Voyage to the New Economy

"Your business card may read, 'CEO,' " James says, "but you may end up doing your own public relations and booking your own travel and negotiating your own real estate. There will be days when it feels as if you've taken a demotion."

Most of all, she says, people joining the Web economy need to be consumed by the idea that they are building something great. Sure, the chance to get rich is part of the allure, but if people are looking for nothing more than a stock-options jackpot, they are likely to be disappointed. Startups can be emotional roller coasters with many frustrating moments. Deals falter. New recruits back away from job offers. Promised financing doesn't come through. It helps to have a burning belief in the business mission, so that setbacks will seem inconsequential.

Until this past winter, James watched the Web migration from the sidelines, in what she wryly calls her "guidance counselor" role. But then one of her best clients called about something closer to home. Mark Stavish, a senior vice president at America Online, needed a "chief talent scout," and he thought that James might be the right person for the job. She demurred at first: She was very busy. She was happy in her job. She didn't want to move near AOL's headquarters, which at the time were in Dulles, Virginia. But Stavish persisted. James didn't want to offend him; after all, she was already doing six searches for him and hoped for even more AOL business. So before long, she agreed to fly to Virginia for an exploratory meeting.

Michele James was about to become a character in her own play.

At AOL's headquarters, Stavish booked a conference room and began a PowerPoint presentation all about ... Michele James! One slide showed all of the areas where AOL could use more recruiting muscle. Other slides explained why James was the ideal candidate to get the job done. "It was touching," she recalls. "It was like getting a big bouquet of flowers." Near the end of the presentation, Stavish looked James in the eye and said, "You'd be crazy not to do this." She blurted out, "I think you're right."

Over the next few weeks, James and AOL hammered out terms. She wouldn't have to live in Dulles full time; she could split her duties between New York and Virginia. She would coordinate outside recruiting, but she would also play a big role in internal recruiting, helping AOL deal with employee turnover, career tracks, and transfers. As she got ready to start her new job in May, James vowed to help AOL with all of the small things that add up to "recruiting etiquette."

"Remember,"she said, "this is an incredibly stressful time in a candidate's life. When you go on an interview, there are a thousand things to worry about besides the interview itself: Will there be a car to get me to the airport afterward? Who will call to let me know how I stand? Young companies don't always handle these things as well as they could." At AOL, 90% of the company's job offers are accepted, and James wants to improve on that. If Miss Manners-quality etiquette helps her do that, she says, it will be energy well spent.

What Do You Want to Achieve?

In a converted warehouse in Oakland, California, Ralph Clark is getting ready to radically overhaul a page on his Web site -- a site that took him nearly six months to build. For others, this might be a sad moment. But Clark, 41, is cheerful, almost playful. "We tried something that didn't work," he explains. "Now we're going to do it right." He is a cofounder and the CEO of BigBow.com, a gift-buying service that uses a combination of Web and email technologies to help parents, coworkers, and relatives pick out presents for people they care about.

BigBow is trying to make it the hard way. Unlike some online gift businesses, it doesn't have lavish backing from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. It doesn't have a multimillion-dollar ad budget or tie-ins to top department stores. BigBow is operating on $3 million of venture funding from a Chicago investor -- and about $300,000 of Clark's own money. But the company has a catchy product line on its Web site and a patent on file for some of its innovative email technologies. It also has a gutsy, multiracial management team that is determined to show that Internet success stories can happen on the "wrong" side of the San Francisco Bay as well as in Silicon Valley.

A dozen years ago, Ralph Clark would have been the epitome of the Organization Man. He sold mainframe computers for IBM in Seattle, working mostly on the Boeing account. He was part of a generation of intelligent black engineers who integrated first high schools and colleges, and then major corporations. By the standards of the time, he was a terrific success. Yet he was starting to get restless. "Big companies have great camaraderie, and they can insulate you from a lot of stuff," he says. "But they can put you to sleep."For the next decade, he hunted for the right next step, getting an MBA at Harvard, briefly working as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, and then joining a series of small California software companies as chief financial officer. He negotiated the sale of one of those companies (for several million dollars), earning a nice windfall for himself -- and the chance to decide at last what he really wanted to do.