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Excite: Timing is everything
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July 9, 1998: 9:30 a.m. ET
Internet company CEO says barriers to entry have risen for startups
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - For Internet company Excite Inc., timing was everything.
In an interview on CNNfn's Business Day, Excite Chief Executive Officer George Bell said Thursday its early entry to the market was a key to building his company into the No. 2 Web portal site.
A company trying to enter the hot Internet portal market today, he noted, would have a much more difficult time making a name for itself.
"If you were to build a Yahoo! or an Excite today, the cost of doing so would have to be measured in the billions of dollars," Bell said.
"We've been out there, so we own mindshare with people. We've spent a lot of money building that brand and we've made those investments at a time when there hasn't been 10 or 20 or 30 pretenders to the throne. We only had a couple of [companies] in the marketplace. Ask yourself [when was] the last time a venture capital firm funded a new search engine."
Bell also said Excite has been "an aggressive dealmaker" to build its brand, noting the company has made nine acquisitions in the last two years.
Excite's biggest deal was its two-year agreement to provide content and advertising for Netscape Communications Corp.'s (NSCP) Netcenter site. Bell shrugged off analysts' criticism that Excite spent too much money when it fronted Netscape $70 million for the deal.
"We booked $21 million of advertising against that down payment in the first 12 days of selling," Bell said. "All of a sudden, the speculation that we overpaid went away."
Even with the speculation that Excite paid too much for the Netscape alliance, investors have been as high on its stock as they've been on other Internet companies.
(Click here to see a chart of Excite's 52-week stock activity)
While companies such as Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) have seen double-digit price swings in recent days, Bell said he doesn't concern himself with how investors react to Excite's stock.
"My business every day is to grow a small company into a larger, more stable media company over time," Bell said. [274K WAV] or [274K AIFF] 
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