Who Are the Netpreneurs?

We have an image of the netpreneur, a cybergeek in his early 20s who doesn’t know how to tie a tie, wears sandals with suites and speaks in web jabber. And of course, he’s hounded by venture capitalists. We wish it were true. A handful of stories about Stanford drop-outs landing $10 million in venture capital for an idea sketched out with friends over 72 emails and you get the idea an MBA doesn’t get you far in northern California. Again, not true. Maybe it was reality for a few weeks in early 1999, but those heady weeks are gone.

And what heady days they were. Consumers were finally buying online in big numbers and business-to-business Net commerce was promising to get disturbingly gigantic. Disturbing, that is, if you were on a corporate sales team and it began to occur to you that the orders were no longer getting called into your voicemail.

Nope, your customers started logging online and grabbing what they needed from the corporate website, and of course that gets you thinking about how long the corporation would continue to pay your commissions when the sales dont come in on your order forms. But I digress.

In 1999, 30% of American venture capital began flowing into Internet start-ups. In the early months of the year, the VCs snagged anyone with the least inkling of cyberculture. It didn’t matter that the proposed Netbiz would see countless years of multimillion dollar losses. The VCs can cash out after the IPO, so who cares for losses. Red ink in big numbers have become the smoky war stories told over blue martinis and cigars.

The Venture crowd hangs in for a few years beyond the IPO and get cyber-richer. It just didn’t matter if there was no business experience on the launch team. The old one-in-ten venture formula for start-up success was meaningless when one Net winner could cover the losses on 30 or 40 investments. At those odds, the more bizarre the idea the better.

Those were the good old weeks. The techy venture capitalists are into something different in the late hours of the millennium. The big story now is that we’re getting second generation Internet entrepreneurs, said Josh Pickus, partner with Bowman Capital Management in San Mateo, CA. Pickus expects his launch leaders to be well-scrubbed. We like to see people who have been through one full cycle in managing an online enterprise and are doing their next company, said Pickus.

Bowman funded Kris Hagerman’s recent start-up, Affinia, an Internet company that matches merchants with merchandise. Before Affinia, Hagerman launched Big Book, an Internet yellow pages, and built it up for 2 1/2 years before selling it to GTE. It’s nice that Kris has a Stanford MBA, said Pickus, but his greatest attribute to us is Big Book.

If venture capitalists are having their cake and eating it too (netpreneurs with Internet management experience in addition to a great idea), the launch captains are finding it difficult to fill out their teams. I think there are a lot of good ideas and a small management pool to implement the ideas, said Hagerman. The ability to put together a great team is every bit as challenging as developing a great idea.

So netpreneurs are dressing up better than the crazy days of early ‘99, but they still have to suffer a sandal-footed staff. In time, the Internet leaders are bound get as stuffy as Microsoft (and whodda thunk MS would get stuffy). It’s the price of stability. But for a few years yet, sandals, lattes and 8 am to 10 pm workdays will keep the web edgy. Netpreneurs are wearing ties to the VC meetings, but their quality time is still spent brainstorming with the hip, smart and poorly dressed.

About the Author

Robert Spiegel, The Shoestring Entrepreneur, is the author of "The Complete Guide to Home Business" (AMACOM) and "The Shoestring Entrepreneurs Guide to the Best Home-Based Businesses" (St. Martins Press). For questions or comments,to email Rob see details below.


spiegelrob@aol.com.