Silicon Valley based everypath.com makes selected sections of any Web site’s content accessible through a plethora of hand-held devices. Whereas current wireless access is restricted to a select few sites hawking their information, everypath.com promises to convert any site in a matter of hours. “I met a guy who told me that his family was hooked on geneology.com. Everyday someone would discover a lost relative, and a link would be posted. That’s the information he wanted to keep tabs on all the time,” said Venk Shukla, CEO of everypath.com.

Along with access from the en vogue devices of the “digital elite,” everypath.com also enables access from the more traditional, accessible tools, like the desktop PC — or even the comparatively old fashioned telephone. A site’s selected content can be successfully navigated and manipulated via voice, making costly and often laboriously developed voice systems superfluous for the client company. Instead of an airline developing a phone access system with its own separate logical and operational base developed separately from its online presence, its Web site can now cope with the phone customers. The former can take months, whereas everypath.com’s solution can kick-in in hours.

Goel’s the Glue

The common thread running through the founding team of Piyush Goel, Prakash Ayer, Amitabh Sinha, and Rajiv Mohindra was Goel, now the CTO of the company originally called Webonphone. Shukla had connected Goel to someone who would look over the business plan and help secure funding. A few months later, Goel returned to Shukla for help, realizing that things weren’t coming together the way they were supposed to. Shukla met the team, heard the concept, became the lead investor, and proceeded to raise $2 million in seed round funding. He joined the company as chairman of the board in November of 1998, and took over as full time CEO in April of 1999.

The Eyes and Ears