Todd and Thread --
Following is a very long, but VERY illuminating profile of DW in Boston Magazine. I highly recommend reading it to get a better picture of the guy heading your investment...
David Wetherell's Excellent @Venture
By Scott Kirsner
This fall, his latest venture, iCast, could transform TV as we know it-burying the major networks in the process. From the media and entertainment world to Wall Street, David Wetherell is building the companies that will rule the Internet. A rare, in-depth look at the billionaire who is changing the way the world does business.
Securing an appointment to explain your Internet business plan to David Wetherell is like winning the chance to pitch your screenplay idea to the head of a major Hollywood studio. You drive nervously up Route 93 to Andover, then a few miles east to the headquarters of Wetherell's company, CMGI, which is housed in a refurbished textile mill called Brickstone Square. You give your name at the reception desk, and then you wait. Since there are only two seats and a sofa in the busy reception area, it's likely that you or one of your partners will be forced to stand, fidgeting.
Soon, you'll be shown to CMGI's main conference room and instructed to set up your demo. The conference room is the center of all activity at CMGI, and the wall through which you enter is floor-to-ceiling glass. As employees walk by, they sneak glimpses inside, trying to glean the gist of the idea and the anxiety level of the people presenting it. Could these guys be the next Lycos-the spectacularly successful Waltham Internet company that CMGI helped launch?
Eventually, Wetherell's personal assistant pulls open the heavy glass door and checks to see if you are ready for the boss, who is known at Brickstone Square, rather cinematically, as D.W. "You have to make sure your Internet connection is right," says one CMGI employee who has witnessed several of these pitch meetings. "These demos are stitched together with baling wire, and you don't want them to fall apart while D.W. is watching."
Upon D.W.'s entrance, you stand and do the introductions. Wetherell is usually clad in dark slacks, loafers, and a long-sleeve dress shirt, sans tie. "Then, Dave sits at one end of the conference table, puts his elbows on it, and leans forward," says the CMGI employee. "He's usually wearing a big smile, his eyes are bright, and you feel like the high beams are on. It's 'Show me what you've got' time."
If you've got something that fits into Wetherell's intricately detailed mind map of where the Internet is heading, you will be pummeled with questions, like tennis balls from a serving machine on overdrive. "How fast is the service growing? How many new [users] are you adding every hour? How much traffic are you generating?" Wetherell asked David Bohnett, the founder of GeoCities, when he met with the entrepreneur in December 1995. Bohnett was pitching a free service that would let users easily create their own home pages in topically organized "neighborhoods."
When Wetherell gets really revved up about a business idea, he will offer to invest in your fledgling company on the spot. "He's got an incredible nose for opportunity," says Steve Barlow, the cofounder and chief technology officer of ThingWorld.com, a Newton-based company CMGI funded in 1996. "Literally, within 15 minutes, based on an initial meeting and a sense of who we were, the guy was ready to do the deal."
He was equally eager with GeoCities. By the time Bohnett finished his demo and left Brickstone Square, he had a handshake agreement from Wetherell for an important first round of financing. CMGI ended up investing $2.1 million in Bohnett's idea, in return for half of the company. When GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January after an impressive initial public offering last year, that bet returned a billion-dollar profit to Wetherell.
Indeed, Wetherell has cultivated a well-deserved reputation as the Warren Buffett of Internet investing. Companies he has financed have been sold at eye-popping prices (PlanetAll of Cambridge to Amazon.com for $90 million) or have gone public (Waltham's Lycos and New Hampshire's Silknet). Companies that Wetherell has built from the ground up at Brickstone Square have also seen success in the public markets, like Engage Technologies, whose stock more than doubled on its first day of trading; NaviSite, which focuses on Web hosting for businesses-putting corporate Web sites on a publicly accessible server-filed for an IPO in late July. CMGI's own stock has been a stunner; since its initial public offering in January 1994, it is up 26,000 percent, which makes it the best-performing Nasdaq stock of the past five years.
For all his extraordinary success, this fall marks a major milestone for Wetherell. He is launching what may be his highest-profile venture to date, iCast, a company that aims to turn any Web user into the programming chief of his own network. He has hired the former president of NBC Television, Neil Braun, and committed $100 million to the project. Along with CMGI's June purchase of AltaVista, the portal site (a gateway to the Internet that offers search tools as well as news, free e-mail, and other features) originally built by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation, the debut of iCast signals a move by Wetherell to shed his reputation as a backroom dealmaker and turn his company into a major player in media for the new generation.
