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Business Week Special Advertising Sections Internet Fever |
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History runs deep in Massachusetts, but it's a history written by irreverent entrepreneurs preoccupied with the future and striving to create change. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Internet. "It's like the Wild West," says David Blohm, CEO of SmarterKids.com. "Entrepreneurs are starting companies in their basements and dorm rooms." You can't walk through Boston's Cyber District, or Kendall and Harvard Squares in Cambridge without tripping over dozens of startups all pointing at the Web. Companies like Akamai, which deploys network servers to speed Internet content to end users; Raging Bull, which delivers financial information to online investors; Allaire, maker of wildly popular software tools for Web developers and a host of rapidly growing dot-com startups like ToySmart.com, MotherNature.com, SupplierMarket.com, and SmarterKids.com which sell everything from educational toys and games to industrial parts and vitamins over the Web. Hottest of all, perhaps, is CMGI. The Andover-based business incubator which began funding Internet start-ups in 1995 has spawned dozens of dot-com companies. Some, like GeoCities and Lycos, are now household names. Others, such as Raging Bull, Navisite and Furniture.com, have claimed early leads in promising markets. Furniture.com is the market leader in online sales of household furnishings. Navisite, developed by CMGI to host the Web sites of its incubator companies, was spun out last year and today provides Web application hosting to more than 250 customers. Web Companies Pick Massachusetts One year old Raging Bull, the financial Web site, already averages more than four million page views a month. The company was started by three college kids in a New Jersey garage. Founder Bill Martin dreamed up the company while working as a summer intern at Goldman Sachs teaching partners there to find financial information on the Web. Last fall, Martin tapped his credit card to fund the startup. CMGI President David Wetherell discovered Martin's company one night while surfing the Web from his home on Martha's Vineyard. Wetherell invested and quickly moved the tiny startup to his Andover incubator where it could grow more rapidly. "The public markets reward the number one and two players in each sector, so it's imperative in this building phase that you quickly achieve recognition," says Bill White, CMGI's vice-president of marketing. "Massachusetts has a large Internet community and the service and capital infrastructure to allow your business to move very quickly." Allaire Corp. came to Massachusetts for the same reason. Founded in 1994 by J.J. Allaire, his brother Jeremy, and a group of their friends from Macaelester College in St. Paul, Minn., their product, Cold Fusion, was an immediate hit. But Allaire's 200% annual growth soon outstripped Minnesota's IT talent pool. They had two choices. Move west to Silicon Valley or east to Massachusetts. They chose Cambridge. "There's a tremendous well of talent here," says Steven Clark, Allaire's vice-president of marketing. We want to build a long-lasting and successful company, and that's a much more difficult proposition in the ValleyŠwhere people jump from company to company every few months." That sentiment is shared by Asif Satchu, president of SupplierMarket.com., an online marketplace where mid-size manufacturers of semi-custom industrial parts can find and sell to new customers. Satchu and co-founder Jon Burgstone started the company this summer after winning second prize in Harvard Business School's annual business plan competition. Funded almost immediately by Battery Ventures, Satchu and Burgstone briefly considered moving to Silicon Valley, but soon nixed the idea. |
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