Yet this is a sector plainly still in diapers. The Internet's business potential blossomed into public view less than six years ago and its most experienced people tend to be under 30 and are unseasoned in the ways of board rooms and banking houses. Flint, at Polaris, said another frequent technique is to elevate a top-flight marketing expert to chief executive. The reasoning is that in the current frenetic marketplace for Internet stocks, a new company's prospects for success rest heavily on getting its product to market as fast as possible. But that, in turn, has brought a shortage of skilled marketing people to fill the positions these people vacate.
Biotechnology is a problem area, too, for different reasons.
The field, while now 20 years old, is seen still full of promise for eventually discovering important drugs. But it has yet to yield many successes. Many companies have failed outright or have run out of money as the development of these therapies has taken far more time and money than expected. Linda D. Sonntag of Axiom Venture Partners of San Francisco, said such thin pickings in a highly specialized field mean a typical search for a biotech chief executive takes six months to a year to complete. It was Sonntag who was responsible for hiring Spence, former chief executive at Emerson Hospital in Concord and founder of the ultimately unsuccessful Spence Health Centers chain of women's medical clinics, to run Consensus Pharmaceutical.