Wetherell is convinced that the Internet is finally poised to bury network television, and he'd like to be the one with the shovel. "We'll be without TV as we know it," he predicts. "That will get completely reinvented."
Though in person he is warm and ingratiating, Wetherell's power and influence are respected and feared by most everyone in the Internet industry. Fellow venture capitalists want to be sure Wetherell invites them to take part in joint-financing deals, and are reluctant to utter a critical word. Former employees never know when they'll be seeking a job-or a business partnership-with one of the 40 companies that are part of Wetherell's far-flung empire.
"They are the most influential East Coast company in the Internet space," says Ullas Naik, an analyst who follows CMGI for First Albany. "And Wetherell is the guy who is at the center of the information flow at CMGI. He is the kingmaker, the rainmaker. He's in the middle of the five major themes on the Net-infrastructure, content, community, commerce, and broadcasting. And he has delivered on so many different occasions that it completely rules out any possibility of sheer luck."
While the launch of iCast is in many ways the next logical step for Wetherell, it propels him from the epicenter of the Web smack dab into the middle of the media world, with all its attendant glamour. In the wake of his highly publicized battle with Hollywood mogul Barry Diller over a proposed merger between Diller's USA Networks and Lycos, iCast also affords Wetherell the chance to build the first media empire of the Internet era. If he succeeds, it could reposition him as a latter-day William Paley or Louis B. Mayer, another mogul who began his career in the Boston area.
"Dave is not doing this for the money," says Andy Hajducky III, CMGI's chief financial officer and one of Wetherell's closest colleagues. "We're in the infancy stage of a new industry, and Dave is extremely passionate about helping to build it."
Even at the relatively ancient age of 44, Wetherell has an uncanny ability to tap into the fundamental youthfulness of the Internet. Given that the man is far from the starchy corporate type, it's not much of a stretch to imagine him as a movie or television wheeler-dealer, fast-talking and hip to all the latest trends. Except Wetherell evinces no trace of detachment, and he's not hard-bitten. On the contrary, he's boundlessly enthusiastic about the Net and the changes he believes it will bring to our lives.
When we were talking about ThingWorld.com, one of CMGI's investments, in the main conference room at Brickstone Square, Wetherell rushed out to grab his pale blue Sony Vaio laptop from his office, then booted it up to demo ThingWorld's multimedia product, which lets entertainment companies distribute audio and video content on the Web while protecting their intellectual property. Suddenly, the Chef (the lascivious Isaac Hayes character) from the TV show South Park began singing about "the Chef's salty balls." Wetherell grinned and explained his vision for digital collectibles: limited-edition multimedia objects like the Chef, which Internet users would buy and trade like baseball cards.
"He's like a kid in a candy store," says Bill Martin, one of the founders of Raging Bull, a stock talk site partly owned by CMGI. "He loves deals, and he loves technology. He's always so bubbly and excited." When Wetherell was negotiating with the 20-year-old Martin to invest in Raging Bull last fall, he invited Martin to his house for pizza to hammer out the details. "We talked for four hours," says Martin. "To a lot of [potential investors], we were just a couple of college kids. But he didn't have that perspective."
Adds Bo Peabody, founder of the community site Tripod, based in Williamstown, "He has an incredibly fresh and young outlook on life, and he's open to new ideas." After Lycos, the portal site that CMGI helped start, purchased Tripod last year, Wetherell and Peabody began seeing each other at Lycos board meetings. One night last fall, Wetherell invited Peabody to hear a jazz pianist at the House of Blues in Harvard Square with his wife and son Jarrett. The teenaged Jarrett and Peabody, 28, began talking about punk rock, which they both prefer to jazz, and discovered that they shared an admiration for a New Hampshire band called the Useless Fucks.
None of which escaped Wetherell. A few weeks later, during a conference call in which the participants were talking about iCast, the Internet broadcasting company CMGI is preparing to launch, the name of the band came up. "Dave was going through his vision of personal broadcasting, and he said, 'Imagine being able to broadcast the latest Useless Fucks concert,'" Peabody recalls. "Well, nobody else knew who they were, but Dave was able to use that band name and feel comfortable. I feel like I can relate to him in the boardroom as well as outside it, and I don't find too many people like that."
Wetherell is very much at ease with people-friends say he's never been a Bill Gates-style introvert-but he doesn't court media attention, and he's reluctant to talk about his personal life. "I'd like to know him better myself," Krista Thomas, a CMGI public relations manager, e-mailed me. "But David is a very private person, and he is just not [fond of] 'most powerful man' profiles. He feels awkward and he doesn't get them or people's interest in them."
