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Technology Stocks : Exodus Communications, Inc. (EXDS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (1339)	10/5/1999 9:59:00 AM
From: William F. Wager, Jr.	Respond to of 3664

Here's an interesting WSJ piece on the trials of EH... Surmounting Setbacks Helps Executive Win War, October 5, 1999 ELLEN HANCOCK SPENT the first 28 years of her career steadfastly climbing the rungs at International Business Machines. Eventually she became a senior vice president and the highest ranking woman at Big Blue, overseeing 15,000 people. Then five years ago, she was suddenly thrust out of the company she considered her "family." Her then boss, CEO Louis V. Gerstner, told her he wanted a new executive with different skills in her job. Ms. Hancock hadn't written a resume or networked for a job in decades. She was also shocked that she had been fired from the company she expected to retire from some day. Since then she has rebounded several times. She hopped first to National Semiconductor and then to Apple Computer, only to be ousted by founder Steve Jobs in a senior management shakeup after he rejoined the company. While her self confidence took another pounding, she dusted off her resume again. Today the 56-year-old Ms. Hancock is chief executive of Exodus Communications, an Internet-systems and network-management firm that has grown nearly fivefold since she came on board in March 1998. Her journey provides a management lesson on the importance of figuring out how to bounce back from career setbacks. Nearly all managers trip at some point in their careers, suffering missed promotions, firings, business failures or other setbacks. The ability to handle these setbacks well can make or break an executive's later climb to the top. For Ms. Hancock, who calls herself a "driven Type A" executive, being ousted from IBM was the most difficult to move beyond. Although other veteran colleagues were fired by Mr. Gerstner at the same time, she felt shocked when he told her he wanted someone with marketing skills, not her technical background, to run her software networking divisions. "It was very emotional," she says tersely. MR. GERSTNER GAVE her a month to clean out her office, time she says she sorely needed. "It's amazing what you accumulate in 28 years, and I had to figure out what was IBM's and what was mine," says Ms. Hancock, who subsequently vowed to "travel lighter." Since leaving IBM, she stores personal papers at home and keeps her business office lean. Initially, she felt lost about how to go about looking for a new job. She took a friend's advice and hired an outplacement counselor, who helped her write a new resume and make contacts with executive recruiters. "I never wanted to use outplacement more than once, but that first time helped," she says. She also realized that during her long stretch at IBM, she shouldn't have had her secretary refer recruiters who called her to IBM's attorney and human-resources department. Now, when recruiters call, "I talk to them even when I'm not looking for a job," she says. "I can at least say hello, and recommend other names." But she found her next job, and subsequent jobs as well, through her own business contacts. "In the final analysis, the odds are that someone you networked with or worked with before will get you to your next job," she says. A few months after leaving IBM, she received a call from Gilbert Amelio, then CEO of National Semiconductor, whose wife had read about her ouster. Ms. Hancock had worked on several computer networking projects with Mr. Amelio. Eight months after leaving IBM, she became chief operating officer at National Semiconductor. AND WHEN MR. AMELIO became CEO of Apple in 1996, she followed him there as chief technology officer. "I loved Apple," she says, but the romance was short lived. Along with Mr. Amelio, she left in July 1997, soon after Mr. Jobs rejoined the company as part of Apple's $400 million acquisition of Next Software. This second firing, while less shocking, still hurt and left her shaken. She told friends that while Mr. Jobs was gracious in face-to-face meetings, he was calling the executives he ousted "bozos." Ms. Hancock took a few months off to spend time with her husband. But then she started job hunting again. What propelled her to seek a second rebound? "I want to end my career on an exclamation point, not a question mark," she says. Never defensive about her situation, she told friends and acquaintances, "I'm looking for a job." At times she felt bereft without a business card, but she rejected friends' advice that she make up her own cards and call herself something like "president of the Hancock company." While she got strong feelers for East Coast jobs, she didn't want to leave the entrepreneurial climate of Silicon Valley. So she waited for an offer there, even though being out of a job made her anxious. "People tell you to relax, but that's hard to do when you don't know how the book will end," she says. She heard about the Exodus position from board member Dan Lynch, who was also an acquaintance, and soon realized that being ousted from Apple might have been her biggest career break. "I tell people now that I would have killed myself if I hadn't taken this job," she says. "I didn't know I had to go through this passage, but the light at the end is wonderful." At Exodus she is a mover behind Web hosting, one of the hot new trends in cyberspace. It provides maintenance, high-speed network connections and other services to companies that want to get on the Web. She can use her technical and management expertise, while being part of the new economy. And she stands a good chance of making lots of money. She ranked No. 5 in an executive recruiter's recent study of 1998 cash and option awards for senior officials at about 70% of public Internet concerns. On paper, those options were valued at $151.3 million earlier this year. --Bill

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (1339)	10/6/1999 3:18:00 PM
From: William F. Wager, Jr.	Respond to of 3664

Dow Jones Newswires -- October 6, 1999 DJ Exodus Commun CEO: Co. 'Focused' On Competition NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Web-hosting company Exodus Communications Inc. (EXDS) is ready to take on competitors like BBN Technologies and MCI Worldcom Inc.'s (WCOM) UUNET, said Exodus Chief Executive Ellen Hancock. "We are extremely focused in our competition against many of these people now," Hancock told CNBC Wednesday. "We win 75% to 80% of bids today. We are supply constrained, not demand constrained." She said the rising costs of Web hosting mean "if you want to host your own Web site it'll cost six times as much as having a company like Exodus to outsource it for you." Exodus' competitiveness was enhanced Tuesday when it became a customer of Oracle Corp.'s (ORCL) Business OnLine Internet application hosting service. Hancock called the partnership an "excellent deal" that provides Exodus with more access to Oracle software. -By Laura Elizabeth Pohl, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5392