Worldwide Success

Reading the stories of successful startups is a tremendous educational avenue for anyone seeking success.  It is also a great source of inspiration.  Entrepreneurs have to go through many difficult moments and sometimes near death experiences, but the ones that make it are often rewarded abundantly.  Those that succeed usually do so because they have the courage and the persistence required to make it happen, no matter how difficult the obstacles in front of them.

If you want to learn more about how successful startup companies made it through the early days, I would highly recommend the book Founders at Work.  The author, Jessica Livingston, does a great job interviewing the founders of companies like Yahoo, Apple, Blogger, Hotmail, and many more.  What you get is the raw information straight from the source.  You get to experience what these entrepreneurs went through and get a feel for what it is like to start a company.

We are going to share with you a piece of the story of one of these companies which is truly inspirational.  Joe Kraus started Excite in 1993 with some friends from Stanford University and started developing search and retrieval technology, which turned into web search, and by the late 1990s they had one of the most popular sites on the Web.  Excite went public in 1996 and merged with @Home.com in 1999 to become Excite@Home.

The Excite team started with $15,000 that they raised from their families.  Then they did some contract work and eventually raised VC money from Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins, a well known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.  A pivotal point for Excite was getting their product on the Netscape browser.  At the time Netscape had two search buttons on their browser and they decided to put them up for bid.  The following excerpt from the interview shows how courage and persistence allowed Kraus and team to win the deal which resulted in the company’s success:

“We had $1 million in the bank and we didn’t know what we were going to bid.  We sat down in my office, all on the floor.  Vinod said we should bid $3 million.  I was like, ‘How do we bid $3 million?  We only have $1 million in the bank.’  And he said, ‘Well, if we win, I’m pretty sure we can raise it, but if we don’t win, I don’t know how we’re going to raise it.’  And so I thought, ‘OK, this is really scary.’

We decided to bid $3 million.  We had no way to pay for it, but we weren’t going to reveal that.  We bid the $3 million and we lost.  It was horrible to lose; it was just the feeling of ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’

Vinod told us this whole story about how he’d gone through a similar situation at Sun in losing a deal, and he just never gave up and won the deal back.  He said ‘We haven’t lost.  Let’s meet with them.  Let’s show up in their lobby unannounced’.

Then lucky struck: MCI couldn’t deliver its service to Netscape on time.  Netscape wanted its money and they wanted to have a vendor in that slot, so they came back to us and said, ‘OK, we’ll take your $3 million and you can be in the NetDirectory play and good luck’.  I can tell you that, had we given up, we never would have gotten the deal back.  And without that deal I don’t think Excite would have had its run at all.”

And the rest is history.  What made the difference for Excite, resulting in a successful IPO which abundantly rewarded its founders financially was the courage to bid a huge sum of money that they didn’t even have for a critical spot in Netscape’s browser and the persistence to continue going after the deal even after they had technically lost it.  The attitude of “No, we haven’t lost, we’re still negotiating” and behaving as if they had not heard ‘no’ for an answer was the difference between success and failure.

If you are serious about achieving success, embrace the lessons of courage and persistence learned from the Excite team, and you are likely to become a big success yourself.

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