"He's a very secure person," says a former CMGI employee. "He has a healthy ego, like CEOs need, but he doesn't look for external validation, as far as I can tell."
Coworkers say Wetherell runs on just four hours of sleep a night. As for his reputation for sending e-mails to employees at all hours of the day and night, an ex-CMGI staffer says, "Sure, he'll work at midnight and send e-mails at two in the morning, but that's maybe after a bottle of wine, and playing some loud rock-and-roll music. He works hard and plays hard."
Play, for Wetherell, centers around music, poker, golf, gardening, baseball, and birdwatching. Friends say he is just as passionate about pursuing those hobbies as he is about building new Internet businesses. "I'm sure he loves going to Herb Allen's retreat,"says Jerry Colonna, a former CMGI employee, referring to the exclusive annual meeting for media honchos like Michael Eisner, Sumner Redstone, and Oprah Winfrey. "But he's equally happy standing on his front lawn watering his roses. He had an arboretum put next to his house a few years ago, and he's very proud of that. He's a very sensitive gardener."
It's also not unusual to find Wetherell frozen in front of a window, spotting and naming birds. "When he gets into something like birdwatching," says David Andonian, CMGI's president of business development and operations, "he really gets into it." After focusing on his golf game for several years, he managed to transform himself into a four-handicap player and win the club championship at Andover Country Club.
But business demands lately have been cutting into some of Wetherell's leisure pursuits. He wasn't able to play in a CMGI-sponsored golf tournament in June because he was busy closing the deal with Compaq Computer to acquire AltaVista, and he has bowed out of a weekly poker game because of his intense travel schedule.
Within the Boston high-tech community, Wetherell is a phantom presence-everyone knows what he's up to, but few actually know him. He's more likely to be seen at events like the Herb Allen summit in Sun Valley, or the Hambrecht & Quist investment-banking conference in Snowbird, Utah, than at a Boston-area conclave.
But Wetherell is fairly well known in Andover, where he lives and works. "He'd prefer to be low-key, but he's past that level now," says Keith Caveny, a fellow Andover resident who sold his company to CMGI last year. "You pick up the Globe every day and there's a new article about him."
Boston's Internet kingpin was born, improbably enough, on a chicken farm in Manchester, Connecticut. The family later bought a dairy farm before moving to Clearwater, Florida, where Wetherell's father found work as a general contractor. The youngest of six children, Wetherell remembers joining the work force himself at the age of eight. "I delivered papers, mowed lawns-I always had a job growing up," he says. Eventually, he earned enough to buy his own mower and increase the number of customers he serviced each week.
While attending high school in the early seventies, Wetherell signed up for a computer science course. It was his first encounter with computers, and his first experience using the ArpaNet (the Internet's predecessor). He laughs when recalling his grade: a C minus.
When Wetherell left Florida to go to college at Ohio Wesleyan University, he was still uncertain about what he wanted to study. Thinking he might want to be a pilot, he enrolled in the Navy Reserve Officer Training program, but he changed his mind and wound up getting a teaching degree.
As a student teacher, Wetherell instructed high school students in math and Fortran, an early computer language. But he soon became more enamored of programming than teaching, and he felt it had more career potential. "I truly admire the teaching profession, but I don't admire the system," he says. "Programming, on the other hand, seemed to have a really good future."
After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan, Wetherell held a series of less than glamorous high-tech jobs-first as the MIS director at a medical center in Ohio, and then as a lead programmer with the Boston & Maine Railroad. His ambition was always to start a company of his own, and through his programming work, he identified several attractive business opportunities; one, for example, was creating software that would seamlessly connect the new wave of personal computers to the bigger mainframes, where all the corporate data sat.
But before he set off on his own, Wetherell took one more job, this one as a technical recruiter with Source Services, finding programmers for job openings at Boston-area companies. "It was the best job I ever had," he reflects. "It taught me about identifying talent, and that every business is a people business."
In 1982, Wetherell embarked on his first entrepreneurial venture: He started a company called Softrend, originally to develop software that connected PCs to mainframes. Eventually, Softrend evolved into one of the first companies to develop a suite of applications-word processing, database, and spreadsheet programs-that worked together.
From his work at Source, Wetherell had forged strong ties to a number of the area's top programmers, and he lured them to his new venture with promises of more autonomy and more interesting work. The compensation was "slave wages," according to Steve Kenda, one of Softrend's cofounders, but working with Wetherell had its appeal. "Dave had a vision," says Kenda, "and it was a bandwagon that I wanted to get on."
