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Technology Stocks : InfoSpace (INSP): Where GNET went! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dr. Zax who wrote (5927)	5/21/1999 9:06:00 AM
From: B. A. Marlow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28311

GNET "press coverage," Doc. From "Fortune": To read the full cover story: cgi.pathfinder.com From "Net Stock Rules: Masters of a Parallel Universe" (c) 1999, Fortune/Time, Inc. At Go2Net, one of the few Web companies that has been making acquisitions from the beginning (it went public in March 1997), CEO Russell Horowitz has been buying a Website a quarter, doling out stock to build up a network of sites like search engine Metacrawler, stock chat site Silicon Investor, and Website host Hypermart. Boasts Horowitz: "All of this allowed us to create a company that's now one of the top 20 on the Web in terms of measured reach and that has some of the top brands on the Web, with a cumulative cash investment of less than $6 million." In deciding how much stock to fork over in an acquisition, *Horowitz, like CMGI's David Wetherell*, says he can't rely on traditional yardsticks like earnings or even revenues. Instead, he says, "we have a formula of looking for technology-driven sites--sites where the incremental cost of scaling up is minimal relative to the magnitude of the revenue opportunities." Once Horowitz finds an acquisition target, he moves fast: "You've got to have this SWAT team mentality," he says. "You can't spend four or five months doing due diligence." Go2Net has been richly rewarded for its decisiveness. Its stock is up almost 700% this year, its market cap was at $1.8 billion in mid-May, and in March it snagged a $300 million investment from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Horowitz may well succeed in using his stock to build a big, profitable company. He may not. But in the meantime, others who want to participate in the Web merger frenzy have to play by rules set by him and other aggressive acquirers.