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ActiveSite

Founded: July 1996 Status: Evolved into When.com (March 1998) What it was: Internet consulting firm / deliberate startup incubator Tagline: "Your website needs a product manager"

Founders

All four were product managers:

  • Ted Barnett — previously at PF.Magic and EO
  • James Joaquin — previously product manager on Newton at Apple, then Diamond Multimedia
  • Tony Espinosa — previously at Apple, then Diamond Multimedia (with Joaquin)
  • Joe Beninato — Ted met him while interviewing producers at PF.Magic

The Concept

ActiveSite was a consulting firm by design, but a startup incubator by intent. The strategy: get a bunch of friends working together, earn enough money consulting, see what clients need, and if a pattern emerges — raise money and start a company.

The premise was that early websites were terrible. Typically built by some IT person following orders from a marketing person who didn't understand technology. The result: awful brochureware. ActiveSite's pitch was that websites needed product managers — people who could bridge the gap between technology and user needs. "Active" because the site would be database-driven and dynamic, not just static brochures.

Clients

  • Bank of America
  • Microsoft
  • Other companies the founders knew through personal networks

Office

Located in San Francisco. (The team later moved to Redwood City to be closer to engineers — in the late '90s, it was "weird to have a tech startup" in San Francisco.)

Ideas Explored

While consulting, the team would regularly pitch ideas to junior VC friends:

  1. Radar Software — automate the product development process using intranets. Engineers make their own time estimates that bubble up into schedules, instead of product managers forcing Gantt charts on everyone. "Not a dumb idea — still not time for it though." Too ambitious, and their hearts were in consumer products
  2. Property management software — tenants could log into a web page and report issues ("my radiator's out"). Visited real estate offices and discovered they didn't even have computers. Dead end
  3. When.com — the shared calendar concept Ted had been prototyping in Visual Basic since ~1995. This was the one that stuck

Significance

ActiveSite demonstrates a deliberate, repeatable startup methodology: consult → observe → identify patterns → build. It also established the founding team that would take When.com from idea to $150M+ AOL acquisition in under two years. The four co-founders' complementary skills and trust in each other was a key advantage — "with four people, we could debate an issue, and if we couldn't vote on it, I could just say 'let's make this decision' and we'd move."

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