But they had an idea: Other start-up dot-coms were paying so much money to advertise on Web portals that the two friends figured they could make a profit starting a portal that lured users to surf with promises of riches. They had little experience between them in media or technology, let alone the Internet. At one of their regular lunches at Burger Heaven on 49th Street in Manhattan, Bill Daugherty and Jonas Steinman, two buddies from Harvard Business School, were kicking around ideas for starting an Internet company. Though iWon has outlasted the Internet bubble, it would never have been born absent the unusually fertile conditions of 1999. Now, loud, intrusive Web ads are the norm. So when the advertising market turned down, iWon was early to develop the big, talking, moving sorts of advertising that other sites like Excite had said were too intrusive for users.
A LATE BIRD MIGHT GET A WORM TOO FREE
With offices rented in a converted furnace factory here, iWon gave employees free bagels and views of the Metro-North tracks.Īs an underdog, iWon clearly understood that its mission was to make money, not to change the rules or the world. It did not go public and never had more than 230 employees. Indeed, the things with three dimensions, and the bills to pay for them, are what dragged down most Internet companies that have failed. The Internet is proving to be different in one way: Internet vultures have no interest in the sort of physical assets - railroad tracks, factories or office buildings - that were bought for a song out of bankruptcy court in earlier eras. Then, as often as not, the leaders collapse of their own unsupportable weight and others pick up the pieces and turn the good ideas into real businesses. It is a predictable cycle of growth, collapse, rebirth: An initial land grab starts as people rush to get in first and get big fast.
It was the latest sign that the Internet has entered a reconstruction phase similar to those that have followed every other frenzied introduction of a new technology, from railroads to automobiles to personal computers. IWon picked up Excite - which was valued at $6.7 billion just three years ago - at the fire-sale price of under $10 million as part of the messy bankruptcy of the company that developed the Excite portal. 16, with little disruption, a small Internet company called iWon began operating the remains of the Web portal.
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