In the summer of 1994, Graham Spencer and five fellow studentsat Stanford University were sitting in Rosita's burrito shop inRedwood City, California, contemplating their futures. They'd beenfriends since meeting in one the dorms on the Palo Alto campus asfreshmen. As graduation day approached, they were facing up to lifein the real world.
"When it came time to leave the university we realised that wedidn't really want to be in big companies," Spencer says. "Wedidn't want to be in jobs where we felt we didn't have muchimpact."
Three summers on, Spencer, aged 24, is sitting in the recentlyopened European headquarters of Excite, the navigation network thathe and his five friends founded as the result of one of thosebrainstorming sessions over cheap burritos. Much impact? Excite hastaken the Internet world by storm in the past year, rising fromnowhere to rival Yahoo! for supremacy in the highly competitivemarket.Spencer's casual attire - T-shirt, trainers - sets him apartfrom the rest of the dressed-for-business people moving about inthe sparsely furnished office tucked away in a courtyard nearRegent Street. In fact, put a backpack on his shoulders and a copyof Let's Go Europe in his hand and he'd have no trouble blending inwith all the other young Americans who descend on London at thistime of year. But Spencer, the company's chief technology officer,isn't here to "do Europe" as much as conquer it. Excite'snavigation services are expanding into the UK as well as France,Germany and Sweden. The way the company has grown in the pastyear, the chances are he won't be spending much time in youthhostels when he tours the Continent.Three years and a day ago, Spencer and his partners formedArchitext Software Inc. "We thought it would be fun to start acompany. We had no idea that it would mean working hundred-hourweeks for a year. So we got together and started talking aboutideas."Because Stanford has traditionally been a very wired university- everybody has 10Mb of ethernet in their room - we were allfamiliar with the Internet," Spencer recalls. "At that point intime there wasn't really a Web, but we knew about FTP sites withelectronic library text. We knew about Usenet newsgroups."We saw that there would be more and more text available on theNet and we also felt there was a big gap between the averageconsumer user and the information retrieval tools that had beendesigned for knowledge researchers over the past 30 years. Wethought that gave us a window of opportunity."Following that great Silicon Valley tradition, they lockedthemselves into a garage with nothing but their brains and somehardware salvaged from the university dump."We got into the garage and started writing informationretrieval tools. We were very poor at the time. We scrounged$15,000 from friends and family and that was our salary for the sixof us for a year."We rescued from the dump a bunch of terminals and some ancientSun hardware. We wired that up and started programming. At the endof a year we had what we thought was a great technology but nobusiness plan and no idea how to make money from it."The next step was to shop their technology around to venturecapitalists in Silicon Valley. "Most of the VCs told us it was agreat technology but come back when we had a business plan that wecan work with," he says. "We finally got in touch with KleinerPerkins {Caufield & Beyers}. Kleiner is fairly famous in the Valleybecause they finance a lot of risky but ultimately great payoffcompanies - companies like AOL Netscape, Compaq, Lotus and Marimba."So we met with Vanod {Khosla} and instead of asking us for abusiness plan, the first thing he asked us was "will yourtechnology scale?" We told him we didn't know because we couldn'tafford a hard drive big enough to test it. Within 10 minutes heordered us a $5,000 hard drive. That sort of attitude - veryaggressive, willing to spend money if necessary, very willing totake risks - was very compelling to us."Before their company was even off the ground a competitor,Verity, was expressing an interest in taking it over. "After a lotof soul searching, we decided to go with Kleiner Perkins and takethat investment and try to build the company ourselves."And build it themselves they did, and very quickly, enteringinto exclusive distribution agreement with Microsoft Network andNetscape. In March 1996 Architext changed its name to Excite andthe following month raised $43m in a stock market flotation. Moredeals were made with the likes of AOL, becoming the giant onlineservice's exclusive search and directory service. Last year, a bigadvertising campaign was launched in America and Excite saw itsmarket share soar. From a staff of six in 1995, the company nowemploys more than 200 people with annual revenues of $15m lastyear.Apart from expanding Excite's services around the globe, Spencerthinks the company has a big role to play with the coming of "pushtechnology", which will deliver information to the desktop withoutusers having to search the Net for it. "I don't limit ourselves tojust searching the Web. We're perfectly willing to explore otherways of doing that navigation. In fact, we've been probably themost aggressive of our competitors of actually going out and doingthat. So we signed a deal with WebTV to be their exclusive searchand directory partner. We provide the channel guide for the Marimbanetwork. We recently signed a deal with Pointcast to be theirexclusive partner. All of those deals help extend Excite out of theWeb space into other areas."But the rapid rise of Excite hasn't put a strain on thecompany's six founders. "We're all still really good friends,"Spencer says. "We're all going off to Hawaii in a few weeks. Eversince we founded the company we kept saying at each milestone thatonce we finally get venture capital, we'll take a trip, once wefinally go public, we'll take a trip and we never have." And whenhe ceases to be excited by his current job, Spencer says he isn'tlikely to take early retirement on a tropical island. "I'llprobably go back to school to get my PhD."Bill Gates is reported to be considering funding a new computerresearch centre at Cambridge. But seeing what Graham Spencer andhis friends have accomplished with Excite makes you think that whatBritain could really do with is a few Silicon Valley-style garagesn
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