Tellme Networks is turning the phone into a voice-driven browser that lets you talk to the Web. Better yet, the Web talks back.
Mike McCue has figured out the secret to attracting star employees to his Silicon Valley startup: free pizza.
Free pizza at midnight, to be precise, pizza that McCue - respected Netscape veteran and now CEO of Tellme Networks - will personally deliver to the Stanford computer lab, hoping to cajole a handful of top students into quitting school and joining his startup.
He comes armed with more than just extra cheese. Even months before its May launch, Tellme has generated some serious buzz. For one thing, the company brings together onetime archrivals in the browser wars - McCue and 22-year-old Web whiz Angus Davis, a fellow Netscapee, are teamed with Hadi Partovi, an erstwhile leader of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team. Former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale and ex-Microsoft exec Brad Silverberg, who haven't exactly seen eye-to-eye on antitrust issues lately, both invested in Tellme and sit on its board. And the company has raised $47 million in funding from the Valley's competing venture capital studs - Benchmark Capital (which funded eBay, Webvan, and Red Hat) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (Amazon, AOL, and Netscape).
Oh, and then there's the service itself, which promises to combine the power of the Web with the convenience of the telephone by creating what's being called a voice portal. Tellme will offer content and commerce via a toll-free number, with users navigating the service through simple voice commands. It's not the entire Web on the phone, but rather an interactive service powered by voice-enabled XML files - sort of a scaled-down Yahoo!-by-phone. Tellme is only one player in this hot new sector: More than half a dozen voice portals are expected to launch in the next several months, in a mad-scramble replay of the original Net portal rush.
But before any of this can happen, there must be pizza: 35 large pies snatched from the arms of a wide-eyed Domino's owner in Palo Alto and loaded into the backseat of McCue's 740i.
"It's not hard to get money these days," McCue says, in what has become a Valley truism. "It's getting the right people that's difficult. I spend 60 to 80 percent of my time on recruiting. It's by far the most important thing that we're doing. We're assembling the DNA of a company that's going to be around for the next hundred years."
A hundred years! Most dot-coms can't see much further than 100 days, but McCue's got the entire 21st century staked out.
"Building for the long term is the difference between a great company and a mediocre one that gets bought by somebody," McCue says.
Before he's driven a block, the windshield begins to steam up from the heat of the pies. McCue flicks on the defrost and also fires up the Beemer's onboard GPS navigation system, which provides driving instructions ("In 500 feet, turn left") in an assured, directory-assistance tone. McCue doesn't need directions to the computer lab, he just seems to like the technology: the soft glow of the dial, the confident voice, the satellites silently monitoring his progress from space.
Three cars carrying members of the Tellme team follow in procession. McCue and company could have staged their guerrilla recruitment drive during the day, but Stanford officials aren't crazy about startups raiding their computer science department for talent. Besides, Tellme isn't interested in any student engineers who think they have something better to do than sit in front of their computers at midnight.
"We're basically looking for people without lives," McCue says, laughing.
But the mission is dead serious. With the launch date approaching, McCue desperately needs to hire more good people, especially coders. To that end he's staged late-night pizza frenzies at Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley, hoping to cherry-pick the top two or three students in the computer science and business programs. So far, the plan's paid off: For about a thousand bucks' worth of pizza, Tellme has landed two from Harvard Business School and made serious offers to 20 other college students.
"I'm very, very aggressive about people quitting college to join Tellme," says 32-year-old McCue, who passed up academe for IBM, later launching his first startup, Paper Software, which he eventually sold to Netscape. "I just tell them, 'Hey man, the time to go to school is during a recession. Not now. Not when you have opportunities like this.'"
"If possible, in 500 feet, make a U-turn," the navigation system urges. There's no place to turn around, and besides, the computer lab is straight ahead. McCue ignores the voice and a few moments later pulls into a parking lot just off the Stanford quad.
