Quan Zhou

Case Study – Lycos

Bob Davis signed as the CEO of Lycos while Michael Mauldin was the one who invented the search engine at Carneige Mellon University and it grew rapidly for the next several years in the Internet Bubble. It was the fourth most popular time on the web on that time and it was acquired by Telefonica in Spain owned by Terra Networks for $5.4 billion. It was just a research porject when Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin discovered it as a search engine. But he is not sure on what to do with in at that time and did not plan to be a businessman in a commercial entity. It was all accidentally happened.

Lycos is a search engine where you can search free blogs, web sites, online games, e-mail, videos & movies, news, weather, people, things, places and more updates. It is a web portal centered around the broadband entertainment content. Bob Davis became involved because he is the vice president on sales for a technology company  at that time before signing as the CEO of Lycos. He focused on getting people and trying to understand what they were doing for a living and how they were going to go about doing it.

Problems that they have encountered were hiring people, firing people, getting customers, servicing the customers, understanding their business model, raising funds, staring the competitors, going into public, finding office space, scaling the company and satisfying the shareholders. Their biggest competitor was Yahoo and they worried about the expanding of Microsoft that it will go online too. They grew very fast and I have learned that it doesn’t always good if the company was quickly spreading, it has always pain because nothing works the way it designed as before and people don’t realize that a rapidly growing company always has a crumbling within because you will never know what might happened after and always expect on the least side