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The Big Kahuna
Why eTour Founder Roger Barnette is King of the Surf
by Lynn Lamousin
Atlanta Citymag, July 2000

Roger Barnette had an initial Internet experience that many of us can relate to. After successfully dialing-in and opening up the browser, he stared at the default main screen and thought "okay, I'm here, now what?"

He had heard a lot about Yahoo, so he ventured over to their portal page and decided to give the search engine a try. He wasn't really seeking sites on anything in particular, so he just looked around his office for topics. Seeing a Dixon Ticonderoga on his desk, he decided to give the word "pencil" a whirl. After sifting through a few of the 10,000 matches returned, Barnette realized that, "none were about pencils, except one or two, they just listed the word somewhere in their Web site."

His disappointment wasn't in the fact that he couldn't find a Web page about good old yellow #2, it was in the belief that there had to be cool sites out there, about all kinds of topics, he just didn't know where to find them. Instead of a search engine for researching specific data, he instead wanted to find a surf engine that, based on your interests, placed Web sites in front of you and let you decide which ones were worthwhile. As Barnette explains it, "The thought occurred to me that it would be great…if someone who knew what was out there would just show me things that they thought I would like."

An Ocean of Information
Using the tools available at the time, the only way to find an assortment of information on the Internet was to specifically conduct a search on every topic of interest. Since this was not practical, his solution was to develop the "surf without searching" concept that is now implemented at eTour, a company he founded in 1997 and which he heads as President and Chief Executive Officer.

At www.eTour.com, an Internet user simply fills out a free membership form that asks questions about hobbies, interests and lifestyle. The answers are then used to build a totally individualized surfing experience. Each time you return to eTour a "control panel" frames the bottom of the screen and allows you to browse through your own personal library of sites. The pages presented are carefully selected by an editorial staff and placed in the eTour catalog without charge, but companies can pay to have their sites given priority rotation.

Since he saw the experiences as closely related, Barnette borrowed the idea for the control panel from the television remote. Barnette believes that sitting at a computer monitor surfing the Internet can be a similar experience to sitting in front of the television and flipping channels. A lot of times you know you want to watch TV, but you don't know what's on. With the Internet you may be online wanting to be informed or entertained, but you don't know exactly what you are looking for or how to get there.

Before Barnette came up with the solution to this problem though, he mulled it over for a couple of years as he continued his unsatisfying Internet journey. In the summer of 1997, before his second year at Emory University's Goizueta School of Business, he interned at an Internet company in San Francisco. The founder was a friend from his undergrad days at the University of South Carolina, and the internship gave him exposure to the relatively new field of Internet advertising. After seeing the prices companies paid for banner ads, Barnette knew that his idea to turn America's predilection for channel scanning into a new way to surf the Internet was a viable concept. In the past he had seen the need for users to find sites, but now he also understood the need for sites to find users.

As Barnette explains it, "Stats are that over 51% of Web users have never clicked on a banner ad. You immediately discount half your audience right there and it's expensive and at the end of the day you still don't know who clicked on your banner ad. (With eTour) people who want 20,000 women to view their Web site, or who want 50,000 people that like football to visit their Web site (get it). We guarantee targeting that you just can't get anywhere else on the Web."

Returning to Emory and the final year of his MBA program, Barnette spent the fall of 1997 writing a business plan, and recruiting technology friends for the venture. One of the first on board was Jim Lanzone who now serves as eTour's Vice President of Marketing. At the time Lanzone was a fellow business school student who had also spent the summer interning at a .com company and devising his own plan for an Internet startup. He recalls their first business meeting occurring in October of 1997 over lunch at the Righteous Room on Ponce de Leon Avenue. After hearing Barnette's pitch Lanzone says he "saw so much potential in his nascent business model that I immediately dropped my own plan and hopped on board with Roger to co-found the company."

Three others: Jennifer Bonnett, Richard Carrano, and Yong Zou, were recruited into the venture and rounded out the original five person staff. Barnette always treated the fledging project as a serious business and Lanzone says, "when it was just the five of us starting out, Roger actually had us fill out vacation request forms…and we all had other jobs or were still in school."

Cyber Tsunami
As his time at Emory was winding up, working on his resume and applying for a job at someone else's company never crossed Barnette's mind. Instead, he says he "just went for it and didn't hit any hurdles." The leaps and bounds he took are evident when you look at the climbing company numbers for employees, office space, venture capital, and registered users.

