Women and Venture Capital Are a Fine Mix at iVillage
August 3, 1998
By LISA NAPOLI
NEW YORK -- When Barry Diller hired Candice
Carpenter to start Q2, an upscale home shopping
channel for QVC Inc. in 1994, the words of wisdom he
offered, she said, ran counter to everything she had
learned about business.
"He told me, 'Anything
worth doing is worth
doing badly,"' said Ms.
Carpenter, who had
been a consumer
marketing executive for
American Express and
president of Time-Life
Video and Television.
"Getting used to
imperfection and
evolving on the fly, for
me, was the most
important takeaway."
And indeed, the notion
that flaws are necessary ingredients of a new business
prepared her for what she describes as the "wild
adolescence" of the Internet, whose full surge she
would experience a year later. After a management
change upon Diller's departure from QVC, Ms. Carpenter
also left the company and took the leap from old media
to new by creating the Web site iVillage.com with a
group of investors that included America Online.
iVillage.com began with little more than the premise
"Internet for the rest of us" and a focus on baby
boomers. After encountering its share of false starts
(like a site, "Vices and Virtues," now defunct, about
the competing forces of indulgence and health), it has
evolved into the leading women's online "community" on
the Web. It attracted more than 2 million different
visitors during June, according to the Web measurement
company Relevant Knowledge.
"Join our community of smart, compassionate, real women
today," the iVillage.com home page invites visitors,
offering an array of news, columns, advice and tips.
Most important, though, it offers ample opportunity for
women to contribute their own views through chat
sessions and message boards on topics like "Sex After
Kids" and "Anger Management."
Although the company has dealt with
turnover of personnel and a
refocusing of its mission, the one
constant has been Ms. Carpenter and
her ability to raise financing for
the enterprise. The company closed a
fourth round of venture capital
financing in May with $32.5 million
from 10 sources, bringing the total
sum raised to $67 million.
What is it that investors find attractive about an
Internet business for which profits are not yet in
sight and which bills itself amorphously in its new
television advertising campaign as "Your Home on the
Web for the Stuff that Matters"? Besides the large
women's audience and its drawing power among
advertisers, iVillage.com's lure to investors is Ms.
Carpenter herself, analysts say.
"She's a media celebrity," said Janet Stites, publisher
of Alley Cat News, a trade publication for investors.
"She's an intriguing personality. Those things are very
important when you're raising money."
Especially when the medium for which one is raising
money is untested. Particularly in the early days of
the World Wide Web, when it was perceived as a
technological oddity as much as a burgeoning mass
medium, the fact that Ms. Carpenter, 46, was not
another twenty-something Internet prodigy with no
previous business experience helped attract investors
who wanted to test the waters.
That iVillage.com shifted gears from a broader audience
and chose to focus on a demographic in demand didn't
hurt, either.
"They picked a category that's very interesting," said
Habib Kairuz, the managing director of Rho Management,
a recent investor in iVillage.com. "The trend continues
to grow very nicely." Women now make up half of all new
Internet users, as opposed to just a third two years
ago.
"The competition was not like
that in search engines," Kairuz
said. "This was a management
team that really looked at what
worked on the Internet in
establishing a new brand. They
are not looking at duplicating
other mediums by simply
putting their content on the
Web."
In fact, iVillage.com has
positioned itself as what could
be called the un-content
provider. The emphasis is more
on what visitors to the site can
contribute on the particulars of
parenthood, relationships and
workplace issues, rather than on
top-tier columnists spouting
advice and other more
traditional editorial offerings
used by established media
companies.
Even its coming series of books,
to be published by NTC
Contemporary, a division of
Tribune Co., consists of information culled from the
users of iVillage.com's first Web offering, Parent
Soup.
Along with more traditional marketing tactics, like a
television campaign, the company has hired Catheren
Woolard, a city councilwoman in Atlanta, to do
grass-roots community building, organizing volunteers
around the country to act on behalf of iVillage.com,
and introducing the site to various nonprofit women's
organizations.
This, Ms. Carpenter says, maximizes the strength of the
medium in which she dwells. "We offer the intimacy of
community with the scale of media," she said,
describing iVillage.com as "utilitarian."
Ms. Carpenter and her co-founders, Nancy Evans and
Robert Levitan -- who are also New York media veterans
-- oversee a staff of more than 200 who are scattered
across two buildings in converted loft space in
Manhattan's Silicon Alley.
Their site now attracts nearly twice the traffic of its
nearest competitor, Women.com, according to Relevant
Knowledge. Such sites deliver demographic gems to
advertisers: high-income, well-educated women.
Ms. Carpenter has tried to generate revenue from three
different sources: advertising, sponsorship of specific
areas of the site, and product sales, including in its
own online store, iBaby.
It will take not only those elements but a lot more
capital for iVillage.com to prevail, Ms. Stites said.
"Experienced management in the corporate world doesn't
translate into experienced management in the start-up
world," she said.
For her part, Ms. Carpenter said it took a "gunslinger"
to work in this industry. "In the Internet, you've had
to place bigger bets in order to win," Ms. Carpenter
said. "I would not want to be doing this without a
media background."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company |