The Tellme posse quickly unloads the pizzas and charges up to the lab on the second floor of Sweet Hall. Instant pandemonium. A pack of about 75 hungry students descends like jackals tearing into a flock of sheep. Several look as though they've spent their entire college careers inside the lab. One programmer has skin so pale it's almost translucent, like the larval coating of an insect. The Pale Programmer picks up one of the large pepperoni pies and retreats into a corner to enjoy his own personal 12-slice.
In the midst of the chaos, McCue leaps onto a table and balances a pizza box on the fingertips of his right hand. Looking more like a demented waiter than the multimillionaire CEO of a hot startup, he launches into his spiel.
"Hello, everybody!" he shouts over the jungle din. "Enjoy the pizza, courtesy of Tellme."
"What do you guys do?" one student asks through a mouthful.
"We're taking the best advantages of the Internet and bringing them to the telephone," McCue replies. "You'll have access to content like stock quotes and traffic, weather and sports. You can buy things on the phone, like airline tickets. You can say the word 'pizza' and you'll be automatically connected to your favorite pizza place ..."
This is one of McCue's favorite examples, a way of demonstrating how Tellme aims to become a part of the lives of ordinary folks, not just the computer-savvy. But in this crowd, the example is probably a bad choice. Why get pumped up about a startup that's pioneering a new way to buy pizza when you can just hang out at the computer lab and be handed a free pie by a total stranger? The students move on to bottom-line concerns.
"When are you going public?" someone shouts.
Hadi Partovi, the vice president of production, shakes his head softly at the question. It's become a common problem in the Valley. Tellme wants workers who are interested in the company and its technology, not just in cashing out and moving on to the next big thing. McCue has talked privately about taking Tellme public later in the year, but he isn't offering details.
"We'll see about going public," McCue tells them. "Soon."
"How much funding do you guys have?" demands another student.
"$53 million," McCue shoots back, including a preliminary round of funding. That shuts up the kids. But not for long.
"Who's your competition?"
"No one," answers McCue. That's a bit of a fudge, since a host of Web-enabled phone services are poised to launch. Yet for the moment, at least, the voice-portal space is virgin territory.
"How many people are in the company?"
"We have 55 now, but we're growing fast," McCue says. "We're building an awesome team. Just awesome."
Some of the students look as though they think McCue is laying it on a bit thick. But the fact is, Mike McCue thinks a lot of things are awesome, not to mention excellent, incredible, andamayyyzing. Even in a Valley crowded with relentlessly motivated entrepreneurs, he's one one of the most tirelessly upbeat people you're likely to meet, a humming dynamo of positive energy. "That man," says Jim Barksdale, in his red-clay Mississippi drawl, "has more enthusiasm than the good Lord had the right to give anyone." After all, only an incurable optimist could send a startup into the churning Internet economy and proclaim that the enterprise will be around in a hundred years.
As the questions skew toward stock options, McCue winds up with a recruitment pitch.
"We're looking to hire the best," he says. "We're building something that'll be used by literally anyone with a telephone, billions of people. So check us out at tellme.com or send us email."
McCue jumps off the table and the crowd disperses. A handful of students, however, circle McCue and Partovi, peppering them with questions. This time, the queries are incisive. How accurate is your voice-recognition system? What about the international market? Do you have any partnerships with wireless companies? This is the reason that Tellme came to the lab - to find the half-dozen top students who have a passion for what the company is doing.
Half an hour later, McCue climbs back into his car, clutching a fistful of résumés.
"I'd say there are five possible hires, out of which maybe two will be the right fit," McCue says. "But man, I could use two engineers right now."
"In 600 feet, turn left," the navigation system pipes up.
McCue turns right and heads back to the Tellme office, his car still reeking of pizza.
On an overcast spring morning, McCue and Partovi assemble the Tellme team for a gathering that's equal parts company meeting and evangelical revival. With a life-size cutout of Austin Powers looming over the proceedings from a nearby wall, McCue delivers his pitch.
"The next few months are the most important we've had - perhaps we'll ever have - at Tellme," McCue says. "We need to stand and deliver now! It's simply not an option for us to ship late."
