Easy.Com, Easy.Go
OK . . . we've weeded out the wanna-bes. Who's still with us?
"Let's be quite honest," says Neil J. Closner,
president and CEO of BabyUniverse.com, a 12-person Fort Lauderdale,
Florida, e-tailer of infant products. "Anybody who got
involved in this business had their eye on an exit strategy, either
to be acquired or go public. That was in our game plan as
well." Now that a public offering is unlikely and many
potential acquirers are struggling to finance their own operations,
the game plan is to stay on and run the company for several more
years. How does Closner, 27, feel about that? "Honestly, I
don't know," he says. "My mood changes day to
day."
Others are more philosophical. "I didn't anticipate it
to be a get-rich-quick scheme," says Betsy Burlingame, founder
and president of Expatexchange.com, a New York City-based Web service
for expatriates. "It's a very long-term focus. You build
relationships and a community and then later bring in e-commerce
and make money."
Burlingame, 29, met with venture capitalists before the April
meltdown to discuss funding for her 2-year-old company. She was
told she wasn't asking for enough money and didn't plan to
spend it fast enough. "Now you have to have revenues that go
to the bottom line," she says, "which we're working
on."
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That statement sums up the central experience of the post-crash
Internet entrepreneur. It has two prongs: Spend less, make more.
It's not easy, and it's not as much fun as the
spin-and-spend techniques that transferred countless millions of
dollars from the pockets of investors and entrepreneurs into the
bank accounts of Web site designers, online advertisers and others
in the dot-com boom. But it's necessary. And according to early
indications, it seems to be working—as evidenced by the fact
that not every dotcom is bankrupt, and some are actually healthy
and growing.
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