IQ News: INSIDER - Motro's Mandate

It speaks to the craziness of Harry Motro's online career: Recently, on his 37th birthday, the Infoseek chief executive could only squeeze in an interview in a Manhattan office lobby between stops on an Infoseek investor tour. Ever the entrepreneur, he joined the company in April as president from CNN Interactive, where he started AllPolitics.com, CNN.com and CNNfn.com. Motro was named Infoseek CEO within a month of joining, with the mandate to build a company that by some measures is third among search engines behind Excite and Yahoo. According to October Media Metrix data of home-based online usage, 41.2 percent surfed the Yahoo network of sites, 25.1 percent went to the Excite network, and 17.3 percent went to Infoseek. But Motro's take on Infoseek's performance betrays how much he likes a good fight. On the day last month that he held this interview, he enthusiastically reported that Infoseek had just had its first 16-million-page-view day. He also made the argument that Infoseek's numbers are ahead of Excite's, with Infoseek recording 7.9 million unique users in August to Excite's 7.6 million. "Competitors make me a better company," he contends. Motro came to Infoseek to turn it into a "connected media company"--his words for describing how search can serve to connect people with similar interests. Not surprisingly, Motro was raised by an entrepreneur. His father came to the United States from Israel and started a lumber business. He eventually turned down his father's offer to take the business over, instead working at Coopers & Lybrand, where he advanced to manager of audit services. He moved to Turner Broadcasting in 1988 to learn the media business, focusing on mergers and acquisitions. By 1994, however, he had offered to start an interactive unit for Turner. He became its senior vice president and built it to a staff of 200. In Ted Turner, he found a second father figure. "I dealt with Ted the same way I dealt with my father," he explains. "Ted is an entrepreneur. All he understands is how to grow a business." Motro's ideas for the future of Infoseek were definitely informed by the time he spent at CNN Interactive. In early 1994, he had looked at interactive businesses as a method of supporting Turner's entertainment division, but he soon began to view the Internet as more of an information medium. Now, he envisions the next stage in that evolution. Motro believes that the past ten years of technology growth have been about how computers affect peoples' work lives. But, he predicts, "The next ten years are about computers affecting peoples' personal lives."

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IQ News: INSIDER - Motro's Mandate

Anya Sacharow

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Anya Sacharow