The "we've gotta hit our ship date" meeting is, of course, as common a fixture at technology companies as the stoner in the mail room. But the stakes are particularly high for Tellme, and the tension in the room is palpable. So far, McCue has moved quickly, forming Tellme in February 1999 and rounding up $53 million in funding in less than a year. With Tellme's high-profile players, the infusion of big-name venture capital, and a gathering flock of competitors, there's mounting pressure to deliver.
"I may be going out on a limb," says investor and board member Brad Silverberg, "but I think it's Tellme's game to lose."
"I don't view the voice-portal space as the risk," adds Benchmark's Kevin Harvey. "This is going to be big. They just have to execute."
The corollary to the investors' optimism is that, if Tellme fails, it could set back the voice-portal market before it even gets off the ground.
"If Tellme doesn't handle this right," says Mark Plakias, an analyst with the Kelsey Group, "it could be the Newton of this medium."
Needless to say, McCue is convinced Tellme is a winner. The idea is elegantly simple: combine the power of the Web with the convenience of the telephone. With a phone service, there's no barrier to adoption, no additional hardware to buy, no software to download, no plug-ins to configure. Simply by calling Tellme's toll-free number, users will be ushered painlessly into the Net age.
"This is an idea that every consumer instantly understands and wants to use," says McCue. "I explain this to my mom and she gets it right away. Even people who have never been on the Internet will want to use this, because to them, it's just using the phone. It's a super-fertile opportunity."
"We're trying to make three minutes in a person's life really magical," adds Tellme cofounder and director of production Angus Davis. "This is going to be huge."
McCue & Co. figure they're leveraging several trends. Recent advances in voice-recognition technology have made the software ready for prime time, at least for the dozen or so global commands and several hundred keywords, such as company names for stock quotes. (Tellme's software won't need to be "trained" by users to recognize words the way more complicated systems have to be.) Major corporations like UPS, Sears, Charles Schwab, FedEx, and United Airlines have already installed similar voice-recognition phone systems to route customer calls and handle simple transactions with positive results.
"Speech recognition is a huge advance to the telephone interface," says William Meisel, a consultant and publisher of the newsletterSpeech Recognition Update. "Instead of only 12 buttons, the user can say any number of keywords. It turns every telephone into an Internet appliance."
Tellme also sees good news in the dramatic growth of wireless devices, which supply a large and growing pool of mobile users who want to stay connected. Currently, there are 400 million wireless phones and devices worldwide, nearly three times the number of Internet-enabled PCs. For drivers, voice systems are safer and easier than Net connections involving tiny screens and keyboards. And as the Internet becomes more deeply integrated into millions of lives, Tellme is betting people will come to demand the one-click convenience of the Web in other devices.
In the US, there are about 220 million people who own a phone, compared with around 78 million who have Net access. While PCs are clearly superior for complex visual or text-laden applications, the phone is perfectly equipped to deliver quick bursts of information - movie listings, weather reports, stock quotes. Tellme is betting that while AOLers searching for movie times are still dragging Steve Case's latest letter to the trash, Tellme callers will already be on the way to the theater.
But before Tellme can fulfill McCue's dream of being "the most significant phone application on the planet," it has to get up and running.
"At Microsoft, we'd say a ship date, but no one would actually believe it," Partovi tells the crowd. "We can't have that happen here."
McCue and Partovi run down the formidable list of things to do before launch. Hire a CFO as well as dozens of business staffers and programmers to more than double the workforce over four months. Get the bugs out of the basic launch-time offerings - news headlines, traffic and weather reports, an airline finder, sports updates, stock quotes, and a blackjack game. Deliver 200,000 voice samples drawn from a beta test to Nuance Communications, the company supplying the kernel of Tellme's speech-recognition system. Start the marketing and advertising campaign. Choose a logo.
"Speech recognition is an inherently imperfect technology," says McCue. "It's not going to be perfect the first time out. But it'll get better as we refine it."
