Nirav Tolia Cofounder, Epinions

Jeffrey Rayport: Could you have done what you did in the spring of '99 in today's environment?

Nirav Tolia: Well, they say that, you know, hindsight is 20/20. So I don't really even remember what the summer of '99 was about, because we were working so hard and it was just sort of this big blur. I think the biggest difference between the market then and the market now is the amount of money you can raise. So for example, when we started Epinions, we didn't have a real business plan. We had a great concept, we had what we felt was a very strong team, and we had 16 slides on a PowerPoint presentation. We presented that to the VCs, and were able to raise $8 million. We weren't exactly sure where the revenue was going to come from, we weren't exactly sure what the value proposition or endgame for Epinions was. We didn't even really know how big the market was. Today, I think you need to have answers to all those questions. So whether or not you can complete a website as quickly as we did, I think that you can probably do. But getting the funding, and maybe even hiring people, because in general people are a little more skeptical to just jump from their established jobs to dot-coms. I think those two things would be very difficult to do today.