An edited transcript of their conversation follows. There is this land-grab feeling that if you do not settle the territories quickly, you will never be able to. This rallying cry is certainly helpful to motivate people within those companies, and certainly it can help motivate investors to supply the money for these advertising campaigns. It also helps bring some drama to it all. It's hard to see how people are going to recoup these tremendous advertising expenditures.
People have to become comfortable with the Internet before they start shopping.
Unless people have really concentrated on debugging their customer service, people won't stay. You started WAIS when no one thought anyone could make money on the Net, and it became profitable. Today it's almost heresy to suggest Internet startups should be profitable. You spent all of your time trying to explain what the Internet was. The demands from the public market are going to start to go back to profitability as well as market share.