And the two Mumbai-born men aren't "going around to that Ferrari dealer out there," too, as Almeida pointed out. But one thing is sure: they are two happy men after iVillage, which operates websites for women, made its IPO.

"We are happier 24-year-olds than (we were) yesterday," Hira said hours after iVillage's stock chalked up handsome, but still unspectacular, gains of over 200 per cent from its offer price of $24, already higher since the chief underwriter Goldman Sachs first tested the investors' waters. The stock, listed on the Nasdaq, touched a high of $100 before receding to the 80s.

"I am kind of disappointed," said Almeida, in jest. In fact, there was no mistaking the glee in the pair that "grew up on E-mail and Netscape's IPO" four years ago.

For those who haven't really espied thegeneration that has not just grown up on the Net, but one that also shapes it, hear out Hira, iVillage's director of member database.

"The older perspective would have been to be more set in terms of career goals," said Hira, who grew up in Scarsdale, New York and graduated from Harvard three years ago with a double major in applied mathematics and economics. But "when you come out of college you say, I don't know, and you say, the world is my oyster and see what happens. And then you find this thing called the Internet and you say, let me run with it and you run with it, and it goes and goes and goes and keeps pushing us to the next level."

Hira started out in quite that spirit at a gaming company, Interactive Imagination, and then spent time at a service firm that built websites for major corporations such as Avon and Budweiser. "But I wanted to get involved in products, not services, and that is how I came to iVillage," he recalled. He joined the firm when it was already gaining widespreadrecognition, but implemented new features that have made iVillage.com such a hot site for women. "Our strategies changed slightly," said Hira. "Only last year, we launched E-mail service to keep up with the Yahoos of the world, and then added personal home page (service), instant messaging, postcards and a lot of interactive services." The focus no longer is only on acquisition of members, but also on members who come back often and establish an online community, he added.

Almeida is iVillage's director of business development and finance. Only a little over a year ago he was losing money rapidly in trying to partner his old roommate in a computer consulting venture in San Francisco. He grew up mostly in Oman in the Middle East where both his parents are doctors, and came to the US seven years ago. Once he received a bachelors degree in electrical engineering, Almeida worked on Wall Street but discovered he had no "passion" for it. That is when he migrated to the other coast, only to return to NewYork when his nest egg ran out.

At iVillage, he has "focussed on establishing alliances with media companies to make sure that when the day of reckoning came, when big guys like Time Warner and others came, we wouldn't be left alone." During his stint, iVillage, founded by Candice Carpenter in 1995, has won over NBC to its side giving it substantial content and clout and, as Almeida pointed out, it has got Tele-Communications Inc. and its parent, AT&T, as partners. "When broadband becomes the big thing, we (will) have the contentand the pipeline," he remarked.

Meanwhile, iVillage will continue to focus on women in the age group of 24-49 to the exclusion of every other segment, explained Almeida, because it is this group that enjoys the most purchasing power, making 80 per cent of the household spending decisions.