Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher

  Steven Johnson: So what had just been text-based pages suddenly had images. This was the point which the web stopped just feeling like an interesting new format for data, and really started to look like media. You could start to imagine that this was something that could become a magazine, that you could put advertising on, or maybe the kind of intimate media of your own personal pictures. I remember looking at Netscape and thinking, Oh, I can learn this and publish my own magazine—with basically no distribution costs! That was just mind-blowing.

  Lou Montulli: The next step was to introduce those elements which allow for dynamically driven web content, allow for video, audio, a full programming language as a plug-in within the browser. Netscape started to lay the groundwork for the dynamic web that we know of today: We started to treat the web more like an application rather than a series of pages.

  Marc Andreessen: Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application.

  Lou Montulli: The whole metaphor of moving through the web page to page is now disrupted, and you have a complete application written in HTML on the one page of your browser, which is really important. This allows you to deliver truly immersive apps in a web browser which changes, fundamentally, how software is delivered.

  Steven Johnson: The internet was an asterisk that evolved into this browser-driven second platform. It kept Microsoft from being the dominant quasi-monopolistic force that we all thought it would become.

  Lou Montulli: You can see very clearly, there is a correlation between the decline of Microsoft’s power and the increase of the open web. We knew that would happen.

  Steven Johnson: And because no one owned the open web, it unlocked this period of unbelievable creativity and innovation. It was not just variations on a theme. Whole new categories of software were created: user-created and -curated encyclopedias, social media, and a million other ideas. Suddenly a couple sitting in the proverbial garage could come up with something and change everything again—like Larry and Sergey starting Google or Biz and Jack starting Twitter. Or even Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

  John Doerr: The greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet!

  Steven Johnson: It all happened remarkably quickly: All the exciting things and all the vast new fortunes began to be created on the open web.

  Bob Taylor: The world wide web opened up the internet like nothing before, and the browser made all of that a lot easier.

  The Netscape web browser was an unprecedented success—as was the Apache web server. And yet the two were like matter and antimatter: by all rights unable to exist in the same economic universe. Apache was giving away the server software that Netscape had planned to sell in order to keep the browser free. Paradoxically, it all worked out. The solution? An inspired bit of what Silicon Valley likes to call “social engineering.”

  John Giannandrea: It was a somewhat sneaky idea.

  Lou Montulli: We had put a price tag on the browser but with kind of a wink-wink. We were really saying, “Well, if anyone wants to download it, just download it.” It was freely available.

  Marc Andreessen: There was a clause in the license that said if you use it for business, you have to pay for it.

  John Giannandrea: The core engineers—the Jamies of the world—were a little bit ambivalent. They said, “This is not okay, we are going back on our word.” Because Marc had said things like, “It would always be free.” And now we were parsing that a little bit.

  Lou Montulli: But what it meant was our salespeople could call up virtually any business in the world and say, “We noticed you are using our software, would you like to pay for it?” and they would say, “Oh yeah, sure sure.” It was not very expensive; it was twenty dollars or something. It had a more expensive price but the discounting made it very cheap, as cheap as a dollar per person. People were like, “Yeah, absolutely, it is useful software, we love it! We will give you money.” And our revenues just ballooned. It was ridiculous.

  Marc Andreessen: The browser was intended to be a loss leader, but revenue shot up like a rocket because that split license worked! I mean, we never expected browser revenue to get that high. We always thought that would be free.

  Jim Clark: Our revenue started going up exponentially and I started seeing that we were going to be profitable that first year. I thought, Well, this is wild. We should just take this thing public!

  Jim Barksdale: We decided to go in in May. We hired the bankers. We did the necessary filings. We went on the road show. You could sense the momentum building as we went from city to city. The word was getting hot. The newspapers were covering it a lot. The Wall Street Journal was talking about it, and everybody else, wondering what this new IPO was going to do. We were a brand-new company, less than a year old. Back then, the conventional wisdom was that you had to have at least three years of solid financial data in order to go public. We didn’t. We had a couple of quarters and some projections, which I thought were conservative. And they proved to be. It was getting exciting. In London, which was our last stop, we got to the end of it. “Mr. Barksdale, what is going to happen when Microsoft just bundles the browser into their product?” I said, “Well, sir, there are two ways to make money in this world. Bundling and unbundling. We have to catch a flight. Maybe another day, I’ll go through that with you.” We laughed at that one.

  Aleks Totić: We had no idea what we were doing. All of this stuff was improv. The long working hours, the releasing of it on the internet, not having a business model to start off with, the IPO, all of this stuff, we were doing it because we didn’t know any better.

  Jim Clark: I remember the day we went public. I was worth $663 million at the close of market that day. So I put a tail number on my airplane of 663 Mike November. And I began to build that boat, Hyperion.

  Jim Barksdale: Jim was interested in boats. He had this idea of building this computerized boat, the Hyperion. It was single-masted, the tallest mast in the world.

