CHAPTER 4Joe KrausCofounder, Excite
Joe Kraus started Excite (originally called Architext) in 1993 with five Stanford classmates. Though they began by developing technology for information search and retrieval, their decision to go into web search ultimately made their site the fourth most popular site on the Web in the late 1990s.
Excite got venture capital funding in 1994 and launched its web search engine into a market crowded with competitors. Excite went public in 1996 and in 1999 merged with high-speed Internet service @Home.com to become Excite@Home.
In 2004, Kraus and Graham Spencer founded JotSpot, an application wiki company.
Livingston: How did Excite get started?
Kraus: We decided to start a company together before we had any idea ...
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