Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[mdthomas AT mindspring.com]

I'd love to invite these guys to have a beer with us, but...



"Stein, David" <stein AT ACADEMIC.NCSSM.EDU> wrote:
> For those of you still awake at 11:00 tonight, you might enjoy seeing an
interview with Jud Bowman '99 and Taylor Brockman '99 on NBC's 11:00 news
(WNCN-Channel 17).  The story will be on how dot.com companies get started.

If you're not familiar with Jud and Taylor and their dot.com adventures,
here is a recent piece about them by David Ranii of the News & Observer.
The company name was changed a few months ago from InterTect Networks to
Pinpoint.com in keeping with the times.

David



Old enough to drive a business

Summary:  Two 18-year-olds founded online search engine


DURHAM -- A year ago, Jud Bowman and Taylor Brockman were applying to
colleges as they began their senior year at the N.C. School of Science and
Mathematics, the state-run school for overachievers.

Today, they're focused on hiring Linux software developers for their
fledgling business, Intertect Networks, after raising $650,000 from
investors.

College has been pushed to the back burner while they pursue the American
dream of starting a company and making a fortune. Their business: leasing an
Internet search engine devised by computer whiz Brockman to midsize Web
sites.

"We're going to college eventually," Bowman says. "It might be a year or
three years. We'll take this to the point that it can be sold or can run on
its own."

Selling the business might be preferable, he allows, because that would
allow both of them to get back on the college track sooner rather than
later.

As you might have guessed, these are not typical 18-year-olds. They're
ultra-smart, and their maturity is on a par with that of people a decade
older, says Jeff Barber, who heads the Raleigh office of
PricewaterhouseCoopers. PWC became Intertect's accounting firm this summer
after Barber was introduced to Bowman and Brockman.

Bowman's mother, Carlie Bowman of North Raleigh, says she's not surprised by
anything her son does. He has been helping her prepare income-tax returns
since he was in seventh grade and, she adds with considerable pride, his
academic prowess is equaled by his skill playing the violin, viola and
piano. (He recently became the youngest member of the Raleigh Symphony
Orchestra.)

Parents of both entrepreneurs say they're not distressed that their sons
have put off going to college. Says Dr. Steven Brockman of Shelby: "He's
learning quite a bit from this - he may be learning more from this than he
would from a year in college."

As it is, they've already put their high-school experience to good use.

Bowman says he and Brockman weren't even nervous when they had to stand up
and present their business plan to the TriState Investment Group (TIG), an
organization of successful local businessmen that invests in promising
start-up businesses. Bowman says he was used to making presentations in
high-school science competitions.

And although that may sound naive, the truth is that they had no reason to
be nervous. They breezed through TIG's screening committee and received a
commitment for $650,000 in financing in only a few weeks. TIG accelerated
its normal approval process to accommodate Bowman and Brockman, who had
decided that they would go off to college if they failed to raise the money
they needed over the summer. Bowman has been accepted at Stanford and
Brockman at N.C. State.

"They made tremendous progress for two 18-year-old kids with no experience,"
said TIG member Paul Mayer, a co-founder of Fusion Ventures in Durham and,
before that, the CD Superstore chain. "They have a business, by God. ... We
thought they had a good product, a great marketing strategy and the ability
to [move] very fast."

As a condition of its investment, TIG did insist that the company bring on
board a seasoned executive as chief executive officer. Bowman and Brockman
agreed and hired Jim Strathmeyer, 45, vice chairman of TIG and former
president and majority owner of TNI in Knightdale. TNI, which provides
electronic components to telecommunications companies, increased its annual
revenue from $5 million in 1987 to $30 million last year under Strathmeyer's
leadership.

On Wednesday, Intertect moved from a North Raleigh apartment to 6,000 square
feet of space that it has subleased in the Meridian Business Campus in
Durham, just across the street from Red Hat's offices.

"We want to grow fast enough that, in two years, we have to move out,"
Strathmeyer says.

The company has five full-time employees plus Strathmeyer, who is a
part-time CEO. Strathmeyer expects to have 15 or 20 full-time employees by
the end of the year.

That would be a quantum leap from last summer. That's when Bowman decided,
while attending a camp sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, that building a search engine would be a "neat project."

Bowman wasn't up to tackling the project on his own, because his primary
interest was biology, not computer science. So, when classes began in the
fall, he went to the guy he thought was the smartest programmer in school
and asked him whether he would take on the project.

"No way," the student replied. "It's impossible. You'd need a team of
programmers."

But the student referred Bowman to Brockman for a second opinion.

And Brockman was unfazed when Bowman approached him. "I can probably do
that," he said.

Working mostly on his own, Brockman managed to develop a working search
engine by mid-December. That triggered a metamorphosis from neat project
into fledgling business.

Bowman paid for the computer components, which Brockman used to assemble two
servers, with profits he had made from day trading. Over the summer,
Brockman continued to improve the software with three friends, who were paid
thanks to financing from Brockman's father.

Bowman, meanwhile, was concocting a marketing strategy. Instead of using the
search engine to compete with portal sites such as Yahoo! and Lycos, he
decided the opportunity lie in leasing the search engine to midsize Web
sites. The entrepreneurs could use the search engine to boost their traffic
and "stickiness" - their ability to hold on to Web surfers longer.

Intertect also has the capability to customize search engines for
specialized topics. For example, a search for the word "Labrador" would give
preference to the dog on a pet site over the peninsula on a geography site.

By the time Strathmeyer came on board as CEO in early August, Intertect's
search engine was being leased by three Web sites and two others had signed
to use it, including the popular FreeYellow.com.

Bowman says that as far as he can tell, none of those customers knows how
young he is.

"We're having a blast starting a business, the whole entrepreneurial thing,"
Bowman says.

As for their eventual return to academia, both Bowman and Brockman are
toying with doing something completely different from their current endeavor
- going to medical school.

"The possibilities are open for us," Bowman says. "We're the kind of people
who want to do everything."