@LARGE
A diploma deferred

By Scott Kirsner
Globe Contributor, 2/28/2000

Ashley Keller's mother cried when he got accepted to Harvard, and she cried again last summer, when he told her he was taking a leave of absence (he was careful not to use the words ''dropping out'') to start an Internet company. His dad got up from the dinner table and didn't speak to Keller for two days.

''The initial reception was not warm,'' says Sean Carmody, who, along with Keller and Jason Magnus, left Harvard after his sophomore year to seek his digital fortune. ''I told my father'' - a banker with Chase Manhattan - ''that to do this right, we had to dedicate ourselves fully to it, commit ourselves to excellence. I was met at first with incredulity, then this wall of resistance.'' Before long, the trio's parents got used to the idea.

Unlike Bill Gates, who left Harvard to start work on the company that would become Microsoft, the three young men promised to return to college and get their degrees. Then they hit their parents up for money.

''Not only am I leaving Harvard,'' Keller says with a chuckle, recalling the conversation, ''but I'd like you to whip out your checkbook.'' Seriously, though: They raised a million from their family and friends, and another $2.5 million from other private investors.

This Wednesday, the trio will unveil the beta version of Why.com, the site they've been working on since school resumed without them last September. It's an intriguing concept, and also a startling example of how quickly intriguing concepts can turn into real companies in the dot-com economy. Think of it as Zagat's for the Web.

The concept was hatched last May, when, to celebrate the end of the semester, the three friends wanted to go out to a fancy dinner.

Instead of relying on a single critic's review of a restaurant, or asking a friend, they turned to the Zagat guide, which distills hundreds of consumer comments about a restaurant into a compact paragraph.

They wound up at Radius. (''Good food, but loud,'' Carmody opines.) Why, they wondered, wasn't there a way to find interesting and useful Web sites in the same way, relying on the opinions of a large group of fellow users?

Why.com will allow users to rate sites they like and dislike, and contribute comments. As the database of ratings and reviews grows, others will be able to search the site, and get a list of search results based on the sites' popularity.

So if I'm searching for sites related to the Red Sox, the top results would be those that had gotten the most favorable reviews from other Why.com users. And you can have your search results categorized according to various criteria, like ease of use, design, functionality, or content.

To make sure the quality of the ratings is high, Why.com will reward users for contributing reviews, and they'll also let users critique one another's reviews. So if I produce a gushy write-up for a friend's Sox site, and someone else gives my review a thumbs-down, the value of my review in the system drops slightly. Same thing if I pen a pan that no one agrees with.

They also plan a telephone-based service to help neophyte Net users find the best sites, and a research offering that will interpret users' opinions for firmsseeking to improve their online presence.

Last summer, Carmody, a well-spoken (former) government major, was working in the New York office of Zilkha Venture Partners, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm.

''I saw thousands of business plans,'' he says, ''and none of them struck me as being quite as compelling as Why.com. It seemed that if we were really willing to dedicate ourselves fully to it, we could build a sustainable, valuable business around the concept.

''What's amazing is how quickly a cool concept can gain momentum in the Internet space. This is an industry that embraces the what-iffers, the players with possibilities.''

Here's what has happened over the last eight months:

First, the trio filled out their leave-of-absence paperwork at Harvard. Carmody flatly explains that once you've got a killer Internet idea, the opportunity cost of staying enrolled starts to seem pretty high. (Though another Harvard undergrad, Geoff Cook, writes in the March issue of Wired Magazine about building CollegeGate.com, which offers essay-editing services, while still in school.)

Next, they found a Denver development shop willing to help them build the product for a combination of cash and equity. They made a list of 200 URLs they thought would fit the concept, and managed to buy Why.com for a price that Keller describes as being in the tens of thousands of dollars - a great bargain for such a memorable address.

They put up a placeholder site that, with no promotion, has attracted 65,000 visitors and brought in about 500 job applicants. They secured a PR firm. They set up a basement office just outside Harvard Square - the better to keep in touch with buddies who are still enrolled - and hired Todd Tzeng, a CEO who has held executive posts at Javelin Technologies and New Era of Networks. They cut a deal with Google, a well-regarded Silicon Valley search site, to augment their service.

Carmody also deployed his considerable chutzpah to attract a handful of powerful investors and advisors, among them Ric Fulop, president of Into Networks (formerly Arepa), a Cambridge firm that delivers CD-ROM content to homes with cable modems.

Fulop, at 25, is a fitting choice for an adviser. He started his first company, a software distributorship in his native Venezuela, when he was 16; built a computer modeling business when he was 18; and then took a leave from Babson College at age 20 to start Arepa. Like the Why.com guys, Fulop says he'd like to get a degree someday - like an MBA from Harvard.

Fulop confesses to being somewhat stunned at the ''just-add-water-and-mix'' nature of Internet start-ups right now, but he says that ''if you know what you're doing and you can put the pieces of the puzzle together,'' you can succeed.

''It's important to remember,'' Fulop says, that ''there are some people that can be young and have the capacity to do great things.'' The Why.com team has made believers out of Fulop, and their parents.

Next up, on Wednesday: the rest of the world.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston writer and a contributing editor at Wired, Fast Company, and Boston Magazine.