Fest listed three goals and 10 items for discussion, staring with ``vision'' and ending with ``guerrilla tactics.''

``Now, I'm learning to be a businessman,'' he said, grinning.

He's learning from some well-known names, particularly TV meteorologist Bryan Norcross, who has become Quickbrowse's interim chief executive officer, and David Bohnett, a California 'Net pioneer who has made a major investment in the company.

When The Herald last reported on Fest, the 33-year-old German freelance journalist had a great program but no business plan. 'Net columnists from Thailand to New York were raving about Quickbrowse, which can be programmed by individual users to collect information from their favorite Web sites and compile it into one quickly viewable scan. Investor Andrew Tobias had given Fest money to try to convert his hobby into a wealthy dot-com.

Since then, Fest has been charging forward. Much of the impetus has come from Bohnett, the founder of GeoCities, which was sold to Yahoo last year for $4 billion.

Bohnett is now a major Los Angeles philanthropist (with a $40 million charity fund), supporter of liberal causes, and angel to 10 fledgling Internet companies.

His interest in Quickbrowse began when Tobias, treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, asked him to lunch. Tobias says he was hoping for a major contribution to the party, but the conversation drifted to the Internet, and Tobias told him about Quickbrowse.

Bohnett checked out the site -- http://www.quickbrowse.com/ -- and was excited about what he saw. He called up Fest and the two chatted.

Bohnett: ``They have a great market opportunity that can appeal to a very broad range of folks, and I was impressed with Marc. He's a very talented, smart, engaging guy. I liked his overall spunkiness.''

Bohnett invested $250,000. He was willing to put in more, says Tobias, but the company doesn't need much money now, and Fest and Tobias didn't want to give away any equity that they didn't have to.

Tobias: ``We weren't looking for money, but the right kind of investor. In this case, he's worth his weight in gold. He knows so much about the Internet and how to incubate a company.''

Fest: ``I was thrilled. Suddenly we had all these high-powered lawyers doing due diligence.''

Through e-mails and Yahoo instant messenger, Bohnett has been serving as Fest's mentor, peppering him with advice.

``How to hire people, how much to pay them, what's the right structure for the company, how to design future enhancements for the program, how to write a business plan. I tell him a lot of details,'' Bohnett says.

Fest is also listening to Norcross, a friend who in February left his full-time job as chief meteorologist for Channel 4 after announcing he wanted to pursue Internet projects.

Quickbrowse, Norcross says now, was not one of the projects he originally had in mind, but for some time he has been serving as a ``friendly advisor'' to Fest, giving him suggestions about how the company should grow.

Norcross admits he doesn't have a lot of business experience, with the exception of owning a Miami Beach tanning salon, which he recently sold. But he has been meeting daily with Fest. He became interim CEO because ``they wanted to give me a nice title.''

Fest says he's given Norcross some stock in return for his help.

Rather than spend money for help-wanted ads, Fest went to a Tuesday Network meeting of Internet professionals, where he wore a T-shirt that announced, ``We're Hiring.''

Problem is, so are dozens of other dot-coms these days. Many persons chatted with Fest, but he found no programmers.

Bohnett is pushing Fest to act fast because Quickbrowse now has competitors in what is becoming known as the field of ``metabrowsers.''

Octupus.com, Calltheshots.com and Onepage.com are now in development. So are two others, Yodlee.com and Katiesoft, with slightly different concepts.

Cory Kleinschmidt from Traffick.com, a guide to portals, tested all the ``metabrowser'' sites and concluded Quickbrowse ``is so easy. I think it will be the first to gain widespread acceptance.''

But Fest knows the programming must be improved and marketed. At the moment, he has a ``rented'' programmer from a Pennsylvania company, but he wants to use Bohnett's money to hire two full-time programmers in the PERL language, plus a marketing man and a finance man.

That was his agenda at the South Beach luncheon, attended by a half-dozen prospective employees. One was a veteran of 20 years in the technology business. Another, from a large New York ad agency, was willing to jump to a start-up for the right deal.

Despite Fest's lengthy agenda, the lunch proceeded casually, with everyone talking about how they saw the company growing. Ultimately, the tech guy decided he didn't want an exhausting full-time job with a start-up. Fest is still negotiating with the New York ad man.