Buce Marjorie C

BS IM – AOC

SYSANAL

Case Study

Excite

     Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer founded Excite in 1993 with his Stanford classmates. This originally called Architext. They decided to do a web search which made their site the fourth most popular site during ‘90s.

Joe together with his friends decided to start a company.

     To avoid his parents buying him another job he called a friend and said to start a t-shirt company. That summer they had made $25,000. Then after that he also worked at Dominos Pizza just to earn money.

     Joe was a Political Science graduate but he wants something to do that’s why when his parents are telling him to find a job he just refuses it. He really wants to do something so he convinced the Graham; smartest person he knows, to start a company together with his friends.

     At first they don’t know what company or kind of company to start because they do have different ideas.

     They were thinking and sharing different ideas to each other. It was Graham who finally gives the best idea. Then they come up with this slogan “We are unencumbered by reality” Then they decided to go to library to do a search.

     It was mid 94 when that got an idea that they need to put an interface on the software to start showing demos. Then they turned unto web. Graham choose the because of the particular moment that they end up being a web oriented and being known as a web search thing.

     They were introducing to a lot of people then to Vinod Khosla. It was Khosla who funded them. He asked Joe and Graham to show the demo and do a scale. He funded the needs of Joe and Graham. Then they made a scale and it was a successful moment for them. From $15000 to a $100000 now it is $ 3 million VC financing.

     Excite became more popular and they were recognized as fourth largest website in the world.

Things that I have learned:

     Startups begin with nothing only ideas and ends with success. Friendship is one formula in their success because they do build a trust to each other and believe in their own ideas and then they going to explore it to come up with the best that they can have. If we want to have something or achieve our goals we need to work for it.