A company that changed loyalty marketing forever and most people have never heard of it. Netcentives. Eric Tilenius and Elliott Ng came to Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1996 with an idea inspired by United Airlines frequent flyer miles. Their pitch was that all consumer businesses would benefit from online couponing. And those coupons might even be used to trade for miles, dollars, or goods and services. Draper took a bet on two newly minted business school grads and their crazy plan to use frequent flyer miles to drive promotional and loyalty marketing on the World Wide Web. They wound up partnering with: → Every leading airline in the country → Major deals with Visa, AOL, Barnes & Noble, AmEx → Nearly every leading e-tailer except Amazon The company went public on the Nasdaq in 1999 at a market cap of $372 million and eventually reached over $2 billion. According to founder Eric Tilenius "Netcentives would not have been possible if it was not for the support and backing of Tim Draper and his funds. Tim's funding and guidance came at a critical time and enable us to launch what became, at the time, the biggest incentive marketing firm on the web." What’s the Netcentives of today? Let us know… we’d like to invest.(Tim Draper)