  Jim Clark: It had the tallest mast in the world—until John Williams, this real estate guy in Atlanta, decided he was going to build a bigger one. He made his mast one meter taller. Hyperion had eight crew and three bedrooms. It was meant as a jewel box: It’s a real work of art inside. It is 150 feet long, which sounds big, but it is not that big on a sailboat. To get to the size where you have another deck above on a sailboat, you are getting into the three-hundred-foot range. That is what I have now—a three-hundred-foot three-masted schooner, Athena.

  Lou Montulli: It never even occurred to me that people could make this much money. I made probably $20 or $30 million. Something like that. But it did seem absurd to me and, in some ways, I felt a little numb. This cannot be real; this money cannot actually be there.

  Jamie Zawinski: It was just a joke. Actually, my favorite joke from IPO day—it turns out Jerry Garcia died on the day of the Netscape IPO. So the very first joke I heard when I walked in that day was, “What were Jerry Garcia’s last words?”

  Jerry Garcia: Netscape opened at what?!

  A Fish, a Barrel, and a Gun

  Suck perfects the art of snark

  In a manifesto that accompanied the first issue of Wired, editor in chief Louis Rossetto predicted a digital revolution that would whip “through our lives like a Bengali Typhoon.” Remarkably, the deluge showed up just as Rossetto promised. Nineteen ninety-five was the year that toys started to talk; it was the year that the web awoke. From his vantage point, Rossetto could clearly see that the new medium was going to create a new crop of media moguls. And if he plotted his course right, he could join them. It didn’t happen. Instead, Rossetto was upstaged by two mutinous employees: Carl Steadman and Joey Anuff. Disgusted with Wired and especially HotWired, Rossetto’s attempt at an online media empire, the two twenty-somethings secretly decided to launch a “HotWired killer”—while still working for Rossetto. Suck was cynical, anonymous, gleefully Marxia
n: the anti-Wired. Yet it was produced in Wired’s offices and served out on Wired’s bandwidth—and it established a format, set a pace, and adopted a tone that came to define the world wide web.

  Kevin Kelly: If Wired had been done in like 1989, it wouldn’t have made it. It would have been too early. Wired came just right at the dawn of the web, and everybody kind of woke up and said, “Oh my gosh, now I get it! I need this magazine to understand what’s happening.”

  Louis Rossetto: We had no reference to the world wide web in the first issue of Wired.

  Kevin Kelly: We were accused of being completely clueless about the internet, because we had no mention of the internet in the first issue. But I was so tired of talking about The Well and the internet that I didn’t want to talk about it in Wired. We actually didn’t want it to feel like it was about the internet. We wanted it to feel like it was about this broader culture, and so we avoided it. Maybe that omission seemed like an oversight, but it was on purpose.

  R. U. Sirius: I remember when Wired started their conference on The Well. People didn’t talk so much about how the internet was changing the world. They were already imagining virtual reality right around the corner and stuff like that.

  Brian Behlendorf: At Wired in the summer of ’93 I was setting up a website, but I was also fixing bugs, I was adding features, and sending them upstream over this e-mail list to the kids at the University of Illinois building, this along with everyone else, the other users, and we were trading these fixes like baseball cards. This was kind of like the Brownian motion of how technology improvement took place in the early days of the web.

  Louis Rossetto: It was only in the second issue that we had a small news item in the front talking about Tim Berners-Lee in Geneva. That was the first mention of the web in our magazine. But not the last. Then it became something we were paying attention to.

  Howard Rheingold: And so Louis thought, Okay—let’s create a web-based cultural publication that we’ll make money on. One of Louis’s admirable traits was that he thought really, really, really big.

  Louis Rossetto: The magazine people were having a ball. The advertising people were selling ads hand over fist. So the HotWired thing was a complete flyer. We had a meeting where we sat down and said, “This is what we’re doing: We will create the first website that has original content and Fortune 500 advertising.”

  Brian Behlendorf: I was impressed with that, but none of them had deep experience, or any experience, really, with the internet.

  Louis Rossetto: So let’s find out what it is! The mandate for HotWired was “What is original content made for this medium supposed to be like?” We set a launch date for the fall of ’94.

  Jonathan Steuer: I was the nerd getting a virtual reality PhD at Stanford. What pulled me over to Wired to start HotWired was the data piece. To get interesting data about how people use media and new technologies, you have to pay college sophomores to do weird stuff for you. But on the internet people would leave logs.

  Brian Behlendorf: I knew enough about the protocols and the technology to understand that you could start to use this new technology that a couple of us had proposed called a cookie.

  Lou Montulli: The original design of cookies was specifically designed to be a tracking-free methodology, which is pretty ironic given how it is used today. The problem came about when cookies enabled tracking essentially by combining multiple technologies together to create a tracking technology.

  Howard Rheingold: So one of the things that we did do at HotWired was to use forms, which had just become available, and cookies, which had just become available, to enable people to have forum-like conversations online.

  Louis Rossetto: We invented web media. For the first six months we had 50 percent of the traffic on the web—some ridiculous number.

  Brian Behlendorf: We wanted to cultivate an online community where people actually had identities and talked to each other. Everything was the beginning point of a conversation, almost more of a BBS than a newspaper.

