Monday, September 12, 2005

Movers & Innovators

New Lycos leader looks to lift portal back up

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

As the new chief executive officer of Lycos Inc. in Waltham, Alfred Tolle has one mission - to restore the Internet portal to its previous glory.

Naturally, there will be new innovations and services as the company repositions itself, but Tolle said working with a known quantity in the marketplace is a good foundation from which to start.

"I travel around a lot now and when I tell people about Lycos they say 'oh, the guys with the dog. Are they still around?'" he said. "We have a very strong brand recognition, but no one knows what we are doing."

Tolle comes to Lycos from Daum Communications Corp., an Internet portal, e-commerce and media distribution company in Asia, and the new parent company of Lycos. The Korea-based company purchased Lycos from Madrid's Terra Networks for $105 million last fall with the hope it could use the Lycos name to quickly gain market share in North America.

There has been plenty of market discussion that includes wondering aloud whether the disappearance of Lycos under the Terra regime was a result of corporate mismanagement. While Tolle will not go as far as to place the blame solely on the Terra-Lycos management, he points out the previous corporate structure was convoluted, and that attitude filtered down to the company's 200-plus U.S. employees.

"When I got here, people weren't thinking they were a Lycos employee," he said. "They thought they were a Wired employee or an AngelFire employee (properties of Lycos) or what have you."

Since he started, Tolle has been working hard to not only bring back the community atmosphere in the employee base, but also re-establish similar feelings in its users. From an outsider's point of view, Tolle's first act was to launch a redesigned web page, designed to present and easily navigate content from itself and its partners, as well as prominently displaying user-generated content.

Internally, he is using smaller strokes.

"The first thing I did was to bring the coffee back to the office," he said. "I don't really have a top-down approach, but more of a bottom-up approach. It is the little things that bring people together. I am aiming to encourage people to communicate what they want to do and what they can do. It is a group effort, and when we succeed, it's not for my benefit, but for the benefit of the group."

In addition to his java coup, Tolle has also brought back several former Lycos executives to help in the company's repositioning, including Senior Vice President and General Counsel Dan Sullivan and Chief Content Officer Brian Kalinowsk. "We're focusing on the creation of the symmetry of what Lycos already did and placing it back in the marketplace," he said.

For the future, Tolle aims to keep the company moving steadily, but aggressively, forward. Plans call for Lycos to focus on its offerings in North America, and eventually expand into other regions, particularly Asia, where Tolle has considerable experience through Daum and another former employer, Bertelsmann AG, where he led the German company's Far East and Southeast Asia division.

If all goes well, he said, a future public offering is not out of the question; possibly in 2007.

"We have a good team lined up," he said. "People who believe in Lycos and have a deep knowledge and understanding of what Lycos is and what Lycos can be. Simply put, we want to be No. 1 again."