@LARGE
Bo Peabody's next act

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Staff, 3/27/2000

Bo Peabody is not a big company kind of guy. Nor is he a Waltham kind of guy.

"There's only one place worse than Waltham," he says, still shuddering at his brief foray into the maze of sterile, anonymous office parks, "and that's Silicon Valley. It's the geography of nowhere."

Last August, a year and a half after Peabody sold his first company for $58 million to Lycos, the Waltham-based portal, he cut loose. He had been a vice president at Lycos, assisting with acquisitions, espousing the firm's multibrand strategy, and helping to enhance his site, Tripod, an online community for twentysomethings that had started out as a dorm project at Williams College.

"I went to Bob [Davis, Lycos' chief executive]," he recalls, "and said, `Bob, I think I'm done. I'm an entrepreneur. I can't sit still. I'm not a great manager. I want to do something entrepreneurial."' And he wanted to spend more time in Williamstown, his adopted hometown.

Peabody, 28, was ready to start Act Two of his Internet career, though he agreed to continue as an adviser to Lycos on an ad hoc basis.

The curtain goes up this spring. Today, he's formally announcing his involvement as a founder and board member of Streetmail, a locally oriented e-mail-based news service targeting smaller cities and towns. Peabody has helped Streetmail raise more than $7 million. The company, with offices in New York and Williamstown, is rolling out to four or five new markets every week, targeting locales that are too small for CitySearch or AOL's Digital City.

In the next few weeks, Peabody will unveil an as-yet-unnamed network of quirky content sites that will include Feed Magazine, Suck, and The Smoking Gun, the site that broke the news about "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire" groom Rick Rockwell's restraining order. It will be funded to the tune of $4 million by the Advance Communications publishing empire, Lycos Ventures, Peabody himself, and several other individual investors.

In May, Peabody will launch Village Ventures, a new model for gestating start-ups. Village Ventures will create mini-incubators in college towns around the country - places like Williamstown, Ithaca, N.Y., and Hanover, N.H. - to try to capture and fund the best Internet business ideas that come out of the universities there. Peabody will be the chairman of that company, which has already found its first start-up to finance.

But his biggest project, which involves an ever-widening group of friends and colleagues, is the care and watering of a budding Internet business community in the Williamstown/North Adams area.

Peabody grew up in southern New Hampshire. He was, and still is, an avid ski racer, and in high school he'd travel to races at ski areas like Berkshire East. "I just fell in love with the Berkshires," Peabody says. He wound up enrolling at Williams, where he studied political philosophy and sociology.

In partnership with a classmate and Dick Sabot, his economics professor, Peabody created Tripod, which initially offered career and financial advice to college students and recent grads. Within a month of launching, Tripod had 10,000 members.

After Peabody's graduation, in 1994, Tripod continued to grow. In 1997, Peabody entered into negotiations to be acquired by America Online, but soon decided there wasn't a good fit between the two company cultures. Lycos bought them instead, announcing the deal in February 1998. At the time, Tripod had just under a million members.

The site's growth accelerated once it was integrated into Lycos. Peabody became an influential voice at Lycos, informally "sharing" a board seat with Sabot and helping to guide several acquisitions. But Peabody, a vibrant and voluble guy who once appeared on the cover of Silicon Alley Reporter in full football regalia, always seemed a bit out of place within the staid corporate confines of Lycos. He was like an exclamation point in a sea of question marks.

Now that he's no longer involved with Lycos day to day, he is back in Williamstown with a vengeance, serving as an adviser/mentor/moneyman to several local Net start-ups, including Sabot's eZiba.com, an online marketplace for crafts from Third World countries, and Ethan Zuckerman's Geekcorps, which aims to dispatch techies, Peace Corps-style, to unwired regions of the planet.

Over the past 18 months, Peabody has made 21 investments, though not all have been in Western Massachusetts. The first was the Linux portal Andover.Net, in Acton, which has since gone public, and the most recent was NetClerk in South San Francisco, a company that helps contractors apply for permits with government agencies. "I'm addicted," Peabody jokes. "I can't stop investing in Internet start-ups."

He also can't stop talking up the potential of the Williamstown/North Adams area as a secondary hub of Internet activity in Massachusetts.

"I find it has so much more soul than Waltham," Peabody says. "You go into the coffee shop, and you see college professors and lumberjacks and Appalachian Trail hikers. It's not all Internet people."

Yet. Peabody already counts 15 firms that employ about 400 people in northern Berkshire County, and he's devoting substantial energy to pushing those numbers higher.

"You can really feel the effect of your work when you're doing it locally. I walk down the streets, and people are excited. They believe they have a place in this new economy."

For just that reason, Peabody's most interesting project to watch will be Village Ventures. Venture capitalists and other investors are already salivating at the opportunity to put money behind it, since it will help them find early-stage ideas in markets where they can't afford to maintain a presence themselves. And if it flies, it could spark an economic resurgence in a handful of college towns around the country.

Intermission is over. And Bo Peabody, Act II, remains quite a show.

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