Wetherell was only 27 at the time, but already he was skilled at selling his vision not just to prospective employees, but to investors as well. Wetherell raised $3.3 million from TA Associates, a Boston venture-capital firm that also backed Federal Express and Continental Cablevision (now part of MediaOne). "He took me to meetings with venture capitalists," recalls Kenda, "and you'd have thought he'd been at it all his life."
One of Softrend's biggest rivals at the time was Lotus Development, in Cambridge, which was working on a similar suite of applications. The competition to be first was fierce. "You had people putting in 90, 100 hours a week," says Kenda. "I remember the occasional beer bash, and late-night poker sessions at Dave's house. We were doing whatever it took to get the [software] package delivered. There was a lot of unbridled ambition and hunger. We really felt we had the right product at the right time-we just had to get version one launched, get a revenue stream, and then we would've been well ahead of Lotus."
In the summer of 1984, just as Wetherell was shepherding Softrend's first product to market, the company ran into a brick wall. Softrend needed more money to promote its software, but Roe Stamps, the venture capitalist at TA who'd been Wetherell's most reliable supporter, abruptly left the firm to form Summit Ventures. "We [were] orphaned there, within months after they made the investment," says Peter Mills, managing partner of CMGI's venture capital arm, and at the time one of Softrend's cofounders. "We wound up with a partner that didn't know anything about software-he was a health-care specialist-and didn't want to know anything about software."
Before long, TA, which had promised to continue funding Softrend, changed its mind and began seeking a buyer for the company, hoping to cash out quickly. "It was like launching from Cape Canaveral, but not having the second-stage fire," says Jack McMullen, who was a member of the Softrend board at the time, and served on CMGI's board.
That experience, Wetherell says now, prompted him to become a venture capitalist, albeit 10 years later. At Softrend, he had a product with tremendous potential, but a venture capitalist without sufficient understanding of the technology "snuffed the flame out very early," he says. Later in 1984, Softrend was sold to a Texas company, BPI Software, which made accounting software. BPI never had any wide success with Softrend's product, and the market for applications suites was left to companies like Lotus and Microsoft. Wetherell's colleagues describe Softrend as a "sore point"and something that "soured him on VCs." "It was a little disheartening [for Wetherell]," says Kenda, "the lack of vision on the venture capitalists' part."
Ten years later, Wetherell would set out to create a venture capital firm that profited from a deep understanding of technology. "We wanted to focus on one industry-the Internet-and do that really well," says Peter Mills. For his part, Wetherell is terse when asked about the fate of Softrend, but he tries to put a positive spin on it: "We were too far ahead of our time, frankly." "It wasn't a tragedy, but the real potential [of applications suites] was recognized 15 years later," says McMullen. Indeed, Microsoft's application revenues, which rely heavily on Office, a suite of word processing, database, and spreadsheet programs, were $6.84 billion in 1998.
During the waning days of Softrend, Wetherell and his wife Celeste had started a family. Once Softrend had been sold, Wetherell took advantage of the brief pause in his career to make some changes to his lifestyle. It wasn't unusual for him to work 80 hours a week as Softrend approached its launch date. "I would leave in the morning before the kid was awake, and I'd come home after he was asleep," Wetherell says. "I decided to get out of software for a while, and watch my kids grow up."
Watching his kids grow up, though, didn't mean becoming a full-time house husband; instead, Wetherell simply sought out an industry that would afford him a saner work schedule. He settled on database marketing, the field that compiles lists of likely buyers of a particular product or service and targets them with direct-mail solicitations. Using his proceeds from the Softrend sale, along with financial backing from Stamps and Woodsum's Summit Ventures, Wetherell engineered a leveraged buyout in 1986 of CMG Information Services in Wilmington. The CMG originally stood for College Marketing Group, and the company's central line of business was compiling lists of college professors and their courses for textbook publishers. (In December of last year, CMG Information Services changed its name to CMGI, to signal a new focus on the Internet.)
The early going at CMG wasn't always smooth. In 1989, the company acquired Hub Mail/Inquiry Systems Analysis, a failing printing and direct-mail concern that caused a major drag on profits for several years. But Wetherell was able to identify one part of the company that might be useful to CMG in the future, and salvage it. Today, that division, rehabilitated and renamed SalesLink, accounts for the majority of CMGI's sales and much of its profits.
