"We have no funding. We think we have a great idea, and we think we're going to dominate our space."

Those are the words of dot-com entrepreneur Randy A. Berlin, but they may well have fallen from the lips of any number of Internet entrepreneurs.

These days it seems anybusiness.com is a go in the fast-paced world of the Internet. Dot-coms are popping up all over, luring not only e-entrepreneurs like Berlin, but also many folks who once populated the prestigious offices and choice cubicles of the "traditional" economy and Fortune 500 firms.

Whether you take the straight entrepreneurial route like Berlin, where it's your neck on the line, or you sign up to devote your expertise to an entrepreneur who has inspired you, working for a start-up dot-com company can be a challenging and volatile proposition. It's a world that's not meant to be inhabited by everybody.

A few dot-com alums gathered these thoughts regarding what lies in store for folk who enter the Internet fray.

A dot-com employee "has to be somebody who's team-motivated," stresses Berlin, chief executive officer of discountcall.com and a guy who knows a lot about teamwork.

After graduating from Virginia Tech in 1988, Berlin played minor league baseball for teams that included the Johnson City (Tenn.) Cardinals, the Frederick (Md.) Keys and the Hagerstown (Md.) Sun. In the off-seasons, he worked as a sales rep in the telecommunications industry.

Then, in April 1999, he launched discountcall.com, a Norcross-based Internet firm that acts as a telecommunications broker, marketing voice, and data and Internet access to corporate users.

While Berlin is currently the only official discountcall.com employee, he has assembled a team of contractors to get the work done. "There's Pete, Alison, David," he says. "We outsource everything. They're all coming on full-time when we get financing." Full-time or not, "team player" is the essential quality for dot-comers, says Berlin.

"I can't play third base by myself, I need to be part of that team. You've got to bring something to the table, something very, very strong to the table," Berlin reasons.

"We're not looking for someone who's going to carry us. We're looking for a good solid player for each position, and the team is going to carry us. If somebody doesn't have it in them, it doesn't make them not a good employee. It just makes them not an employee for a dot-com."

"Someone who needs a lot of structure or who likes to have a very well-defined and narrow role might not thrive (at a dot-com)," counsels Elizabeth Cross, chief financial officer at soon-to-be-launched changeaddress.com, based in Midtown. "Usually, you have to wear a lot of different hats, and a lot of times you have to make things up as you go along."

Cross, who worked for NationsBank and McKinsey & Co., was the first employee at changeaddress.com. One of the aspects of dot-com commerce that lured her, she says, is the "reap what you sow" quality that wasn't as apparent in her previous jobs.

As a McKinsey consultant, for example, though she worked to solve problems and plot strategy, "I was often a few steps away from the real action," she says.

Having come in on the ground floor of changeaddress.com, Cross says she has worked not only to solve problems and address challenges, but she's been directly involved in making and implementing decisions, creating the company culture — and reaping the consequences, both good and bad.

"It's been just like a roller coaster," she marvels. "The thing I'm in awe of now is just how quickly the growth occurred...We went from two of us and our two dogs to a building full of people."

If you're looking to get rich quick, look again, advises Scears Lee III, managing director of the Lee Group Management Consultants in Newnan. "The obvious benefits [to working for a dot-com] are long-term stock options, ownership possibilities and things like that," Lee says. "With that is part of the risk, too, because you see a lot of these dot-com companies not being successful."

Lee notes that wide coverage of overnight e-success stories has contributed to the allure of the dot-com. But all that glitters on the Net isn't gold.

"Either it's not what you thought it was going to be, or they just are not able to get the funding that they were looking for," he says. "You just read so much about the success of so many [dot-coms] and you don't tend to read about those that aren't successful, and there are those out there, too."

While you may be a big fish in the proverbial small pond, Scott Councill, chief technology officer at InterAsk.com, notes that working at a dot-com also often means big responsibility. "The rewards can be very great, of course," Councill admits.

Dot-coms can make a lot of money and can be very profitable, but normally there is a steep curve to get to that point.

Having worked some two decades in the restaurant industry, Councill switched to the computer industry, taking a post as network and database administrator for Emory University in 1998. He left that job in March to join InterAsk, an Internet marketing and Web site development firm in Dunwoody.

Unlike his restaurant industry and university jobs, where "there's plenty of experience out there that you can draw from, whether it's calling a buddy or reading in a journal to get an idea of what to do in just about any situation," Councill says, with a new Internet firm, you are often charting new territory.

"The industry is growing and changing so rapidly that you are continually creating new ideas, and that's great. That's one of the great challenges," he says. "You have to really do a lot of research ... to stay on top of the game."

That means, "you're specifically and solely responsible for your actions," Councill asserts. "If you're planning on going into something with the assumption that people can share the blame, you're absolutely wrong."

Copyright 2000 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution