HOW HOW STUFF WORKS WORKS.

• Author: Mason, Scott

Curiousity killed the cat but breathes life into a start-up that capitalizes on Marshall Brain living up to his name.

Marshall Brain seems an unlikely poster boy. But there he is, thick neck and cheeky face, squinting from his company's press packet. He's standing hands on hips in front of a long row of hydraulic digging machines as if to say, "I am the man!" But the man seems out of place. There's not a speck of dirt on him. Heck, his name alone is enough to give him away. Shouldn't someone named Brain be in the library studying rather than posing in the mud?

He's pictured wearing his trademark sneakers, faded blue jeans and a nice, white T-shirt with "I Gotta Know ..." across the front. Marshall Brain, 39, has gotta know how stuff works. And he wants everyone else to know How Stuff Works.

How Stuff Works is an Internet magazine, an entire Web site, stuffed with articles about how stuff works (2,350 articles and counting). "There was a day I was eating a chocolate bar," Brain says, "and I thought, what am I eating here?" So he researched it, punched out an article and put it on his Web site. Go to www.howstuffworks.com and you'll find what makes a chocolate bar. The article begins, "Chocolate starts with a tree called the cacao tree...."

But do people really care how chocolate bars work? Or how TVs and toilets work, hurricanes and helium, airplanes and ATMs, bytes and bits and birdhouses and bread? Apparently they do.

Citing July traffic figures, PC Data Online ranked How Stuff Works as one of the top 500 Web sites in the country (No. 497), quite a jump from May when it broke into the top 1,000 (No. 992). The number of site visitors had doubled. In any given month, 1.5 million people visit its home page. On the Web, the million mark is a huge benchmark. The company is less than a year old.

What visitors get is practical information, Brain says. "It's things we all use but don't know about. It's just really interesting stuff." And valuable stuff, too, believe investors who have plunked $5.4 million into Brain's machine. Of that, Durham-based Southeast Interactive Technology Funds has chipped in $3.5 million. Bill Glynn, a director of the venture-capital firm, sees big potential. "If you have an instruction manual to build a cabinet and can't put it together, you return it. It's a huge problem with retailers. People have nowhere to turn except the instruction manual."

There's even an article on how How Stuff Works works. It works with 40 people in 10,000 square feet of space in Cary. It's a new office. The company lasted just five months in the business incubator on N.C. State University's Centennial Campus. Ted Morris' office was down the hall, and he remembers seeing more and more people squeeze into more and more rooms. "I mean, they were borrowing and started leasing from other tenants." That was a good sign for Morris, because his own firm, Centennial Venture Partners, was one of the early investors in How Stuff Works.

There's no doubt that Brain is both the head and the face of the operation. The press packet proves that. There he is again on the Web site posing in the same T-shirt, which How Stuff Works would be happy to sell you. Click a little deeper, and you'll find childhood photos of him. Even his name is part of the company: It's officially called Marshall Brain's How Stuff Works. "We want the site to have a personality," says Steve Christian, vice president of business development. "It's not just anonymous data out there, it's really and truly a person who's telling us that. When you put a person like Marshall out there who is really the true McCoy and you're hanging that personality out, you have someone you can relate to."

His name doesn't hurt either. It's a conversation piece. The most common question fielded by folks at How Stuff Works is, "Is Marshall Brain a real person?" When people meet him, one of the first questions they ask is, "Is Marshall Brain your real...