Voyage to the New Economy

The brainstorm happened at Mama's Royal Cafe, in Oakland, in the midst of a December 1998 breakfast with Anne French, a former Intuit marketing manager. She and Clark didn't know each other well, but mutual friends had suggested that they meet. Both wanted to do something Internet-related. Both thought that commerce with an email twist had great potential. And, as they batted ideas back and forth, they suddenly came up with an idea for their own company: helping busy people get the right gifts as efficiently as possible.

More than a year later, Clark remembers those first few months as a magical time. He, French, and a third cofounder, Matt Strain, mapped strategy over long lunches at a few favorite restaurants that they jokingly referred to as "our virtual offices." They drew up business plans that called for a September 1999 launch, 55,000 users by year-end 1999, and $4.5 million in revenues by the end of 2000. They were way too optimistic about everything, of course. But they pushed forward, convinced that this was an opportunity to create their ideal company -- one that they had always wanted to work for.

"The 'IBM' me never would have done that," Clark says. "But I made a decision: If I'm going to bet on anyone, I'll bet on me." He decided to draw an annual salary of $120,000 -- barely half of what he had earned in his best year in investment banking. That would be enough to support his family, he figured, and it would send an important signal to his employees. Pay rates at BigBow would be reasonable but not lavish. Ownership of the company would be spread widely, and if people wanted to get rich, they would need to do all of the things necessary to ensure that the closely held company stock would be really valuable someday.

Sometimes, being the underdog helped. When BigBow needed someone to oversee its computer-programming efforts, Clark set out to recruit Maira Benjamin, an acclaimed black manager in the engineering department at Luna Information Systems, an established Internet-technology company. Clark acknowledged that BigBow was a younger company at a riskier stage of development than Luna. But if Benjamin joined, he said, she would have an opportunity to work on projects that could make millions of consumers happy -- and to show that a multiracial team in Oakland could accomplish truly great things. Just one day later, he got a delicate, handmade, red card from Benjamin that said, simply, "Yes! Maira -- your new director of engineering."

As crunch time arrived last winter for BigBow, which still needed to get its Web site up and running, a second migration drama took shape at the company. Clark and Benjamin knew that they needed a lot of computer programmers in a hurry. Rather than hire them full time, they called Vajih Khan, a Pakistani immigrant who, four years earlier, had cofounded his own Internet-consulting firm, NetPace Inc., in nearby Union City, California. Could he help? The answer was yes. Within days, a half dozen NetPace programmers arrived at BigBow's headquarters. Most of them were Pakistani immigrants, like Khan, and the observant Moslems among them would take periodic prayer breaks. In an attempt to provide his employees with proper prayer space, Clark bought a half dozen prayer rugs and offered them as company perks.

Now Clark is trying to figure out whether he might someday be able to take BigBow public. That may have seemed a realistic goal in February. But with most consumer-oriented Internet stocks having taken a pounding this spring, an IPO is hardly assured. As much as he would like to keep BigBow independent, Clark isn't ruling out the possibility that at some point, it may make sense to sell the company. If BigBow doesn't work out, he says, "it would hurt really badly. But it wouldn't be a disaster. I'd find a job working for someone else. We'd be able to say, 'We did something really cool. We invented a new email technology. We just weren't quite able to make it into a successful business.'"

Do You Know What Life Will Be Like?

Patrick McCue still remembers the sweaty-palm details of his first day at Blue Martini Software six months ago. At age 33, he was a well-traveled software consultant. He had worked on the information-technology team at Coca-Cola, in Atlanta, for two years. He had been a Chicago-based senior manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers. He was used to the pace of big-company orientations for new employees: some paperwork in the morning, a company video in the afternoon, and maybe an on-site tour in a day or two. "It could be Thursday before you began any real work,"McCue recalls. When he joined Blue Martini in January, he knew that he was becoming part of a young, hungry Silicon Valley company that helped clients build brands -- on the Web and elsewhere. He would be running a Chicago-area field office for the company, helping to negotiate business alliances. But would that really mean a totally new work pace? He wasn't sure.