Joe Kraus |
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Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot, has seen
Silicon Valley’s highs and lows (he was founder of one of the 1990s
hottest companies: Excite at Home) and here he shares with us his
insights about whether we’re going through a bubble, what his new
company, JotSpot, is trying to do, and a lot more
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Conventional wisdom tells us to go get a job out of college to learn
the ropes, not to take on friends as business partners, and to accept
defeat gracefully. Joe Kraus's business war stories are anything but
conventional. Before graduating college, he convinced five of his
friends to pass on blue chip job offers to start a business of their
own. What would that business be? They didn't know yet, but met at a
burrito shop to come up with something. The rest is Internet history.
Joe was the founding president of Excite, one of the first well-known Internet search and content sites. After a merger, Joe left Excite@Home in 2000 and tried his hand at world travel, angel investing and politics. Unable to break the entrepreneurship addiction, Joe is now starting JotSpot, the first application-wiki company. More on his newest venture in the next show. |
 Joe Kraus could have been as big as Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Stanford University students who invented the search engine Google in 1998.
But while Mr Brin and Mr Page have become the wealthy owners of a big chunk of what has become the most valuable media company in America, Mr Kraus has been less fortunate. Don't feel too sorry for him, though: Mr Kraus is only 34 and he's certainly not poor.
But his story is perhaps more revealing than Google's, because of the lessons he's learnt. . . . . |
