Sticking to The Business

While some entrepreneurs in the current boom are proving that there are second acts in America, others are quietly proving that the first act isn't over. Case in point: Jake Winebaum. After starting Disney's first big Web effort, he joined with Earthlink founder Sky Dayton to create an "incubator" of businesses called eCompanies. One famous excess was a reported $7.5 million payment simply to secure the domain name for a new company called business.com. When the bust came, too many of the incubated babies didn't make it. But business.com kept going and, under Winebaum's stewardship, is a profitable "search engine for business" supported by lucrative pay-per-click ads. This week he will introduce work.com, a spinoff designed to provide "guides" (written not just on assignment but also by volunteers). Winebaum, 47, also blows off steam by extreme athletics; the weekend before he came to New York for our interview, he participated in the Everest Challenge, a two-day bike race in the Sierras. He finished third.

LEVY: The idea of work.com is to provide information to entrepreneurs. Isn't there already plenty of information around for them?

Winebaum: They're actually overwhelmed by the information. Type in "accounting software," on Google and you get 203 million results. They don't have time to go through that to find the accounting- software answer they're looking for. And articles they read have an editorial viewpoint but can't lead you to solutions on the Internet. So we created these guides that basically combine the informative editorial nature of an article with the action orientation of search results.

Why do you expect people to write guides for you for free?

You'll get a lot of satisfaction out of helping entrepreneurs solve their problems. There's also a pure business motivation. If you're an expert on 401(k) plans, and you want to help business people figure that out but also perhaps use your services, you write a general guide on 401(k) plans and you have a member profile that will then link from your guide.

Business.com is basically a search engine for companies. How have you managed to compete in the age of Google?