In almost any stable industry, the giants of yesterday are still the giants of today. Remember the big soda brands when you were growing up—Coke and Pepsi? Remember the big U.S. car companies—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler? How about breakfast cereals—Kellogg’s and Post? Oil companies—Mobil, Texaco, and Esso? (Okay, so they changed their name to Exxon.) How about the dominant TV networks—NBC, CBS, and ABC? They’re all the same today. Does this mean that no smart, promising newcomers have entered any of these fields in the last thirty years? Of course not. It’s just that the advantages of already being established are almost impossible to overcome.

The exceptions, of course, are those companies that have totally changed the nature of things. Apple and Compaq computers are important companies today because the mainframe business that IBM dominated has all but ceased to exist. In fact, the PC business is practically a new industry altogether. It’s as similar to mainframes as credit card terminals are to cash registers.

The fact that computers allowed for a new industrial revolution should not have been all that surprising to anyone who knows about youth. New things most often start with young people. They are the most willing to experiment, and they have the fewest bad habits to break. Jogging, yoga, computers, and the Net—they all began with young people. It’s not so strange that little stores that prospered near the Harvard campus when I was a student have gone on to become national chains.

What all this means is that if a person or a company, young or old, aspires to true greatness, he or she had better set off on a whole new path. The people in seventeenth-century Europe who were able to rise to true greatness were those who jumped on a boat to try their fortune in the New World. Even in the New World, those who were poor and aspired to more jumped on a wagon train and headed west. Today there are no more unexplored continents and few open frontiers. Occasionally, however, there are new industries being born, and this is the place to go for those with dreams that being a niche player will leave unsatisfied. For me, I had seen the new frontier, and it was the Internet. This was where I was going to stake our claim. There was only one big problem: Some other guys had gotten there first.

These other guys had names like PSI, UU Net, and Netcom, and they were already national in scope. There were also hundreds of little local Internet providers, many with their own big dreams. Finally, there were big on-line services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online who were getting ready to move in. Pretty soon this market would be totally dominated by others. At that moment, however, these companies were still getting their acts together. Customer loyalty hadn’t jelled yet. Their systems were still being developed, and the kinks were still being ironed out. Not only that, but more potential new clients were being identified monthly than the entire industry had served just a few months earlier. In short, there was still time to become a major player, but time was running out. We had to do something dramatic immediately if we wanted to get in the game.

The press seemed like the obvious answer. The press had made us in the callback business, and I knew how to work with reporters. Not only that, but the press just couldn’t get enough Internet stories. Major publications were appointing reporters and editors to cover the Internet exclusively. They were creating entire sections to deal only with this new phenomenon. Internet news was becoming almost as big an industry as the Internet itself.