"No matter how tough things get, Dave always manages to keep his chin up," recalls Kenda, who no longer works with Wetherell, but still sees him socially on occasion. "He always projected a great deal of confidence, even during the dire times at Softrend and CMG."
Wetherell was a competent manager for a relatively obscure database marketing company, but he still felt as though he was destined for bigger things. "It was confining for him," says McMullen. "He was looking for ways out of that."
In 1993, David Wetherell made his move.
That was the year Wetherell first learned about a new, more user-friendly part of the Internet called the World Wide Web. He became instantly obsessed, and started puzzling over how it might fit into CMGI's business of connecting publishers with book buyers. He came up with what was then-and still is-a radical idea. What if book buyers could use the nascent Web to shop for titles they wanted and purchase them? Rather than storing books in a warehouse and shipping them to the customer like Amazon.com, the company could print and bind the books on demand at special service centers around the country. Storage costs would disappear, but books would never be out of stock, and publishers would never print too many copies.
Booklink, as Wetherell dubbed it, was a big idea-a reinvention of the entire publishing industry-but Wetherell managed to convince CMG's board to bite off one small piece of the opportunity, and commit $900,000 to starting development. It was a tough sell. CMG was in technical default on a bank loan related to the Hub Mail acquisition. Two of the three venture capitalists at Summit who were helping finance CMG at the time were against the idea. But the board gave Wetherell the go-ahead. "It was definitely a risk," recalls McMullen. "Nine hundred thousand dollars was, at the time, probably equal to the net worth of the company, if not more. [But] I had faith in Dave."
Wetherell took CMG public before he embarked on the Booklink project, against his better judgment. He thought the company would have a higher market cap if he proved it could do pioneering work with the Web, but his board and financiers disagreed. In fact, the investment bankers at Piper Jaffray, the Minneapolis firm that underwrote the stock offering, advised him not to talk about the Web at all during the company's pre-IPO road show; in late 1993, the Internet was still too far out. Even so, the stock had a lackluster debut, opening at $8, below its estimated price range.
For all its risks, Booklink proved to be one of the smartest gambles of Wetherell's career. He hired a programming team from Interleaf in Waltham, and one of the first projects it tackled was creating the software so that potential book buyers could browse Booklink's shelves-a Web browser. At the time, most other Web browsers were still academic projects at universities.
Before CMG could finish executing Wetherell's grand vision for Booklink, suitors came calling. Microsoft and America Online both needed Web browsers for their online services, and a bidding war started for that piece of the unfinished Booklink. In December 1994, a year after CMG had invested $900,000 in the Booklink project, America Online bought the browser in exchange for 710,000 shares of its stock. By the time Wetherell sold the stock, it was worth more than $70 million.
"The Booklink sale was more of a fluke-it wasn't a track record," says Ullas Naik, the analyst. "But it was a validation for Wetherell that these large companies would pay a lot of money for interesting technology."
Rather than pocketing the proceeds and simply continuing on as the newly minted megamillionaire chief executive of a database marketing company, Wetherell was emboldened by his success. It was 1995, and he decided to reinvent his company and himself. CMG would become CMGI-a factory with a new kind of product: Internet start-ups.
He started to assemble a team of players-some with traditional venture-capital experience, some without-to tap into all those large companies that would pay handsomely for interesting technology, and to right the wrongs that had torpedoed Softrend 10 years earlier.
Jerry Colonna, a technology journalist and editor who was one of Wetherell's first hires, remembers traveling from New York to Andover to talk with Wetherell about joining CMG, shortly after the Booklink sale. During the drive to his home, Wetherell said, "You want to see what I bought with my piece of the proceeds from the sale of Booklink?"
Colonna was expecting to see a Ferrari as they pulled into Wetherell's driveway. But when they entered the house, Wetherell sat down and started playing his new toy-a 19th-century Steinway concert grand piano. "He's a very good piano player," says Colonna. "He's also an extremely down-to-earth guy."
Today, CMGI is typically described as a publicly traded Internet venture-capital firm. That's half right. When you buy a share of CMGI stock, part of your money is invested in early-stage Internet start-ups, known in CMGI lingo as "the @Ventures companies," because they're funded by CMGI's @Ventures arm. CMGI holds minority stakes in these companies, which it believes will either be sold for a high price or go public.
