State of the Web: It's the People at the Top that Count

Sometimes I have to do everything I can to contain myself when I find the right stock. I'm on Fox News Channel a lot and am at my keyboard constantly, and I freely admit I get carried away when I find something that seems perfect for this environment.

So on Friday, when I was doing some promos for

Fox

about the special shows we have coming up (and believe me they're rocking, so get the dish and watch, because I'm being grilled on one of them and we have a rocking panel on the other), I found myself almost unable to show even the least bit of objectivity about

Internet Capital Group

(ICGE)

.

This stock has it all for this market. It has the right people, the right companies, the right mix (unlike

CMGI

(CMGI)

, which is a pastiche of companies, this one is all B2B) and most of all it's

Matt Jacobs'

biggest win in his

B2B Rotisserie League. It is that league, by the way, that caused my fund to take as large a position in Internet Capital as we have. I was trying to make a joke about the symbol, but I couldn't pull it off. ICGE, I said, was really "I see

G.E.

(GE) - Get Report

" -- as in, "I see the next G.E." But I decided that nobody would get that reference so I scrapped it. And it presumed that this $30 billion company would grow to $500 billion, which is quite a presumption, even for this presumptive individual. Why am I so high on this one?

Join the discussion on

TSC

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ICGE

People. I look at the people who are running this show and I see all of the people who got the Net early. I'm talking about guys like Julian Brodsky, an important Internet Capital director, and vice chairman from

Comcast

(CMCSK)

, who is one of those hard-nosed businessmen that don't much exist in this space. (I may be angry at Comcast for not picking up our show, but that doesn't preclude me from praising the brains behind the outfit!) Or Doug Alexander, a guy I met when he was at

Reality On-Line

in 1997, that I wanted desperately to recruit for

TSC

because he understood where the Net was going before the Net. He plays a huge role at Internet Capital and is fantastic. Or how about Tom Phillips, who is the head of

Deja.com

, one of Internet Capital's portfolio companies? When we were starting

TSC

, Tom reached out to me to encourage me to pursue this. He got it very early on. He's another winner in this space.

The amazing thing is that these guys are just the tip of the iceberg. This company has more good people up top than just about any dot-com you can find. And in the end that will determine whether a company wins or loses in this space.

Yahoo!

(YHOO)

and

AOL

(AOL)

had that edge. They had and have the best people running the joint. You may not think

Amazon

(AMZN) - Get Report

can ever make money, but Bezos has a fabulous team, too.

Having that team is what it's all about. That's exactly what

Microsoft

(MSFT) - Get Report

has, what

Sun Micro

(SUNW) - Get Report

has, and what

Intel

(INTC) - Get Report

has, and, most similarly, what G.E. has. It's what all the great ones have.

Usual caveat: Internet Capital is already so high that it has to have a pullback before it can get to the next level, if only to shake out the nonbelievers. I'm looking forward to buying more when it does.

James J. Cramer is manager of a hedge fund and co-founder of TheStreet.com. At time of publication, his fund was long Amazon, America Online, G.E., Intel, Internet Capital, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo!. Cramer's fund may also be long or short certain stocks in his B2B rotisserie league. His fund often buys and sells securities that are the subject of his columns, both before and after the columns are published, and the positions that his fund takes may change at any time. Under no circumstances does the information in this column represent a recommendation to buy or sell stocks. Cramer's writings provide insights into the dynamics of money management and are not a solicitation for transactions. While he cannot provide investment advice or recommendations, he invites you to comment on his column at

jjcletters@thestreet.com.