Start Me Up

The plot is familiar: two ambitious Internet geeks graduate Stanford business school, devise a lucrative idea for an e-business, get funded by a prestigious venture-capital firm, set up shop in dingy offices, hire a lot of people, generate buzz, go public. The 15-month-old Internet start-up Della & James hasn’t had its IPO yet, but so far it has nailed down the idea (an online bridal registry), the VC (Kleiner Perkins), the hiring (15 to 70 employees in six months) and the buzz (everybody in the Valley has heard of Della & James). But there are some twists: their office is more Pottery Barn than grunge. The ambitious geeks didn’t bother to graduate Stanford. And they’re not geeks; they’re two well-adjusted married women.

While the hiring this summer of Carly Fiorina as the first female CEO of Hewlett-Packard was considered a seismic event among the Valley’s pocket-protector set, members of the dot.com generation barely shrugged. For many of them, the boss already is a woman. The boom in e-commerce–and the relative unimportance of engineering expertise, where men have ruled–has produced dozens of young entrepreneurs like Della & James’ founders, Jessica DiLullo Herrin and Jenny Lefcourt: business-savvy women running Internet companies that cater mainly to women, peddling everything from wedding gifts to cosmetics to knitting. “Women are looking for more than a search engine,” says Herrin. “They want the shopping experience on the Web. And if you’re going to sell to women, you’ve got to understand women–and there’s no better way than to be one.”

Having just locked up a sizable second round of venture capital, Della & James (from O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi) has become an object of both envy and contempt among other start-ups. (“You can’t even call them a start-up anymore,” grumbles a friend and fellow entrepreneur.) Herrin, 26, and Lefcourt, 30, come off as the girls who were too smart to talk to you in high school. Herrin had an outline for her wedding-registry business even before she entered Stanford in the fall of 1997. “I wanted to do something entrepreneurial,” she says. “The M.B.A. wasn’t the end goal.” She soon met Lefcourt, who confided that she was exasperated with the nuisance of buying wedding gifts. “I said, ‘Ohmigod, I have a business plan for that,'” Herrin says. “That was our love-at-first-sight moment.”

They skipped spring break–and most of their classes–to finish their plan. In May 1998 they secured VC funding. The next month, they quit Stanford. “It wasn’t a hard decision,” says Lefcourt, sitting in the company’s office, which is luxurious by start-up standards. “The things I was trying to get out of business school I’m getting right here.”

Lefcourt and Herrin are poster girls for the Valley’s new emphasis on business creativity. “I’ve never been conscious of being a woman in doing this,” says Herrin. But there are still moments when it confronts them. When she walked into a meeting with Kleiner Perkins, Lefcourt “looked around and thought, ‘This room is huge and filled with men.’ It occurred to me then that I must be a woman.” And yet their pitch was convincing precisely because they could explain the nuances of wedding registries to highly credulous men. “We had an instinctive understanding of something they didn’t really get,” Lefcourt says.

The product line may have factored into the selection of former Apple executive Rebecca Patton, 43, as CEO. But the crucial issue was to hire an experienced manager to run the place. “The control thing was totally unimportant to us. Several people have told us that’s a female characteristic,” Herrin says, as if she wouldn’t know one way or the other. –R.R.