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Unlike those online companies in panic mode, kinkos.com isn't sweating yet about employee defections, outrageous marketing bills or weary investors ready to kick the dot-com bucket.
In fact, it's dripping with anxiety just concentrating on something more fundamental to its future success: its launch.
Kinkos.com CEO Rick Steele has done it before with Meetinghouse Technologies, the software firm he started in 1994. But this time is different.
When Steele sold his latest business, Liveprint.com, to Kinko's earlier this year, he veered from the course many tech CEOs take. He gave up his nameplate to a $2 billion offline giant.
Now who's gonna remember Liveprint, a venture for which Steele went without pay for six months and sold his car to fund?
Maybe it doesn't matter.
While local tech execs worry over dwindling cash reserves, Steele remains committed to the $40 million Web-ification of Kinko's, speaking softly about showing his comrades the right way to build a Net business.
"If tech CEOs think they're the brand, they're mistaken," he said.
Countdown to launch
It's only a matter of weeks before Alexandria-based kinkos.com attacks the $58 billion online printing market. But Wall Street's cool reception toward Web start-ups of late isn't going to be the...