Internet Tsunami
Bringing Up Baby
College Daze
Painting, by the Numbers

Hiroshi Mikitani (MBA '93) is the founder, president, and CEO of Rakuten, Japan's leading online shopping destination. He believes that because the Internet allows merchants to circumvent the many intermediaries who jack up prices in Japan, "it is going to completely rebuild the Japanese economic system, much more so than in the United States," the New York Times (June 7, 2000) reported.

Merchants, ranging from toy stores to fishmongers, pay a monthly fee to access Rakuten's e-commerce software and customer database. Merchants also enjoy low-cost advertising by signing up for Rakuten's service. As for customers, in addition to making purchases, they use Rakuten for online auctions and chats about the site's vendors.

According to Business Week (July 7, 2000), Rakuten, founded in 1997, has 3,100 vendors, attracts some 70 million page views per month, and in the first quarter of this year had operating profits of $1.9 million on sales of $4 million. Mikitani, formerly a banker at the Industrial Bank of Japan, became a man with a mission after attending HBS: He founded Rakuten, he told the magazine, because "I wanted to set up a real Internet business, a model for other start-ups in Japan to follow.

Bringing Up Baby As a Walt Disney Co. executive who helped turn around the company's Euro Disney operation, Laura McCartney (MBA '93) knew plenty about problem solving and strategizing in the corporate world. But as a mother, she also knew from personal experience that shopping for maternity clothes is a daunting task for even the most capable, accomplished women. So in 1997, McCartney made the leap into e-commerce with eStyle, Inc., a dot-com backed with some $60 million in funding that sells clothing and accessories to expecting mothers. Last April, she added kidstyle.com, a clothing line for children. On top of that, her second child arrived in June. "Motherhood is all about being flexible in a fast-paced environment, being tolerant, and welcoming change," McCartney told Business Week (June 26, 2000). "Working in the Internet is the same." Based in Los Angeles, eStyle has grown from 6 to 175 employees; McCartney does not reveal sales figures for the company, but with "e-tailing" these days looking as challenging as child-rearing, she'll be calling on all her formidable skills to help her start-up grow strong and healthy. RETURN TO THE TOP OF THE PAGE

American parents wholeheartedly believe in the importance of a college education, but relatively few are saving enough for that not-so-distant day when Junior's whopping tuition bills will start rolling in. Enter UPromise, Inc., a Brookline, Massachusetts, start-up. The new company, whose president and COO is Jeff Bussgang (MBA '95), intends to transform "Americans' lust for spending into college savings," the Boston Globe (July 13, 2000) reported.

Companies that partner with UPromise will offer customers rebates on purchases in the form of contributions to a tax-deferred fund. According to UPromise, a family of typical income and spending patterns might accrue as much as $50,000 after fifteen years of participation in the company's program.

"Finding money for college is one of the biggest problems families face these days," noted Bussgang. "Our goal is to help solve that problem, taking advantage of the fact that companies are desperate for programs that will create customer loyalty." Bussgang and UPromise's venture capital investors will donate as much as half of their personal stakes in the company to a scholarship fund for low-income students.

UPromise's launch is scheduled for this fall.

You could call Richard Feigen (MBA '54) a dealer in commodities, but he might bridle at that characterization. An internationally known dealer in fine art who has been in the business for more than forty years, Feigen told the Boston Globe (June 27, 2000), "I really am a collector. I love to buy. I don't like as much to sell." In addition to maintaining an impressive private collection, Feigen has sold works to more than one hundred museums through his New York firm, Richard L. Feigen & Co. His new book, Tales from the Art Crypt, (available at Amazon.com) is an outspoken memoir of his art-world experiences.

Feigen left a career on Wall Street in 1957 to open a gallery in his native Chicago. A second gallery followed, the very first in Manhattan's SoHo district. These days, with more museums housing more art, with fewer old collections to disperse, and a finite supply of masterworks, Feigen sees art dealing as "a dying business. I don't know whether it'll still exist in fifty years."

Meanwhile, if you'd like to pick up a conversation piece -- for example, Titian's Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (price tag: $12 million or so) -- Feigen is the man to see. But act now. "There's so much money out there," said Feigen, "and there are very few objects."