Six years is something like a millennium in internet time. It's even hard to remember what websites we browsed in 2001. So when web analytics firm Compete issued a list of the 50 most popular websites of August 2001 -- comparing their traffic to the top sites in August 2007 -- we were intrigued.
Yes, the list has a lot of dated companies and most have a much smaller market share than they once did. But whether their startups succeed or fail, tech entrepreneurs have a curious habit of resurfacing elsewhere. What happened to the founders of these companies? We decided to track down this Class of 2001 for a little six-year reunion.
Not surprisingly, many on the list of 2001's best and brightest went on to create new startups. Michael Merhej, founder of now-defunct Audiogalaxy (#16), created an online file-sharing service FolderShare and sold it in 2005 to Microsoft, for whom he works today. Classmates.com (#47) founder Randy Conrads, meanwhile, has also started a new company, time-share site RedWeek.com.
By 2001, online card company BlueMountain.com (#46) had already been sold to Excite@Home, and its cofounder, Jared Polis, was on to his next venture, ProFlowers.com. Today Polis is more civic-minded: He's founded several charter schools and is running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Colorado Democrat.
Farhad Mohit, founder of #30 Bizrate (now called Shopzilla), recently set out on a sort of midlife vision quest. After leaving the company this past February -- he'd sold it to E.W. Scripps for $525 million in 2005 -- Mohit spent two months in Iran, where he was born but hadn't visited in 29 years. He hoped to take stock of his life and figure out what was next.
"Regular people there are fantastic, as they are here," says Mohit, 38. "Iranians are embarrassed by their leadership as much as we are. How do you bring people together and show them that their differences are worth appreciating and that in fundamental things they are quite the same?"
Out of that dilemma comes DotSpots, a company Mohit founded in August. It's so new that Mohit's not sure whether it'll be for profit or not. (He's calling it "for change.") He declines to give details, but says that the company will offer a way for people to share their thoughts on any website, not just those that explicitly enable comments.
Vanchau Nguyen, founder of ezboard, also took time off after leaving his company in 2004. The following year, an old colleague approached him about joining Next Internet, a company Nguyen describes in an e-mail as "a sort of platform for entrepreneurs to do their thing." Nguyen grudgingly agreed to give it a try, and got hooked. Within six months, he'd sold his new creation, a group of marketing services now called NextClick Media, to another group of entrepreneurs within Next Internet and started JustSayHi.com, a free dating site.
Omar Wasow, of No. 23 BlackPlanet.com, is currently getting a PhD in African American Studies at Harvard with the occasional gig as a technology pundit for TV and radio. BlackPlanet itself was launched by corporate parent Community Connect, which was also behind #49 AsianAvenue.com, which has since lost three letters to become AsianAve. Community Connect's own cofounder, Benjamin Sun, has been its CEO for the duration.
And in a twist of irony, Idealab founder Bill Gross, who spawned #5 GoTo.com, later created Compete, the company that made this list in the first place.
It just goes to show the importance of being nice to your colleagues and competitors: You may want to join their next venture. There's almost always a next venture.
( Wired.com )
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