L'autre Bill

BusinessWeek Online, A Stirring at Idealab; Bill Gross backed some of the dot-com boom's most innovative startups -- and its biggest flops. Now he's mulling his first IPO possibility in years, 04/04/2006

He's an entrepreneur with nine lives. Bill Gross, founder of the Pasadena [Calif.]-based technology firm Idealab, rode the dot-com rocket as high as anyone in the late 1990s. His Internet "incubator" hatched dozens of companies with names such as Tickets.com, WeddingChannel, and CitySearch. But by 2000, the one-time billionaire was scrambling. Idealab laid off workers, closed offices in New York and Silicon Valley, and negotiated settlements with angry shareholders who sued him to get their money back. Lately Gross has been hatching his comeback. On Mar. 21, Idealab shareholders approved the purchase of a $50 million personal loan from Bank of America (BAC) that Gross had taken out to buy the company's stock back in the boom days. Gross argued that the company was making a good investment, paying only $20 million for the loan, which he'll pay back in full, with interest, plus $1 million-a-year in fees over four years. … Although many of his ideas were flops -- online retailer eToys, most notably -- Gross can rightly claim his share of successes. Overture Services [formerly GoTo.com], an early Idealab creation, popularized the concept of advertisers bidding for key words in Web searches -- later to become the foundation of Google's multibillion-dollar stock market valuation. Yahoo (YHOO) bought that company in 2003 for $1.7 billion.