Voyage to the New Economy

So in 1993, when Walsh's AAA job moved her to San Francisco, where she found a home in Silicon Valley, she laid the groundwork for her most daring reinvention to date. She got increasingly involved in the association's Web site and became an early customer of E.piphany Inc., a Web-site-development company. In early 1999, E.piphany's founders introduced Walsh to Doug Mackenzie, a partner in the renowned venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. They chatted, and Mackenzie came away with the clear impression that if he could find the right job for her, Walsh might be ready to jump to an Internet startup.

Over the next few months, Walsh periodically visited Kleiner's offices to do the career equivalent of window-shopping. One startup struck her as intriguing but focused on too narrow a market. Another was too far along in its development work; the really gutsy, early creative steps had already been taken. But Mackenzie kept urging her to come back. "She got the Internet right away," he recalls. "She was a marketing talent. And she had a real sense of urgency that I hadn't expected."

Then Walsh met Bippy Siegal, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who had just gotten a first round of funding from Kleiner to create an online barter exchange. Walsh liked his plan from the start. "It was a big idea," she recalls. "It was going to be a complex-transaction environment, which meant that you could create a deep, broad customer base and mine the data. Plus, there was a lot of energy around the company. If I was going to leave corporate America, I wanted to get in at a startup early. I wanted to create a brand."

In June 1999, Walsh started working for Siegal's company, then called Doublebill.com, and discovered just how early she was. She was employee number eight, in a company that had just leased 65,000 square feet on the edge of Silicon Valley, in Redwood Shores. Her office abutted a vast, bare floor that someday would either be filled with coworkers -- or become an embarrassing, empty testament to everyone's excessive optimism. Even the company's initial name didn't sound right. She quickly got Siegal's approval to hire a naming consultant to come up with a more-enticing alternative.

Gradually, Walsh started rearranging things to be the way she wanted them. She recruited a half dozen marketing aces whose work she admired. Among them was John Faville, a longtime ad-agency executive, who found her enthusiasm so contagious that he quickly told her, "How can I say no?" She researched alternative names and finally recommended that they call the company BigVine.com, a suggestion that Siegal and the board embraced. And she struck a vital partnership with American Express, which took an ownership stake in BigVine and agreed to promote the barter service to its 2.1 million small-business cardholders and merchants.

After about a year at BigVine, Walsh says, she's found the excitement that she was looking for -- and occasionally even more of it than she expected. New recruits' cubicles now pack the once-bare carpet outside her office. The BigVine logo is becoming a recognized brand, and, to her delight, the company was mentioned in an American Express annual report. Web-site traffic is brisk enough that company engineers have disconnected a short-lived gong that used to go off every time a customer bought or sold something. "It was making too much noise," Walsh explains.

But in an unexpected switch, Walsh says that she sometimes has to tell her CEO and her board that the world just won't move as fast as they want it to. That's especially true in negotiating alliances with long-established companies like American Express, she says. In the can-do culture of the Internet, executives sometimes expect everything to be done in hours. It isn't that easy. Throughout the multimonth American Express negotiations, for example, Walsh became the voice of caution, reminding everyone, "American Express is bigger than we are. We have to move at their pace."

Are You Prepared for Stormy Weather?

It's 11:30 AM, and living.com CEO Shaun Holliday is about to get his third surprise of the morning. That's typical of his new life -- a life in which 300 employees are building an online furniture, gardening, and home-decorating store, improvising feverishly as they go along. First Holliday learned that version five of living.com's Web site was due to launch in 24 hours, with some crucial elements in different places than he expected. Then his merchandising chief told him that efforts to include Waterford crystal on the site had stalled -- and that his help was needed to get the plan back on track.