Popularity Contest Hot high-tech entrepreneurs

Between them, Gary Culliss, 29, and Mike Cassidy, 36, havequalifications sure to make most reassess their own"achievements." Cassidy has won a 2,000-mile car raceacross Australia, competed in marathons and studied jazz piano atthe esteemed Berklee School of Music. Oh, and the Harvard BusinessSchool grad co-founded and sold a company before starting DirectHit Technologies Inc. with Harvard Law School alum Culliss. (Who,by the way, wrote code at age 12, was a registered patent agentwith the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and invented thetechnology that would drastically reduce the pain of Internetsearching.)

The innovative technology of which we speak is the Direct HitPopularity Engine, available at partner search engines like HotBotand Lycos, or at http://www.directhit.com. During hispatent-agent stint, Culliss realized the most efficient way toperform patent searches was to ask colleagues where they'dfound needed information. The co-founder (who saved Direct Hit$50,000 in legal fees with his patent expertise) thought, Why notcreate an Internet search engine that would list only the mostpopular and relevant sites, as chosen by other users?

Culliss developed and entered the Direct Hit business plan inMIT's 1998 $50K Entrepreneurship Competition, the hotbed ofnetworking and collaboration that brought Cassidy (who'd wonthe 1991 competition) and Culliss together. The newly formed teamdidn't just take the grand prize--within a month, they alsosecured their first round of $1.4 million in venture capital fromSilicon Valley investment giant Draper Fisher Jurvetson and gavetheir $30,000 prize money to fellow finalists. Cassidy recounts thefunding miracle: "We walked in, pitched them at 8:15 a.m., andat 4:30 p.m., they said `OK, here's yourdeal.' "