"The lesson for me is go slower," said George Bell, who was chief executive of Excite and later Excite@Home.
"When I look back on it, I wonder did we need to make important strategic decisions at 10pm on Sunday night after another 80-hour week," quipped Bell.
Even before Excite filed for bankruptcy, Steinman and Daugherty started thinking about whether they could buy the portal.
Even though Excite@Home had hardly invested a penny in new development for Excite.com as its troubles mounted and multiplied this year, the site still had 14 million monthly visitors, and 600,000 people each month still register on Excite to receive e-mail and other personalized services.
Iwon secured the help of Infospace, a Seattle Internet company, to bid jointly for the Excite portal. Infospace would run the Web search and directory section of the site, and Iwon would run the rest.
In October, as the bankruptcy process began to gather steam, Steinman and Daugherty began to realize that if they won the bidding they would have no more than 30 days to take over Excite, too little to actually build it.
So Iwon dropped most of its other development projects and started building a carbon copy of Excite.com.
That meant designing more than 1,000 separate Web pages and reaching agreements with 130 providers of news and information. Iwon made one major change to the look of Excite: The ads are bigger.
On Nov. 28, the court approved the US$10 million bid by Iwon and Infospace. That gave them less than three weeks to take over operations of the portal.
To operate Excite, Iwon rushed to buy 270 servers from Dell Computer and enough storage from EMC Networks to hold 12 terabytes of information, most of which is Excite users' e-mail. Iwon figures it needs only eight extra employees to operate Excite on top of the 220 it has now.
Steinman figures that Excite was spending 10 times what Iwon will for technology, content and other components used in operating a Web portal.
In all, Iwon's share of the purchase price of Excite, the hardware, software, content and employees will cost a bit more than US$5 million in the first year, the company figures. Daugherty said he hoped Excite will increase Iwon's revenue, which will come to about US$70 million in 2001, by 40 percent to 50 percent.
At US$100 million a year in sales, Iwon, which is renaming itself Excite Networks, is still far smaller than Yahoo, the top portal, which expects to achieve at least US$725 million in sales next year.
But the company is big enough to plan to buy other distressed dotcoms, Steinman said.
"The Internet was supposed to be one thing and it ended up being something significantly less," said Daugherty. "Fortunately for us, we never let our costs get out of control in the way that led to everyone else's demise."
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