George Bell was a senior vice president at newspaper and magazine behemoth Times-Mirror, living in Long Island and commuting into Manhattan, when he got the cyberspace call from a little company called Architext in 1995. At the time, Bell was hardly idle - he was running the company's sporting magazines, including SKI, Field & Stream, Snowboard Life, Salt Water Sportsman and Yachting, as well as overseeing the introduction of the Outdoor Life Network, a specialty cable channel. Bell leapt at the chance. As he told Vault Reports, "I figured the last time there was an opportunity to run a new form of media was the advent of cable 20 years ago, and I'd missed that." Today, Bell is the CEO of what is now called Excite, one of the premier search engine companies in the world. Excite's flagship brands - Excite.com and WebCrawler.com - are visited by more than twenty million people per month. We figured - who better to ask about schmoozing on-line?

Vault Reports: How many e-mails do you get per day?

Bell: On the average, I get 125 e-mails per day. I get them from people we're doing business with, people who work for the company. I would say I only get one or two cold e-mails a day.

VR: Do you get e-mail from friends and family?

Bell: Most of the people I used to call my friends don't call me that anymore. They don't bother to call me. I rarely get in touch with people. But e-mail has helped - it has made communication much more efficient. I can take home and deal with 20 to 30 e-mails at the end of the day. About once a week I'll get an e-mail from a friend of mine who I haven't spoken to in a while. I try to respond to all the e-mail I get.

VR: Why do you keep your e-mail address publicly available, when you might not publish your phone number?

Bell: Because we work in the information business, our philosophy is behind keeping our e-mails available. We feel we should always be open to our customers and the public. That's our business. We don't encourage random e-mails or fan mail, but it doesn't upset us.

~ VR: When did you first go on-line before becoming CEO of Excite?

Bell: Six months. I was using Eudora mail. I didn't spend a lot of time on the Web.

VR: What use do you think people have for e-mail today?

Bell: I find that people in our culture are nowadays more willing to have certain conversations over e-mail. Certain conversations, I think, should be done in person, like meetings between managers, or personal criticism. E-mail shouldn't be a substitute for conversation, and it often is. It has reduced the value of diplomacy in our culture. As far as entertainment value, it's a different story. It's fun, and you can, of course, get a sense of someone through their e-mails, just like you would through a series of short letters.

VR: How are conversations over e-mail different?

Bell: E-mail is more casual, because it seems to be more in the spirit of the Web. Oftentimes, you find with cold proposals over e-mail, there are no introductions.. It just launches into the pitch. That's fine with me. I don't remember the last time I got an e-mail that started "Dear Mr. Bell." I like my e-mail short and blunt. And the ease is perfect. All I need to do is click reply and say "No thanks." I'm not caught on the phone.

VR: Are you friends with competitors?

Bell: There's still a lot of healthy competition between us and our competitors - Infoseek, Lycos, Yahoo. We're all 10 to 15 miles away from each other on the highway. Some people take competitiveness to different levels, and we figured that meeting each other face to face would probably alleviate some of the bad parts of that competition. So we met for a game of laser tag. It worked, and we all had a good time, winning wasn't the point.