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Other Stanford classmates have been overrun by faster movers. While at Stanford last December, Matt Hobart, 28, began writing a business plan for an online pet-supply company. Bad call. In April, after he had sealed commitments from investors and future employees, several other pet sites--including Pets.com Petstore.com Petsmart.com and Petopia.com--announced that they were preparing to launch. Hobart had no choice but to return the money he had raised and pack it in. "There's no such concept as sitting in a garage and starting a company anymore," he says. "If you have an idea, it's safe to assume that four or five people have the same idea. But it's not the person with the best idea who wins. It's the person who can execute quickly." Hobart is now launching an educational website, TheScience.com and plans to rent office space in San Francisco from Petopia.com one of the companies that put him out of business the first time.
E-commerce niches are getting claimed so quickly that there might not be time for business school anymore. Aaron Ross, 27, was an undergraduate at Stanford but turned down a spot in this fall's class at the B school to start his own company, EquipmentLeasing.com Unable to afford any advertising more expensive than free beer, Ross threw a happy hour last month on the roof of the Potrero Brewing Co. in San Francisco. He sent out invitations to 30 friends via the party-planning website Evite. Two hundred people showed up. "It's all about the buzz," Ross said, basking in the early-evening sun and in his sudden celebrity. "I can't explain it. It's like magic."
This is why people come to the Bay Area, when they could just as easily launch a dog-food site from Wichita, Kans. Internet entrepreneurs network tirelessly, going to happy hours and barbecues to glad-hand investors and glean tips about how to find law firms, Web designers and publicists. Entrepreneurs from this year's Stanford business-school class gather for a monthly working barbecue that is perhaps the most exclusive ticket in Silicon Valley--so exclusive that the organizers had to take a vote on whether to invite entrepreneurs from the class of 1998.
It's impossible at these gatherings to find anyone talking about anything but one another's Internet start-ups. The new entrepreneurs are oddly proud of knowing nothing about politics, sports or pop culture. And they don't mind admitting that they have no social lives. "Dates bore me," says Ross. "Especially dates with women who aren't in the tech industry. That's my life. If they can't relate to that, then what do we have?"
Perhaps Ross is another potential customer for TheMan.com So is Lui, for that matter. By the time his site launched last Friday, Lui was in his fourth month of self-imposed exile from the real world. Working 17-hour days, he's gone on one date all summer. And that was for work. "I need to stay in touch with the social world, given our topic area," he says. "I'm married to this now."