While Tellme's software has beta-tested well under ideal conditions, the recognition system has struggled in less-than-optimal scenarios. The software can handle the uhs, ers, and ums that many people insert into their commands, but background noise, especially from a moving car, is still causing problems. Tellme hopes to avoid such trouble by limiting the number of commands to a dozen or so. McCue calls the approach "respecting the software," by which he means not respecting the software too much.
"Yesterday we got 250 calls from just 1,100 users," says McCue, delivering the beta-test report to the assembly. "That's huge - absolutely huge. But only 50 percent are repeat callers, so we need to find out why. Look, someone's calling now!"
Everyone spins toward the wall, where a string of Christmas lights has been rigged up to flash whenever a test-bed caller dials in. The dancing lights spark a burst of applause.
Next, McCue gives a demo of the latest application to be completed, the sports module. After calling an 800 number and hearing Tellme's jingle, users can access sports news simply by saying the command "sports." Saying the keyword "basketball" triggers that sport's current scores; saying "76ers" immediately calls up that team's score. The service will allow for personalization (by phone or via Tellme's Web page), so that news about a caller's favorite teams and stocks, local weather and traffic, and even horoscope info are automatically delivered at the beginning of the call. Eventually users will be able to set up an electronic wallet containing credit card information (or transfer a wallet they've already established online), allowing for one-grunt buying.
Tellme is also serious about being fun. Bursts of sound effects accompany each module - the roar of the crowd for sports, a clanging bell for stock quotes. Say the word "wrestling" and a mellifluous announcer will intone, "Sorry, wrestling is not available at this time ... and it's not really considered a sport anyway." The company hopes to use recognizable broadcast voices in the future.
Tellme's plan for making money is loosely based on the traditional Internet portal business model: Drive lots of traffic to the site and then cut deals and partnerships to monetize the eyeballs - or in Tellme's case, the eardrums. Tellme's services will be accompanied by the aural equivalent of a banner ad - "The weather, brought to you by United Airlines." The company plans to partner with airlines as well as both offline and online retailers (such as eBay, Amazon, and Webvan) that will pay Tellme for sending customers to their phone lines or Web sites. Any site can, without much trouble, extend its HTML files with VoiceXML, a nascent markup language that lets Web content be accessed by phone. Just as an HTML page retrieves specific image files, VXML can call up particular audio clips and deliver them over the telephone. By partnering with Tellme, McCue tells the gathering, sites don't have to supply the audio prompts, maintain the phone lines, or deal with the voice-recognition system; they need only put on their servers a set of files that access Tellme's prerecorded audio.
Tellme wants to blossom quickly into a full-fledged ecommerce portal, connecting buyers and sellers in much the same way that Yahoo! does. In later iterations, Tellme will be able to do things even the Web can't do, like give directions or suggest a restaurant or hotel based on a wireless user's location. Ultimately, Tellme will roll out premium services, such as a flight-tracking system that notifies users of cancellations and delays and then rebooks flights for them. The service may also be incorporated into other devices, such as set-top boxes, but the basic idea of speaking to a machine and getting back information, goods, or services will remain the same.
None of the Tellme services alone is expected to be a killer app. Being able to access all of them through an easy-to-navigate toll-free phone line is what the company hopes will drive eardrums to the service. At first, Tellme will rely on word-of-mouth and viral marketing to publicize the service to early adopters. Later, the campaign will move to radio, print, and outdoor advertising to reach the Great Unwired.
McCue wraps up the meeting with a stirring call to battle that lacks only a brandishing of spears.
"There's no reason why we can't launch an awesome service that just totally stuns people," McCue tells the crowd. "So let's really show them!"
By rights, the workers should run back to their cubes cheering. But it's tough to be that upbeat when you're facing a shitload of work. After the employees have drifted back to their desks, McCue seems spent, musing over the enormity of the task ahead. The first year of a 100-year-old company is always the hardest.
