BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : DECEMBER 11, 2000 ISSUE
BUSINESS WEEK E.BIZ -- THE DIGITAL LIFESTYLE 'So Exciting I Can't Sleep' In a dot-com winter, we track a Stanford student taking time off to pursue his vision It's a rainy afternoon in Menlo Park, Calif., and I'm slurping French onion soup in a local bistro, Vida, with my young friend Stephen Oskoui. ''It's strange in Silicon Valley right now. You can feel something different in the air,'' Oskoui says. There is a trace of puzzlement in his large, intense eyes. It is autumn, but we are talking about the dot-com winter that is hard upon us. For a positive thinker like Steve, even that mild observation is startling. I first met Steve, a 21-year-old computer science wizard at Stanford University, about a year and a half ago. I was working on a column about young entrepreneurs and he had just turned down a seven-figure offer to sell some technology that he and a friend had put together over a summer. The buyer insisted that Steve and his buddy would have to be part of the deal, and at the time, Steve was determined to stay in school. Steve and his tech savvy cronies are the bonus babies of the New Economy. Many aren't old enough to drink, but nonetheless are as well-known to local venture capitalists as Heisman Trophy candidates are to pro football scouts. Some, such as Napster's Shawn Fanning and former Netscaper Angus Davis, now of Tellme Networks, have attained near rock star status. I liked Steve right off. He's smart, polite, and lacking the braggadocio of many of his peers. Despite that eye-popping offer, he decided that college was a great chance for him to grow as a person, not just as a professional. So you can imagine my dismay when, in June, I received an e-mail from Steve that began, ''I recently filed for a leave of absence from Stanford and will be gone for at least the next yearI'm not taking this decision lightly, and I'm only doing it because I've hit on something that's so exciting I can't sleep.'' That something is a startup. He and a seasoned Valley software engineer partner are looking to produce a flat-rate cell-phone aimed at the 15-to-26 crowd. But there was no seven-figure check awaiting him this time. In fact, Steve's note arrived soon after the dot-com bubble popped. As I read his note with some concern I thought, If you didn't jump when you had a sure thing, why now? The lunch at Vida is one of several we've had since that e-mail. Meanwhile, market conditions have gotten worse. The golf retailing site where Steve interned last summer, Chipshot.com--yet another concern led by a young star that raised over $20 million--went bankrupt. Many other highfliers are now trading in what my friend, biotech consultant Joanna Sullivan, recently christened the ''drill bit'' range--11/16 and other frightening fractions. Steve, however, is undaunted. ''What I'm doing now feels so right,'' he insists. His company, Piko Communications, is up and running in a nearby two-bedroom apartment where the decor is Bachelor Provincial. Steve often has the sore-looking red eyes common to late-night hackers. Piko is nothing if not ambitious: It must assemble software, hardware, and networking capability. Steve admits it has been harder than he thought it would be. The first round of meetings with venture capitalists did not produce those ''Aha!'s'' Steve might have hoped for, nor a fat bankroll of seed money. He and his partner have changed strategy and product focus since his first bouts of insomnia. He has had to liquidate some of his own stock portfolio in this down market to buy the domain name, Piko.com, from a young Hawaiian woman for $20,000. (Piko is Hawaiian for ''your connection to your family.'') However, Steve says he has some smart backers interested in his outfit, and an important partnership that could be finalized any day now. It's impossible to predict whether the stars will align for Steve and Piko, but I think there is something important that resonates in his phrase ''so exciting I can't sleep.'' We have agreed to keep meeting, and starting in January I hope to give my online readers monthly updates on how Piko develops (ebiz.businessweek.com). From talking to Steve, I have come to realize that the entrepreneurial calling is as much about where you are in your life as it is about any one opportunity. After he turned down that other offer, Steve spent a year as a resident assistant in a Stanford dormitory, where he dealt with students and their highs and lows--a far cry from the self-directed, solitary, Web-site-building years that first gave him the entrepreneurial bug. He has a supportive girlfriend whose parents are entrepreneurs. Also, he explains, ''When I'd finish a paper, I didn't feel like I'd contributed something to the world. My hobby was always thinking up business ideas and figuring out what I could do to make them work. Now, I'm doing it all the time, and I feel like I'm having fun all day.'' For me, Steve is a window on several worlds. For starters, he represents the leading edge of a new generation of consumers. ''It's very important to connect with the 15-to-25 demographic,'' says Janice Roberts, a venture capitalist at Mayfield Fund. ''They've grown up with technology and have an intuition about it. We need to treat young people very seriously, in a way we haven't before.'' I also believe Steve is emblematic of the blindingly bright, hard-working young entrepreneurs all over high tech who came of age during a period when powerful people did, in fact, take them seriously. Few of them can imagine that the current downturn will last. They continue to flock to venture capitalists the way freshman visit their academic advisers whenever a new major looks interesting. Heidi Roizen, a venture capitalist at Softbank, recalls the Stanford student who recently assured her that his business proposal wasn't some fly-by-night notion. ''You have to realize that I've been thinking about this idea for an entire quarter,'' he said. Now that the big chill is in the air, what will become of this bonus-baby generation? ''It could be that companies like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard will again become the finishing school for young entrepreneurs,'' says Trevor Traina, the 32-year-old founder of shopping engine CompareNet. Traina made millions selling CompareNet to Microsoft in 1999 and now says he sees an awful lot of unwrinkled faces in the company cafeteria--faces he thinks a still-booming market might have attracted to startups. Stanford professor Tom Kosnik, a mentor to Oskoui and dozens of other engineering and business school students, says he sees no despair among the young go-getters. The engineering school's 16 courses on entrepreneurship have long waiting lists, and on-campus talks by high-tech heroes are standing room only. Students now realize you need more than ''three-MBAs and an idea,'' Kosnik says. ''But students still believe they can create great companies on the combination of good technology and the power of their own will and vision.'' The inexperience, even naivete, of scores of young entrepreneurs certainly helped fuel the recent dot-com excesses. Now, however, it will be interesting to see whether the smarts and optimism of Steve and others might also help revive tech. Innovation and force of will swirls around many of these young stars like a brisk, invigorating wind. You can feel it in the air. By JOAN O'C. HAMILTON, joan_hamilton@ebiz.businessweek.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					e.biz Contents for Dec. 11, 2000 issue RELATED ITEMS ``So Exciting I Can't Sleep'' TABLE: Web Pointers INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

Copyright 2000-2008, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of Use   Privacy Notice