Have you ever heard of a guy going to a spa on a date?" Calvin Lui, the 27-year-old CEO of Maverick Online, is surveying the company brain trust. Lui has 35 days before the launch of his Internet start-up, a consumer and lifestyle website for men, and he's got another big decision to make.
"I've never done that," says Maverick co-founder Steve Lombardi, "but I'd take it as long as a hot chick was around."
"I wouldn't go to a spa," says Rich Schwerin, the website's editor. "Not unless there was a Japanese woman walking on my back."
Andrew Sugerman, the company's business-development director, admits that he has been to a spa with his wife. "But I would never get a dude to give me a massage. I'm a 100% woman-massage guy," he says.
It takes several more minutes of such debate before Lui makes an executive decision. "All right, getting a massage together is definitely a date," he says. Another testosterone conundrum is solved. The massage date has made the list of 80 assignations that visitors will be able to plan and purchase from Maverick's website--along with the frosty make-your-own-ice-cream date and the steamy strip-poker date.
Unlike their predecessors, Silicon Valley's new entrepreneurs don't spend their time talking about operating systems or Java applications or HTML code. They talk about capturing eyeballs, forging strategic partnerships and "making the dogs eat the dog food." In the '80s they would have been financing junk-bond takeovers. Today these lapsed consultants and investment bankers are fleeing six-figure job offers from Wall Street for the opportunity to build their own empires.
The amazing truth is that in Silicon Valley today they can do it cheaper and faster than anyone has ever done it before. The old fortunes--amassed by Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, David Packard--took years, sometimes more than 10 of them. Now we're talking months. Maverick Online is all of 90 days old. Almost all the ideas involve selling stuff over the Internet and require little more inspiration than walking through a mall and adding dot.com to the end of every store's name. But the potential payoff is huge, so everyone is in a rush to get the FMA (first-mover advantage), to do it FBC (faster, bigger, cheaper) and to GBF (get big fast). The goal, of course, is the IPO, initial public offering, in which a hot company converts from private ownership to public, selling shares on the stock market and in the process making its founders Maserati rich.
In the second quarter of this year, venture-capital funding in the U.S. increased 77%, to a record $7.6 billion. More than half went to Internet start-ups. In the wake of the massive IPOs of Web businesses like Amazon.com ($561 million) and eBay ($1.9 billion), venture capitalists (VCs) are eager to take a first-round, $2 million risk on any two guys with a business plan.