Washington Post October 1, 2001
By Gary Arlen

Two days after the tragedy, I visited a garage-level startup somewhere out Interstate 66. It was a refreshing break to spend a couple hours with the prototypical entrepreneurial team — the techie and the marketer — who could focus on their latest business vision after the initial discussion about the horrific events of Sept. 11.

As an inside-the-Beltway denizen, I venture cautiously into the netherworld of outlying Northern Virginia. The principal member of the team (the marketing guy with the money) has migrated from hardware to software to systems. Through the decade that I’ve known him, I’ve traveled from Bethesda to Reston to Centreville to Chantilly to see the latest iteration of his vision, watching an array of companies take shape, some going public, others vaporizing.

What I saw crystallized and validated his long-term vision. The product remains behind non-disclosure barriers for now. Suffice to say it’s a software package that, impressively, uses Web-era tools but looks beyond the personal computer platforms as we know them. It seeks to create interactive, customized communities, focusing on the special interests of groups while enabling links among like-minded individuals. There are commercial connections, but the initial emphasis is on user-created …