The five founders are now joined by over 150 employees, known as TourHeads, and the number continues to escalate as a scheduled launch of the UK version of eTour gets closer. Plans are also in place for other continent versions to be up by the end of the year. As Roger observes he hasn't succeeded alone, "You're growing from (a staff of) 14 to 150 in 10 months - it's quite an undertaking and you can't do it without really dedicated, world class, people around you; but there's no question, it's a lot of work."

With the boom in employees comes the need for more space. Their first office on Peachtree Street was 2,400 square feet and only housed the company for a few months. Next came a building on Pylant Street in Virginia Highlands that went through several different build outs over the last year before finally reaching 12,000 square feet and maximum capacity. Currently, they are moving into three and a half floors and 62,000 square feet of space in downtown Atlanta's Peachtree Center. The new space has room for 350 people, which Barnette half-jokingly states, "should last us another year."

Of course hiring employees and leasing office space takes serious capital. Using skills learned in his "Entrepreneurship on the Internet" class at Emory, Barnette was able to gain introduction to venture capitalists. The first funding for the company came in January of 1998 when Roger raised $100,000 of seed money. Two and a half years later, eTour boasts total funding of $37 million. So how does Roger Barnette get people to hand over millions of dollars on an untested marketing technique? Some insight was provided by Sigmund ("Sig") Mosley, President of Imlay Investments. Mosley is a member of the eTour Board of Directors and one of its investors. He states that, "Roger Barnette was the primary reason for us investing in eTour. I wasn't sure that the idea would work, but the concept was definitely unique. Roger was so incredibly optimistic and enthusiastic about the potential of his company that I knew if there was any way to make the idea a success, Roger would be the one to do it."

Now you have the employees, you have the office space, you have the funding…does the "build it and they will come" theory work? For Roger Barnette it did. After his graduation from Emory in May of 1998 the business gained his undivided attention and the product was officially launched in June. By the end of 1998 there were already 70,000 registered subscribers. From there the numbers began surmounting at an incredible rate. They reached 1 million members in February of this year, and currently boast over 2.5 million. There doesn't seem to be any end in site as the number continues to rise by 15,000 to 20,000 every day.

Shuffleboard on the Lido Deck
So what does Roger Barnette like to do when he's not planning international expansion and signing up investors? Well, with the crazy hours spent at the headquarters in Atlanta, and in the air traveling to the sales offices in New York and San Francisco, he admits "that I work a lot and that it is very consuming. That being said, when I have downtime I like just having downtime. I don't go bungee jumping or skydiving, or anything fun like that, but I'd like to." He is quick to add that the satisfaction received from his work is a source of pleasure and states, "It's personally and professionally very rewarding to come up with an idea that you think adds value to consumers and to Web sites. To see it grow and give back to the community in terms of jobs - It's a great feeling."

Since Barnette spends so much time at the office himself, it's only natural for the eTour culture to a reflection of his enthusiastic attitude. He has created a fun, stimulating, no dress code work environment and has stocked the company break room with plenty of diversions including foosball, bumper pool, billiards, pinball and shuffleboard. As Jim Lanzone describes it, "Roger's personality is a unique combination of professional and hip. He's a pretty conservative and traditional guy by nature. He tucks his shirts in, he doesn't swear, he keeps his house neat. On the other hand, you have his long, shaggy haircut, the Ben Folds Five cd's, the cool art on his walls. eTour's culture is much the same way."

With the clever, creative staff he has hired it's not surprising that Barnette has been on the receiving end of a prank or two. Last August he fired up his office computer and opened his usually family-friendly eTour start page. He was surprised to be greeted by a site that had scantily clad women on its homepage and other soft-core pictures. He immediately sent an e-mail to several members of his staff alerting them to the fact that the site had somehow gotten into the rotation, and voicing his concern that the company's editorial process was not stringent enough. After sending the message he went back to eTour and clicked on the "next site" button. He was shocked to see a hard-core porn site. As Barnette explains it, "I'm beside myself by this point. I knew these Web sites could not have passed our editorial process, and so now I'm thinking someone broke into our database and replaced all of our Web sites with porn sites - and all of our users were seeing nothing but porn sites. I'm freaking out, so I run out of the office, and go to our CFO's office and screamed 'click on a site, click on a site!'"

The CFO's eTour experience was normal, so Barnette began to suspect that someone used one of the company's biggest selling features, it's unique user personalization, to play a joke on him. Returning to his office he continued to click through several more "adult" sites before being greeted with a screen that read, "Happy Birthday, Roger! From the eTour Staff." He was so busy cultivating multimillion dollar investment deals he had not realized it was his 29th birthday.

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