Starting Your Startup

Julie Wainwright

CEO
Pets.com
San Francisco, California

If you're trying to start a Web site from scratch, you need to have something up within 10 weeks. If you have an idea, someone else has it too. You'll never get there if you try to put up the perfect site. I tell people to stop talking about it and start doing it! It even helps with raising money. Venture capitalists like to see something concrete. While they do get thousands of ideas, they don't get thousands of ideas that can be executed -- and executed well.

People at large corporations really do not tolerate mistakes. But when you're doing things that haven't been done before, you're going to make mistakes. It's not the mistakes but how you react to those mistakes that makes all the difference. You have to iterate. Listen to your customers constantly. Give them what they want -- and a little more.

You have to take risks. And when you take risks, you may not be everyone's best friend. When I was at Reel.com, Paramount Pictures hated the promotion that we did for Titanic. Some people there thought that we weren't right for studio work. But we shipped 1.5% of all Titanic videos in the United States through our Web site. And guess what? We blew about 6% of those orders. Was it the right thing to do? Absolutely. Was it executed perfectly? No. Sometimes, you just have to live with that.

Pets.com (www.pets.com) was launched in November 1998. Julie Wainwright joined the company in March 1999, expanding the site to feature more pet experts and to include more reference materials and health information. She also helped to secure funding from Amazon.com and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Previously, she served as CEO of Reel.com, a leading Internet video store, until its sale to Hollywood Entertainment Corp. in 1998. She started her career at the Clorox Co.

Joyce Meskis

President
Tattered Cover Inc.
Denver, Colorado

Business is about community. It's about constant engagement. We're living in a time of mass consumerism, and it's hard to fight the battles associated with that trend: the price wars, the location wars. The most important asset that an independent merchant has is a community tie -- a relationship that has been built over time.

That's why we make presentations to the local Rotary Club, and why we work with literacy groups. In our two stores, we hold more than 600 events a year. These involve authors reading to kids, customers making pancakes with our gourmet chef, and people discussing philosophy. Sure, a comfortable environment is important -- but human exchange makes all the difference in the world.

Training programs are important to the success of a business. Even if you have unlimited capital, you can't expect to pour it into a location, fill that location with inventory, open up the doors, and wait for hordes of customers to arrive. You also have to treat people well.

Finally, I'd like to dispel a common myth about owning your own business. A lot of people who go into business for themselves do so because they've had a bad experience as a corporate employee. They think that they want to be their own boss. In some ways, when you are the owner of a business, you have many more bosses than you ever had before. You have to remain constantly vigilant.

The Tattered Cover (www.tatteredcover.com), which opened in 1971, is one of the nation's largest independent bookstores. Joyce Meskis bought the store in 1974, after closing her own bookstore. Under her management, the Tattered Cover has expanded to include a second location. Today, both stores carry 150,000 titles, and the original store also houses a restaurant.

Eliot Kang

Founder, president, and CEO
Kang & Lee Advertising Inc.
New York, New York

If you're going to be a pioneer in a market, you have to spend at least half of your time selling that market. I used to spend 70% of my time selling the potential of the Asian-American marketplace, and many other agencies do the same kind of thing. You sell the market first and your company second.

The first thing that you have to do when you start a company in a new market is to look at whether that market is big enough. In the ad business, a market needs to include at least 10 million consumers before you can convince a company that it should target those people. And with Web sites getting hundreds of millions of hits a day, the very concept of what represents a significant number has changed.

We now represent 30% of our total market. Within that market, we can't get any bigger, because we can't take clients that compete in the same category. We knew that if we stayed at this level, we'd never be able to grow. We looked at our people and asked, "If the business stays the way it is, will they still be here in two years?" At that point, we knew that if we wanted to get the right funding and an opportunity to grow, we needed to join either another company or a network.

Kang & Lee (www.kanglee.com) was founded in 1985 under the name AMKO advertising. It was one of the first Asian-American ad agencies, and today it is the largest buyer of Asian-American media for national advertisers. Its clients include AT&T's consumer and business units; Oxford Healthcare; Sears, Roebuck; and McDonald's. In 1998, the firm joined the Young & Rubicam family of agencies. Eliot Kang is a native of Korea.