"This has never been done before," he says softly. "It's very complex to build an open platform that's going to scale to literally hundreds of millions of people. And then have it be compelling and reliable, have the audio sound good, and a business model that doesn't get in the way of a consumer's experience ..."
McCue's voice trails off. Behind him, the Christmas lights are silent.
Angus Davis is pretty sure that Tellme will work out better than his last phone scheme, the one that helped get him thrown out of boarding school. Davis was a junior at Andover Academy in Massachusetts when he discovered that the school's new phone system had a security hole: Simply by dialing an access number, students could make free long distance calls. Word of the access code quickly made the rounds, and soon, hundreds of students were enjoying the pleasures of toll-free long distance calling.
"Some kids were dialing porn numbers," recalls Davis with a smile. "One girl down the hall called Hong Kong a lot."
Eventually, the ruse went the way of many high school scams. School officials swooped down, and most students received a stern reprimand. Davis, however, was asked to leave. He says he practically begged officials to let him go, since he was already unhappy at the prep school. Being a habitual troublemaker probably didn't help his cause, either.
"I was always cracking up cars, having parties in my parents' house off campus," says Davis.
About the only thing to which he applied himself was computing. Davis would alternately bombard the Netscape newsgroups with rants about how the company was blowing the browser war and raves about new initiatives the company was launching. The postings caught the eye of Netscape officials, who in 1996 hired Davis as a freelance contractor to host newsgroups and write for the company's development magazine. That led to an internship and, the following year, a full-time job offer from Mike McCue, then a Netscape VP. To get Davis on the team, McCue not only had to talk him out of going to college, he also had to convince Davis' father - a lawyer in a long line of lawyers - that joining Netscape was the right move. When the 18-year-old signed on with the company, he was its youngest employee ever.
Ever since, Davis has flourished as The Kid, the apple-cheeked Web whiz who seems to have an instinctive feel for what works online and what doesn't. At Tellme, Davis oversees the service's applications - deciding which ones to include, how to configure them, and what they should sound like. He's converted his office nook into the dorm room he never had, complete with a bunk bed for all-nighters.
"He's so young and boyish, but he's wise beyond his years," says Brad Silverberg. "He's an interesting combination of enthusiasm and naïveté."
"I see myself as the voice of the customer who says, 'It's not good enough,'" offers Davis. "I want real-time stock quotes, not quotes that are delayed 20 minutes. I want audio movie trailers to accompany the movie listings."
Hadi Partovi, 27, ran into Mike McCue around the same time Davis did - though McCue wasn't aware of the meeting. While still at Microsoft, Partovi had crashed a Netscape conference posing as a developer from another company, hoping to gather intelligence on his rival. "I even shook Mike's hand," smiles Partovi. "He had no idea who I was."
Born in Iran, Partovi moved to the US with his family in 1984. At age 8, he was programming on his father's Texas Instruments calculator, and quickly moved on to a Commodore 64. He graduated Harvard near the top of his class with a degree in computer science. He then joined Microsoft's IE team and became a favorite of Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft's president and CEO.
"I'm not like Angus or Mike, who break away from the crowd to do something entirely new," says Partovi. "I'm more the type to take the thing I'm doing and just do it better than anyone else."
After helping Explorer overtake Navigator (and even rubbing it in by making a madcap commando raid of his own, dumping a giant wooden "E" on Netscape's lawn), Partovi was looking to get into the Internet gadget market. When McCue approached him about starting a Web-enabled phone service, Partovi jumped at the chance.
"The moment Mike said, 'You don't need a new device to make this service work,' it fell into place for me," says Partovi. "It's all about bringing people who want something to people who want to sell it. That's what eBay and Yahoo! do."
Partovi acts as Tellme's feet-on-the-ground to Davis' and McCue's heads-in-the-clouds. Partovi sets deadlines, monitors progress, and assesses risk factors. He also conducts the toughest interviews of job applicants, kicking off meetings with prospective salespeople by declaring, "I've got $100. Try to sell me something."