But part of your money also goes to fund the so-called wholly owned companies, many of which sprang full-blown from Wetherell's head. He thought, for instance, that it would be useful to try to derive marketing intelligence from Internet users' clickstreams-everything people see and do on the Web-and so he created Engage Technologies, which went public in July. The wholly owneds, with the exception of the soon-to-launch iCast and AltaVista, tend to be focused on less glamorous aspects of the Internet, like Web-hosting and development tools for programmers.
The company gets its biggest jolts of income from "liquidity events"-VC-speak for companies being sold or going public. Wetherell's company has cultivated such a solid reputation for investing in and incubating successful Internet start-ups that several technology superpowers have bought into CMGI. Currently, Microsoft, Intel, Gateway, and Compaq all have stakes in the company.
Because of the connections Wetherell can make among the 40 companies in the CMGI family-helping Engage, for example, cut deals with Lycos-Wetherell is near the top of every entrepreneur's wish list of investors. "Dave definitely understands the value of getting groups of companies to work together,"says Gregg Freishtat, an entrepreneur whose last company, Telet Communications, was funded by Wetherell. "You don't only get money from him, you get to meet the right people, and that type of access and exposure was invaluable to me."
Entrepreneurs seeking the powerful synergy that Wetherell can create send CMGI more than 1,000 business plans a month. From that influx, CMGI selects about two or three start-ups to invest in. Wetherell says CMGI makes about one acquisition a month, and starts two or three new companies each year. He expects CMGI to shepherd a dozen companies to the public markets in the coming year.
By all accounts, Wetherell is a tough dealer. When asked about his negotiating skills, his friends and colleagues inevitably turn to metaphors involving cards. "He has that poker sense of being able to read the other parties at the table," says one former CMGI employee. "That's where the amazing deal strengths come from."
In person, even when he's in the midst of turbulent negotiations, leaving the room every few minutes to take part in a conference call, Wetherell seems cool as a popsicle. Nick Gleason, a cofounder of CitySoft, a Cambridge Web development firm, visited Wetherell last fall, the morning after a steep plunge in the stock market cost him about a billion dollars. "Tough day, huh?" said Gleason.
"No, not so bad. I don't watch the stock so closely," said Wetherell.
"That's very Zen of you," said Gleason.
"Yeah, I'm like that," Wetherell agreed.
Lycos executive Dick Sabot especially appreciates Wetherell's steadiness under pressure. In March 1998, Sabot was having dinner at a Manhattan sushi restaurant with him and several of Lycos' new Japanese business partners from the Sumitomo Corporation. Sabot was going to be involved in an important partnership with Sumitomo, and the dinner was his introduction to the team.
"We were sitting on the floor," Sabot recalls, "and I got a piece of soft-shell crab stuck in my windpipe. I couldn't talk, but I signaled to Dave that I was in trouble."
The two men stood up, and without batting an eye, Wetherell administered the Heimlich maneuver to Sabot three times, until he began breathing again. Then, they sat down, Sabot made a few jokes to assure the Japanese that everything was okay, and the meeting continued. "I was very grateful that Dave did not panic," Sabot says. "If he had, I might not be here now."
There's also an air of ruthless efficiency about Wetherell. He walks quickly, and he likes to do several things at the same time, answering e-mail and conducting a conversation simultaneously. He talks fast, and there's only as much space between the words as there absolutely needs to be. Though most people describe Wetherell as "very mellow," others say he "has a low tolerance for stupidity," which can sometimes lead to "cold rages." He doesn't have much patience for those who can't keep up.
That combination of perfectionism and a crystalline vision of the Internet's future often translates into disappointment for Wetherell, especially when he has to relinquish control of a company. Selling it to someone else, be it shareholders or another company, is nice for CMGI's bottom line, but it's hard on its founder because he knows he can no longer influence the company's direction. "He does not particularly get pleasure from [good] things happening," one former employee explains. "It's about what could happen. He's always reaching out for this vision that's just beyond his grasp."
Even when Wetherell sold NetCarta, a company that made software to manage content on Web sites, to Microsoft for $20 million, "he was disappointed," this ex-employee says. "[The company] didn't quite come out the way he wanted it to be. He sets unreachable expectations. But that's his drive."
Not surprisingly, Wetherell practically lives on the Web, even when he's not at work. His home office contains several computers with high-speed Internet access. "When I stay at his house," says Avram Miller, a San Francisco-based CMGI board member, "we always end up sitting in his office at 11 at night, showing each other our favorite sites."
The same goes for vacations. Last summer, while surfing the Web at his Martha's Vineyard vacation home (which sits on 10 acres with a view of Squibnocket Pond and the Atlantic), he discovered a start-up tha |
