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Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 55: Barry's Singularity -- ship without a captain
By Thomas Scoville
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"The Gorilla Game" goes out on a limb, encouraging us to invest in -- duh! -- big companies that dominate rapidly expanding markets.
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[09/20/99]

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Mr. Fix-it
After a summer of outages, eBay recruited Maynard Webb to be chief of technologies and shore up the auction site's systems.
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[09/20/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 54: Kiki and Barry reunited by Iridium -- silence at $40 a minute
By Thomas Scoville
[09/18/99]

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"Have you ever gotten an Evite?"

Our neighbors stare blankly at Silverman, who has already exchanged some small talk with them earlier in the evening. The man gracefully retreats to the relative safety of the appetizer chatter: "What did you say your company was called again?"

"Evite," says Silverman. I cringe a little, but he is completely unfazed. You see, Silverman and I have a little dispute going. He thinks it's more likely than not that somebody in this restaurant has used his company's Web site. I think this is improbable, and I have threatened to put it to the test by going around the room and asking.

Of course, I was not going to make good on this threat, because in the conventional scheme of things there are few things as inherently uncool as walking through a roomful of strangers and asking them if they have used a new Web-based application. But there, in a nutshell, is the difference between Silverman's world -- the world of Silicon Valley start-up life -- and everyplace else's: In Silverman's world, there is nothing as cool as telling a bunch of strangers about your new company.

In the hierarchy of contemporary business cool, there are big companies (uncool), little companies on the bleeding edge of technology (cool), successful companies (cool), companies whose stock has taken a nosedive (uncool), start-ups on the verge of going public (very cool) and finally, at the pinnacle, the sine qua non of Silicon Valley cool, the "raw start-up" -- the start-up that's still working on its final business plan, the start-up that is just about to get its first millions from professional investors, the start-up that has a three-room office with four desks in each room.

Silverman has been CEO of Evite since it was a raw start-up. In his world -- the world of programmers, suits, salespeople, visionaries, strivers, geeks and assorted foot soldiers in the Net gold rush -- that makes him the bomb.

According to its promotional literature, Silverman's company is "a Web-based Group Activity Organizer." Put more simply, that means that Evite is a tool for creating invitations. The idea is that a user goes to Evite, puts in the type of event and the guests' e-mail addresses. Evite sends out an invitation, and everybody involved uses the Evite.com Web site to post their thoughts about the event. For a dinner, that can mean planning the menu; for a conference, it can mean deciding the agenda.

Next page | How do you build an insta-company?