"He's a machine when it comes to execution," McCue says admiringly. Others compare Partovi to a very smart bulldozer.
But Tellme begins and ends with McCue, who's on his fourth high tech company. The eldest of six children, he was introduced to the digital world at a computer club in ninth grade. He sat down at one of the terminals and typed, "Can you talk?" The computer replied, "Syntax error." McCue was smitten.
In high school, he wrote several successful videogames (includingNight Mission), earning nearly $40,000 in licensing fees. After graduating, he decided to pass up college (as he would later counsel others to do) to join IBM as a graphics specialist.
In 1989, he left Big Blue to found Paper Software, which eventually developed a virtual reality modeling language plug-in that enabled Netscape Navigator to display complex graphics. When Netscape posted a link to McCue's plug-in on its site, the response crashed his server. Money was tight in the early Paper Software days. To make ends meet, McCue worked odd construction jobs, digging sewer ditches and hanging siding.
But by 1996, Paper Software had grown into a $20 million company, and McCue sold it to Netscape, which made him its vice president of advanced technology. There he was considered to be bright, likable, and enthusiastic - some say too enthusiastic.
"He'd get Barksdale all excited about a wild idea the technology couldn't support," recalls one former Netscaper. "Then he'd go back to engineering and tell them they only had a short time to do something no one had ever heard of."
McCue admits that, as Netscape's "chief evangelist," he spent most of his time pushing new initiatives rather than figuring out how to implement them.
"At Netscape, I wasn't always able to have hype and reality at equilibrium," McCue says. "But I think I've learned from that experience - how to get the right people in place so the ideas get executed." He learned another powerful lesson, too. "I vowed that I'd never let another company drive the way I do business in the way Microsoft drove Netscape."
After AOL gobbled up Netscape in 1998, McCue left the company, itching for another startup. He began talking to Davis and Partovi about a consumer service that could be used by millions, an idea that morphed into Tellme. With this venture, McCue hopes now to answer his first computer question: "Can you talk?"
Gregg Taylor knows all about Tellme - he's seen the Tellme players checking out his phone service.
Taylor is president of Starfree, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based company that plans to launch a nationwide voice portal by mid-year, provided it can secure funding. Last July, Starfree rolled out a pilot service in the Charlotte area, providing news, weather, sports, and traffic information to Alltel wireless customers. Shortly after launch, Taylor noticed that a customer from California with a tellme.com address had registered for the service. Starfree pushed the interloper off the network, only to have the user reappear with a Hotmail address. Once again, Starfree ousted the snoop.
"They got through the third time during Hurricane Floyd," Taylor says with a chuckle. "We offered three days of free nationwide phone service, and they used that time to get back on the service and check us out."
Salt Lake City-based Talk2.com is also beta-testing a voice portal with a major wireless carrier, looking to expand its 10,000-customer base to half a million by the fall. In a full-pageWall Street Journal ad, Talk2.com modestly anticipated "blasting Yahoo!, Lycos, and Infoseek completely off the planet by 2001." BeVocal of Mountain View, California, and TelSurf Networks, based in Westlake Village, California, plan to jump into the fray with Tellme-like services this spring. Last December, Phone.com, the leading provider of Net-browsing software for wireless phones, spent $285 million to purchase the voice-technology company @Motion, though Phone.com will offer its voice-access services to wireless providers, rather than directly to consumers. In March, Lucent Technologies launched PhoneBrowser, a Web access system for mobile carriers. Europe is also getting into the act. A London startup, iHelped.com, founded by former Netscaper Sam Sethi, launched a voice-portal service for European wireless users in April.
With so many sound-alike services poised to flood the market, voice-portal operators are already having a hard time making their companies stand out. When asked to name one difference between his company's service and Tellme's, Ric Alvarez, BeVocal's VP of marketing, paused for a moment and then blurted, "We're going to be consumer-centric."
As opposed to, say, heliocentric.
Tellme's biggest advantages are its seasoned team and ample war chest. The company will have time to tweak the service to see what works.
