Internet Capital's Young Turks

Walter W. Buckley III and Kenneth A. Fox aren't Tinseltown material. While working for a Philadelphia investment firm, the pair traveled to Los Angeles in early 1995 to scout out a multimedia deal. But before a meeting with a music industry attorney, they decided to adopt what they thought was an L.A. look. At Barneys New York in Beverly Hills, Buckley wound up with a neon blue shirt and pants and Fox walked out in a sports jacket with sleeves that were too long. When they finally met the lawyer, he showed up in the sort of casual duds they had just dumped. "The rest of the day we kept trying to figure out how we could change back into our other clothes," Buckley laughs.

These days, Buckley, 39, and Fox, 29, are still shopping together--but in less glitzy markets and with considerably better results. They're the founders and top executives of Internet Capital Group Inc., a publicly traded company that invests exclusively in startups that help companies buy and sell products to one another via the Web. They launched ICG in 1996, and were among the first to spy this so-called business-to-business market, which Forrester Research Inc. estimates will balloon from $131 billion now to $1.5 trillion by 2003. "They went where other people weren't looking and shined the light," says Net guru Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings Inc. and an ICG adviser.