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One of Silicon Valley's 10 most eligible bachelors Tolia is a eight to midnight man

R S Shankar

So what if Nirav Tolia is among the most eligible bachelors in Silicon Valley?

How can anyone possibly date a man who works from eight in the morning into the midnight hours?

Tolia was recently named among the 10 top bachelors in the valley by women.com magazine.

Those who know Tolia say he is a fun-loving person, but his preoccupation with his widely successful startup firm keeps him from having fun.

Tolia, who is six foot tall, weighs 165 pounds and drives a BMW M3, has degrees in English and biology from Stanford University. He does not smoke and is a foe of junk food.

After deferring plans to attend the Harvard Medical School, he worked for McKinsey & Co as a business analyst. In May 1996, he joined Yahoo! where he represented the company on CNN, NBC, and ABC and worked in the marketing group on e-commerce properties. In April 1999, he left Yahoo! to co-found an Internet startup.

There were 5,372 more single men than women aged 20 to 45 in Silicon Valley in October, according to census data and market updates compiled by Claritas Inc, a marketing information company.

Among the top 10, only one Indian found place.

Tolia may not afford to let his hair down -- at least for a year or two. For he wants to make sure that Epinions.com, one of the most lauded of startups in recent memory, continues to fulfill its promise.

He is the co-founder of Epinions.com, an online buyers's guide written by and for consumers. He left Yahoo! to start Round Zero, a not-for-profit organization that brings together Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and professionals. Through Round Zero he hooked up with Epinions's three other cofounders.

'We all travel in tribes and you tend to trust people in your tribe,' he told Red Herring magazine recently.

Other co-founders of Epinions include Internet veterans from Netscape, and @Home.

Epinions.com is based on the power of word-of-mouth recommendations. Epinions.com extends this network of trusted sources by enabling shoppers to collect advice and recommendations from product users everywhere. Users who write reviews will earn recognition and rewards based on the usefulness of their advice. The focus of the service will be on qualitative reviews, rather than quantitative rankings.

The site aggregates, rates, and sorts consumer and professional reviews, and links to the Web's best shopping resources. The focus of the service is to build a self-governing community of reviewers and shoppers who create and rate all site content. The company does not sell anything and does not edit its consumer or professional content. Epinions.com has received $ 33 million backup from Goldman Sachs, Benchmark Capital and August Capital.

Epinions, which has more than 50 employees and is located in Mountain View, California, aspires to be a marketplace for content. 'We are bringing word of mouth to the Net,' Nirav Tolia said in an interview recently.

Market experts point out that Tolia's Epinions is far ahead of its competitors because it offers the widest possible of products including vintage wine, pop culture and restaurants, the latter being one of Epinions's newest categories.

Epinions, launched in September with 5,000 reviews, had over 125,000 reviews by the middle of January and receives at least a million pageviews a day.

Last month Tolia and Excite@Home, Inc announced the launch of a co-branded product review service. Continuing the E-Business Service division's focus on the online merchant, this new product review service provides 'unbiased consumer and professional reviews' to merchants and shoppers at Excite Stores, to help them make informed buying decisions.

Excite Storebuilder (www.excite.com/storebuilder) is a fully integrated e-commerce solution that provides merchants with the necessary tools to build and operate an online store.

Among his many formidable talents, Tolia places high premium on networking. Right now, he may not have time or inclination to network with the opposite sex. But does he ever pause to think how many people are waiting for the magical I-am-all-yours words?

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