The instrument lets employees know when important milestones happen within the company, such as signing a new client, hiring a new employee or to announce the winner of the foosball tournament. "The environment here is fun," said Alain Hanash, CEO and co-founder of Multicity.com. "This is a flat organization. We don't even have titles on our business cards."

Alain Hanash and his brother, Patrick Hanash, founded Multicity.com in the basement of their parents' McLean home in June 1999. Now the pair oversees more than 40 employees in the seventh-floor offices of a Tysons Corner building. The company provides multilingual products for chat rooms with instant translation, message boards, instant messaging with instant translation, auctions, and Web polls and profiling matching in as many as 20 languages for some products. The communication tools allow information to seamlessly be integrated into other languages, in real time.

Multicity.com's list of clients is as diverse as the languages it caters to. The Ford Motor Co., the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the United Nations and the Japan External Trade Organization are among the 200,000 Web sites that use Multicity.com products.

Coming Home
Creating a multilingual global network seemed a natural progression for the brothers, who were born in the United States but spent most of their youth abroad including living in Lebanon and attending high school in France. Both attended American University and found jobs in New York before returning to McLean in the late 1990s. As a result of the brothers' globetrotting, Alain Hanash, 30, and Patrick Hanash, 32, are fluent in three languages - English, Arabic and French - and Alain Hanash has also studied Spanish and Italian. "Growing up, we were exposed to many different languages and cultures," Patrick Hanash said.

Alain Hanash started developing the technology that would become the backbone of Multicity.com in 1997, but it wasn't until 1999 that the company was born. Two months after starting the company, Draper Atlantic provided $1 million of venture-capital funding, which allowed the brothers to move out of the basement and into a small office. Another $15 million in venture funding from Grotech Capital Group and Draper Atlantic in January 2000 helped the company expand and find new digs on Spring Hill Road.

"We received no funding from our family or friends. We had some money saved up from our previous jobs," Alain Hanash said. "We wanted to do it the hard way. We knew there was a high amount of risk, and didn't want to take the risk with our family's money. If we were going down, we didn't want to take them with us."

>Family Trust
Working and living together - the brothers are searching for their own apartments - has not been a challenge, but just in case, Patrick Hanash said they have offices on opposite sides of the company's space. They have also divided the responsibilities of running Multicity.com based on the strengths of each. Alain Hanash, as CEO, is responsible for the day-to-day operations, while Patrick Hanash, the company's president, handles the finance and business models needed to keep the operation functioning.

"We have three brothers and one sister. Our family has always been close," Patrick Hanash said. "I know I can trust him. I know I can go on vacation and the company will still be here," added Alain Hanash. Not that the two get to go on vacation often. As the founders, the Hanash brothers find themselves constantly thinking of new ideas for the business, even when they find some time for a night out. Patrick Hanash said it is not uncommon for the brothers to be at a Washington, D.C., nightclub talking about their business to someone or bouncing new ideas off each other.

Their hard work has paid off. At a time when several dot-com businesses are disappearing, Multicity.com is expanding. The brothers said there are two reasons for their success. First, they found a market that was untapped, and they didn't fall for all the Internet hype. When Multicity.com began, it was the only company offering multilingual tools. As a result it has become a leader in the field. "Our research indicates the Internet has just as many English-speaking users as non-English speakers now, but the trend is toward having more non-English speakers on the Internet in just a few years," Alain Hanash said. "Our tools can help a lot of smaller companies in the global marketplace." As for the boom and subsequent bust of dot-coms, Patrick Hanash said the brothers' plan was simple: to tap into a market and focus on the fundamentals, rather than purchasing Super Bowl ads.

No Ties Required
Currently, Multicity.com employs nearly 50 employees who come from different ethnic backgrounds. "The staff reflects the vision," said James DuBeau, the public relations director. "It's multiethnic, multilingual." The company's philosophy is fun, so the offices are outfitted with a game room that includes foosball, a pool table and Nintendo video-game system. There are also company lunches each Friday, and the dress code tends to lean toward the casual side of the scale.

The brothers have also structured the company so that people aren't tied down to specific job functions. The casualness of the office is to help promote creativity, and anyone is welcome to share ideas to make the company better. The brothers hope the openness of the workplace will help them achieve their long-term goals, which include building the largest global network, taking over the entire office complex with Multicity.com employees, and a vacation.