Getting Started

Allow myself to introduce... myself. My name is Joe Kraus and Bnoopy is a blog about entrepreneurship -- thoughts, lessons learned, open questions. It's all stuff I'm thinking about right now in the midst of starting a new company. My background is that I was one of the founders of Excite. Then I co-founded DigitalConsumer.org and now, I've got a new project still in stealth mode.

Bnoopy, pronouced like Snoopy, was the code-name of Excite when we started the company in the garage of a Palo Alto house right out of Stanford. Bob Cringely told us a story in 1993 about a Korean company that came out with a doll that looked exactly like Snoopy. They came up with the brilliant idea of evading the trademark police by calling it Bnoopy. Sneaky. Needless to say, we liberated the name from the doll manufacturer and took it for our own. Thus, Excite was born.

In Bnoopy I want to explore some of the issues I'm facing in starting a new company. I also want to reflect on some of the lessons learned from Excite and see how they apply the second time around. Hopefully in the process this will be useful to someone other than just me. Here goes...