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FORSAKING A CAREER IN LAW TO HIT THE BOOKS ONLINEAuthor:Beth Healy, Globe Staff TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION / VENTURE CAPITAL TROY WILLIAMS skipped the high-paying job with the prestigious law firm when he finished at Harvard Law School two summers ago. After graduation, he jumped in his car and drove to Houston, where he'd lived during college. He had an idea for a Web business - to make millions of books accessible online - and just a few dollars in his pocket. He slept in his Acura for several nights, until he found a place to live. Williams lived off his credit cards. He bought only one piece of furniture, a white plastic chair for $5. He ate spaghetti with butter most nights. He slept on the floor. At 27, Williams never wavered in his optimism about raising money to launch his Questia.com. And he was lucky. In just 10 months, he hooked a crucial angel investor: Rod Canion, who cofounded Compaq computer in 1982. Now Canion is chairman of Questia and the company's ticket last month to a whopping $45 million in venture financing from Boston's TA Associates, one of the area's biggest and oldest private equity firms. Andy McLane, senior managing director of TA, says he liked the concept because it's not a trivial dot-com. "Using the Questia Internet library, a student is able to create a paper in half the time and turn in a better product." Williams has 200 employees, half of them in the publishing hub of Manhattan. Questia's target market is university students and scholars, the people who need to do research and write papers. He envisions charging them an affordable subscription fee to gain access to an online database of 250,000 books. More than that, this son of a blue-collar family, the first in his line to attend college, wants to make finding books online to be as normal as using a PC to type an essay. "The primary thing for me is that this is a civilization advance," Williams says. "We're delivering the true promise of the Internet, making the wealth of human knowledge available to students, day and night." He sees Questia as the next thing in books since the printing press and the founding of the Boston Public Library in 1848. Questia would allow users to search its data base of titles for free. But it's much more than a list. For a fee, students could access the actual texts of the most-read books and periodicals on library shelves - everything from "Catcher in the Rye" to the latest analysis of the euro. They can access footnotes, get hyperlinks to related texts, and store papers online. With Questia, which is slated to launch in nine months, the problem of racing to the library to grab the one book a professor put on hold for an entire class would be gone. No need to illegally photocopy chapters of reference books. And who cares if the library closes at midnight? With your PC and a modem, you can dial into Questia and see those texts you need. "We can have a million people looking at the same page of the same book at once," he says. "There's no limit." Seventy publishers have given the nod to the system, Williams says, and he expects more to sign on. Questia pays to digitally capture the books, and the publishers will get a slice of the revenue every time one of their books' pages is viewed. There is no downloading of books, so all copyrights are honored. Bernard Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, says he's spoken with several companies that are looking to put books online in various ways. He's not convinced they're any more useful than the 500 free databases this city's library system offers. "You can go online now and get full texts of Shakespeare and major poets," he says. His chief concerns are that all people - not just the wealthy - have access and that little-used books aren't fazed out because they don't generate enough revenue. "Some books have gone through periods when no one wanted to use them," Margolis says. "They're now ancient, old and critical items for us to use in understanding our history." Putting books online is not cheap. Williams says it will take $210 million this year and next to get 50,000 books online. He wants to get to 250,000 texts within three years. "This is not one of those companies that's going to be gone in two years," Williams says. "We're going to be here 20 years from now." Incidentally, he's driving a BMW now. Dog heaven. Forget foosball. Break out the dog toys. At dash.com in Maynard, staffers can bring their dogs to work. A half-dozen pooches sleep near the desks of their owners daily at the online shopping-discount company. Conference rooms are marked by names and photos of the resident canines. To find the right meeting room, "You've got to get up to speed," says Chris Dowhan, cofounder of dash, whose software tracks users as they surf the Web and shop, letting them rack up reward points and reap discounts. The main conference room is named after Dowhan's yellow lab, Gus. The pup can often be found with Salty, cofounder Jason Priest's chocolate lab. "They're best friends," Dowhan says. SIDEBAR: Who's in the money Company/location|Funding|Description|Investors
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