Boston.com / Business / Trading places

Boston.com / Business / Trading places "Bob Davis, sporting an open maroon shirt and sipping from a cup of coffee, is in all-business mode. He leans forward at a conference table in the Highland Capital Partners office and gazes poker-faced at a document handed to him by Steve Kropper, senior vice president at a start-up called Equinox that wants to lower the cost of brokering home mortgages by doing much of the work overseas.
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Dorchester-bred Davis, now 47, has always been known as a young man in a hurry, unusually driven and competitive even by the high-octane standards of the technology industry. His sale of Lycos for $12.5 billion in stock, at the peak of the technology boom, was heralded as one of the best-timed deals of the Internet era. (Lycos is back on the market, expected to fetch just $200 million to $400 million this time.) And three years ago, when Davis signed on as a Highland venture partner after a brief stint running the merged Terra Lycos, many presumed the job would be a hiatus until he could found another company to run."