This month, CEOs from three Internet companies answer our question:
Spending wisely.
"We recently found new office space which we'll be moving into soon. We went to Virginia to this mammoth warehouse to look for used furniture. I'm trying to get this company up and running, so I don't want to spend a lot of money on furniture."
-David Rothenberg, CEO, MDLinx
Start-ups are always short on time and money. Mr. Rothenberg is getting ready to launch a network of 34 news and information Web sites targeted at physicians. He's been traveling the globe to raise funding and he's preparing to hire a staff. Like most CEOs, he spends money only when he has to. Burning cash to build your products is one thing, says Mr. Rothenberg, but using it to buy unnecessarily expensive furniture is another.
Growing quickly.
"This is a team of engineers discussing things I can't even begin to understand. That's probably why I wasn't even invited to the meeting. But this is a good thing—because it means the company is getting large enough to run itself, without my needing to sign off on every decision."
-Will Clemens, CEO and co-founder, Respond.com
Respond.com, an online shopping service which matches buyers and sellers, has grown—like many Internet companies—at an alarming speed. Less than a year ago, Mr. Clemens was borrowing office space from one of his investors and had no employees. Today, Respond.com has over 60 employees and has already moved offices once to accommodate growth. One indication of that growth, says Mr. Clemens, is that he can no longer attend every meeting in the company.
Roads
to Nowhere
The writer returns to his ancestral
home and finds it is disappearing.
Fish
Stories
Louisiana's fishermen won’t
bite on technology unless they know the nets are going to bulge.
KillTheDot.com:
An
Update
San Francisco’s dot-com dissidents go global
and send the media into a frenzy.
The
Virtual Revolution
When anarchists flock to the Web to organize,
chaos reigns.
Dateline
Shanghai's Internet entrepreneurs
expose us to the elegant seediness of the Long Bar.
Through
a lens
People
use cameras to answer a question. CEOs ponder what life is really like
at a start-up.
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