  Louis Rossetto: We separated it from Wired because we didn’t want that idea that we’re just repurposing content from Wired. We wanted these people to feel like they were doing something unique.

  Brian Behlendorf: As we were putting together this HotWired division, Jonathan pulled together a lot of people he really respected from the digital world and from the BBS world, Howard Rheingold being one of those, Justin Hall being one of these. All of them were, like me, freaks.

  John Battelle: Weird furry hacker freaks pushing the boundaries of the internet.

  Justin Hall: In December 1993 there were like six hundred sites on the internet. They were all like, “I’m at this university and I study advanced mathematical modeling and here’s a picture of my cat.” I thought, Boy, this can’t be expensive or difficult. This guy’s just put up a page about his cat! So I figured out how to put up a home page and launched it in January of 1994. And I introduced myself like I’d seen the sort of professor-y people do it. I said, “Hi, I’m Justin. I’m going to college. I love rock ’n’ roll music and LSD…” I started just writing and using the hypertext structure of the web to tell the story of my life.

  Jane Metcalfe: Justin was a bona fide internet personality.

  Joey Anuff: Justin’s links.net was a bigger hit probably than anything HotWired ever published.

  Howard Rheingold: Julie Petersen was the one who found Justin. She said, “Hey, I know you wanted to have a nineteen-year-old around. There’s this guy at Swarthmore whose site is getting more traffic than Wired does!”

  Justin Hall: I went to visit the Wired magazine offices at 2 South Park and it was awesome. You know, just people with tattoos and long hair and earplugs. Like plugs in their ears, not like for sound but for aesthetics. I had been to Grateful Dead shows and I had been to rock concerts and I had been to all kinds of stuff, but walking into the Wired office you had the sense that all these different subcultures were converging.

  Brian Behlendorf: There were other people that we hired eventually who I knew through my connections on the SF Raves mailing list that I administered. The list was a gathering point that a lot of young creative people seemed to be attracted to.

  Jane Metcalfe: I called them the happy shiny people, and they attracted more happy shiny people. And they were good-looking and fun and totally on board with whatever needed to happen. They knew how to manage parties. They knew how to manage the list and the front door and all the rest of that thing.

  Justin Hall: I met up with the online team for a while and we chatted. I can’t really remember much of what we chatted about except that at the very end one of them said to me, “If you’re going to be the intern, you’re going to have to smoke the swag weed.” That’s when I realized, Oh my God. I think it’s going to be okay. I’m going to fit in with these people. These are my people. I get it!

  Howard Rheingold: When Justin joined, we went downstairs. There was an interesting guy who had a little magazine called Might, Dave Eggers.

  Jack Boulware: South Park was a publishing hub. You might go to the burrito place for lunch and Oh, there’s the guys from Might magazine having a Gen-X rap session about something, and then the Wired people would start floating in.

  Howard Rheingold: He had this little magazine, this little storefront down there. So we smoked a joint down there and went back into the office and all eyes turned to us, because we had smoked it at the base of the elevator shaft and it just sucked all the smoke into the office.

  Justin Hall: The online people were in a space called the grotto, in the back of 2 South Park. It was called the grotto because it was hot and it was far from the door and it was packed. I loved it, of course, because I was nineteen. I’m elbow to elbow with people who love the internet!

  Amy Critchett: Justin ended up sleeping in the grotto for a summer. I gave him as a present once to a friend of mine for her birthday. A big bow, you know. So yeah, there was definitely some partying going on.

  John Battelle: Jus
tin was in the HotWired team, but whenever I interacted with him, I was struck by two things: that he was very smart, and that he was like ten years old. He was so thin and slight.

  Louis Rossetto: Justin was cool. He was this young guy who was full of ideas and energy, and I was happy to have him around. He had his own thing going, and he brought a lot of insight into the medium and to help launch HotWired. We ultimately had a disagreement about a couple things.

  Justin Hall: I started arguing with Louis Rossetto about how the web should take shape, and whether people should enjoy the web or whether the web was more exciting as a place where brands and curators should have the loudest voices. I was so worked up about the idea that individual publishing would be the ticket to happiness and a truly new medium. Louis was already feeling like the web was too unpolished for it to be popular, and that the web needed a firm hand to take shape as a truly great space for publications.

  Louis Rossetto: Justin had just a sort of unwillingness to understand that the site needed to make money. For him to have a job the site needed to raise funds and you need an advertiser for that. There was some kind of a disconnect between the business reality of it and what his ideals were about what the site should be.

  Gary Wolf: Howard and Justin, they had a vision of a future of the web in which anybody could say anything to anybody else. And in which platforms for enabling communities would be the new valuable form of media. And Louis had a vision of the web in which the web would provide a mechanism by which popular voices could reach even larger audiences due to the erasure of distribution costs.

  Justin Hall: Louis was very different than the people in the online department. It was fun to be able to sort of go hang out with the people that were all sort of psychedelic and communitarian and then go to the other side of the office and argue with the guy who was—I’m trying to summon my best Louis impression here—like, “We’re on a rocket ship to design expertise and content curation!”