brought a wealth of new ideas on virtual buying environments, trust, discrete-choice modeling, customer segmentation, and product acceptance modeling. Jeffrey Stamen had been president of another company, Management Decisions Systems (MDS), which was cofounded by Professors Urban and Little. MDS, formed in the 1970s, was sold to IRI in 1980, and then Oracle bought a part of the combined company (essentially the part that was MDS) in 1995. With their long history of working together, these three cofounders formed the intellectual core of the company and recruited other key executives to the nascent firm. For example, they recruited Stefania Nappi, an MIT graduate with a 20 year history of building software organizations and former chief operating officer of IntraNet, to be the chief executive officer and president.