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Q & A: Ideas by the Gross

With Idealab, founder Bill Gross got his dream job: coming up with business ideas. Here he explains why he's the perfect man for it.

Q: How do you come up with the ideas for these businesses?

A: Just about every idea I've ever pursued has been something that I pretty passionately feel I would want in my life. One time I happened to talk to three billionaires in one day--a complete coincidence of timing. One was Ben Rosen, one was Steven Spielberg, and one was David Geffen. With each of them the conversation turned to how they pick the talent that they bet on. I asked Ben Rosen, "How did you pick Compaq and Lotus? You must have a great knack for knowing what other people would want." He goes, "Wait a minute, I have no idea what other people want. I only know what I want. With Compaq, I just knew that I needed a portable to carry around." Same thing with David Geffen: he said he knows what he likes, and he totally trusts it, and if he's wrong, he's wrong.

Then Steven Spielberg and I were with our sons in a limo on the way to the Consumer Electronics Show. And my son, David, was asking Steven all sorts of questions about Jurassic Park: "Why did the dinosaur do this at the end? And how come you had them in the kitchen?"--and so on. So I said, "You know, Steven, you really have an incredible sense of what the public would be fascinated with; you can really get in their minds." And he said, "What are you talking about? All I know about is me. I know what I would love to see at that moment." So it finally clicked that everyone was telling me, "Use the force, Luke."

Q: What happens when outsiders approach you with ideas? What criteria do you use to decide which ones Idealab should invest in?

A: Our selectivity in picking a deal is not based on the economic return--although we'd like to make a good return. It's based more on whether we have unique skills that can really add value to the idea. Some ideas have come to us that normally would have been great venture deals, but we had nothing to add.

Q: What are examples of ideas you've turned away?

A: There was a company that had a tool to help corporations produce Java codes for their internal intranets faster. They showed me this tool where you could drag and drop objects, and it would spit out Java codes. It was totally awesome. It was gorgeous. And we had absolutely nothing we could do to improve it. We had no technology; we had no knowledge of that marketplace. We said, "We're not going to be giving you any value added except for money, and you might as well take money from someone else." There have been a few others like that. That one was the most painful.

Q: Why not just give them some money, and if you don't add value, so be it, but there would be all the more return for Idealab's investors?

A: Because for a given investment, we're going to get a much higher return when we can add value. We add value through shared knowledge and creativity. That's why we think we're going to build better companies. Obviously, we now have to prove that.

Resources: Much of Bill Gross's dogma on a company's need to find--and dominate--a narrow niche comes from the book Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It, by Al Ries (HarperCollins, 800-331-3761, 1996, $25). The most successful businesses, contends Ries, are those that tie their product to a single concept in the customer's mind: Volvo and safety; Federal Express and overnight; Prego and thick. The more specific the focus, says Gross, "the more everybody in the company can have every blood vessel in their body thinking about that focus." Gross's devotion to Ries and his sometime collaborator Jack Trout verges on scary. "I worship them now," he declares. "They're my religion."

ENTERTAINNET, Steve Damron, 7336 Santa Monica Blvd., #628, West Hollywood, CA 90046; 213-993-6565; http://www.entertainnet.com

IDEALAB, Bill Gross, 790 E. Colorado Blvd., Suite 200, Pasadena, CA 91101; 888-IDEALAB; http://www.idealab.com

INTRANETICS, Savannah Brentnall, 790 E. Colorado Blvd., Suite 200, Pasadena, CA 91101; 818-841-7307

PEOPLELINK, Steve Glenn, 2950 31st St., Suite 386, Santa Monica, CA 90405; 310-581-4299; steveg@peoplelink.com

THERMO ELECTRON, John Hatsopoulos, 81 Wyman St., Waltham, MA 02254; 617-622-1000

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