"I'm kind of jealous of Tellme," Starfree's Taylor admits. "They're driving Hummers, and I'm driving a Subaru."
Tellme's investors view the already crowded field as proof that McCue & Co. are onto a good idea, even though the fact of companies rushing headlong into a new tech space has not always been a reliable predictor of success.
"I love the idea," says Jim Barksdale. "But I'll be the first to admit we've got a ways to go to prove it to people. There's a lot of risk. The basic question is, 'How can we offer the advantages of the Web to phone users in a way that's not intrusive?'"
Tellme points to glowing feedback from beta testers as cause for optimism. But only half of those tested used the service more than once, and even their usage patterns can't be extrapolated to the general population: The test bed consisted mainly of friends and family of Tellme employees. Once Tellme launches, McCue expects road warriors and heavy computer users to be the early adopters, but it's clear that the real play is to the nearly 50 percent of American households that aren't yet online.
Tellme will live or die by how compelling its service is, and the handful of applications being rolled out initially are up against a formidable opponent: habit. Movie listings can be found in any newspaper or on MovieFone. News and sports updates are never more than a flick-of-the-dial away. Radio stations broadcast rush-hour traffic reports every few minutes. (Not that these reports solve the gridlock itself.) And the pizza-ordering technology used by millions of people seems to work just fine, thank you.
"I think voice-enabled services are inevitable," says John Dalton, an analyst for Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The question is when."
But like any entrepreneur worthy of the name, McCue sees opportunity where others see peril. In the Internet portal wars, Yahoo! prevailed, not because its technology was fundamentally superior, but because more users enjoyed the overall experience - the look and feel of the interface, the usefulness of the applications, even the attitude conveyed by the brand. (And being first to market didn't hurt either.) McCue believes the voice-portal battle will be won in much the same way, and he's positioning Tellme to be the sector's Yahoo!, the fun-but-functional favorite of millions.
"I fundamentally believe in the space, I really do," says McCue. "But I realize someone could come in and take over the market from us. It could all be meaningless if we don't deliver on the service."
With the launch fast approaching, McCue still has a big decision to make: choosing the logo. He sits down with representatives from the San Francisco marketing and design firm Eleven (named in part for the "goes to 11" joke in This is Spinal Tap), and begins to sift through hundreds of proposed logos spread out on a long conference table.
There's Tellme written in dozens of typefaces, from Times New Roman ("Classy," McCue says) to Bubbledot ("Too tech-y"). There's Tellme rendered in lowercase letters, in all caps, and with the M capitalized. "I hate it when people capitalize the M," McCue says, and that variation is never seen again. There's a version with a space between "Tell" and "me," and another written as one word with a period at the end.
"It needs a period," McCue says. "I want it to read like a sentence. I want to create a new word."
Additional design elements are suggested and just as quickly rejected: dialog balloons above the company name, a squiggly line that looks like static, a ripple of sound waves, a swoosh. There's an orange-and-white '70s-style rendering ("TooWelcome Back Kotter," McCue declares) and a logo featuring a silhouette of a head bisected by a diagonal arrow ("This reminds me too much of the Kennedy assassination"). The color blue is out because that's AT&T's color. Purple is too trendy. Orange is so passé.
By meeting's end, McCue has pored over hundreds of logos but still hasn't found one that feels right.
"It has to be timeless," McCue says. "I don't want people to look at this years from now and say, 'Oh, that's so Year 2000.'"
What distinguishes Mike McCue from most Internet entrepreneurs is that he's not just thinking big, he's thinking long - far into an unknowable future. McCue expects that, by the time most dot-coms and even he himself are long gone, Tellme will be thriving, like a 22nd-century Bell Telephone Company. Convincing millions of consumers to change their daily habits is an enormous task, as the developers of the Newton discovered to their dismay. But McCue is banking his company's future on a simple philosophy: Build it and they will call. Now, comes the hard part - waiting for the phone to ring.
