in swanky black packaging. Returns are just as swiftly processed. The website has 100,000 active customers. They also know how to present the clothes attractively on a web page. Last year her expansion included a new depot outside New York so Net-a-porter could guarantee same-day delivery in Manhattan too. Another depot in the Far East is to follow. Massenet wants more editorial product, too, including a quarterly diary-style magazine sent to regular buyers, and more technology: films and videos. Beyond that, she is cagey. Will she start taking advertising? “We’re considering all kinds of things,” she says. She has since registered a Petit-a-porter.com and Net-a-beaute.com.

Jeffery Bezos
Founder of Amazon
In 1994, Jeffrey Bezos observed that Internet usage was increasing rapidly. He saw an opportunity for a new sphere of commerce, and immediately began considering the possibilities. After reviewing the top 20 mail order businesses, books were the commodity for which no comprehensive mail order catalogue existed, because any such catalogue would be too big to mail; perfect for the Internet, which could share a vast database with a virtually limitless number of people. Bezos’s employers weren’t prepared to proceed with such a venture, and Bezos knew the only way to seize the opportunity was to go into business for himself. It would mean sacrificing a secure position in New York, but he and his wife, Mackenzie, decided to make the leap. The company was called Amazon and on July 16, 1995, Bezos opened his site to the world through word of mouth, and in 30 days, with no press, Amazon had sold books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries.

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