Chapter 1. Bob Davis: Lycos: Searching out the next deal

Davis on Davis:

I'm a jack of all trades and a master of none. I'm clearly involved in a strategic role looking at mergers and acquisitions issues, but I'm also one of the company's passionate Q&A specialists, forever conducting product reviews, assessing users' experience, addressing quality issues with the product teams here.

I'm not trying to micromanage the business, but I am trying to instill a sense of fanaticism as it relates to exceptional user experience. One of the things I believe in here very, very strongly is that if you let up you lose. That's what the sign says outside my door: you let up you lose.

Our mission here at Lycos is to become the most visited network and for that we must win people's time. We try to instill in everyone here that people have a choice - they do not have to use Lycos. There are 600 million pages, 600 million choices to go to when you log onto the internet. I have to recognize that there's always a contest. I have to earn you as a user of Lycos services. We earn that through a great user experience, not an acceptable one, or a grade one one, but a great one. So that's my focus: looking at the products, making sure they're good, developing and doing what they need.