Founders at Work.pdf

C H A P T E R
4
Joe Kraus
Cofounder, Excite
Joe Kraus started Excite (originally called Architext) in 1993 with five Stanford
classmates. Though they began by developing technology for information
search and retrieval, their decision to go into web search ultimately made their
site the fourth most popular site on the Web in the late 1990s.
Excite got venture capital funding in 1994 and launched its web search
engine into a market crowded with competitors. Excite went public in 1996 and
in 1999 merged with high-speed Internet service @Home.com to become
Excite@Home.
In 2004, Kraus and Graham Spencer founded JotSpot, an application wiki
company.
Livingston: How did Excite get started?
Kraus: We decided to start a company together before we had any idea what
we were going to work on. But we were so committed to the idea of starting
something together that we knew we were going to figure it out.
For me, that idea came from a formative experience after freshman year of
college. As soon as I had arrived home to Los Angeles from Stanford, my parents
said, “Good news”—and that usually meant something bad—“We went to
your high school fundraiser last night and we bought you a summer job.”
And I thought, “Oh, that’s terrible news.” I had thought I would pump
yogurt or bag groceries and then I could surf and hang out with friends, which
was really what I wanted to do.
I said, “Well, where is this job and what is it?” They said it was at an architectural
engineering firm. I thought, “Well, that sounds kind of interesting. I
don’t know what that is, but OK.” So I show up for work on my first day and the
job is to duplicate microfiche with three 70-year-old women. For a 19-year-old
guy, this is hell.
You had to expose the microfiche to ultraviolet light and then run it through
this developer, which had this ammonia smell. It was really bad. I did that for
3 weeks and I quit and bagged groceries. I kind of determined from that point
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