Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Steve Jarrett: But was this actually physically possible for us to do? It was clear that was going to take years to build a supercompelling product like that. For me, that was the sign. That’s when I left the company.

  John Giannandrea: I quit. Part of it was realizing that we had a better product and we weren’t going to ship it.

  Marc Porat: We were one year away from it. We kind of ran out of gas, we ran out of steam, and ran out of the will to take the next step. Most of us were exhausted, for our own reasons. Andy had probably worked eighty hours a week forever. We were just plain tired.

  Michael Stern: After his first big surge of creativity, Bill kind of checked out. Andy was running engineering for three years. He had just had enough by ’95.

  Marc Porat: It was a physical fatigue, when you keep something alive for five years on a vision and on just the raw energy of passion to do something amazing, five years is a long time to keep that going, and you want some validation at the end of it.

  Michael Stern: So everybody leaves. I stayed on because I felt some loyalty to Marc. It was really sad and ugly. Everyone who touched the project at their respective companies—at Motorola, at Sony, and AT&T—their careers were wrecked. Because these companies had gone public saying, We’re doing the next big thing. We’re creating the future here! And then it crashed. It was a train wreck.

  Marc Porat: Engineers do things because they want millions of people to touch it. That is the ultimate reward for a top-level engineer. And when millions of people do not touch it, where is your source? Where is your juice? Where is the passion coming from? Where does the juice come from to take it to the next level? You need some affirmation; companies need some affirmation to keep going.

  Michael Stern: The company failed—we didn’t ship a product that people wanted to buy. But this cadre of brilliant kids in this incredible pressure cooker went on to do amazing things and create the world that we now take for granted.

  Megan Smith: There was this group at Apple that apprenticed with Steve Jobs, Woz, Mike Markkula, and all that crew, and learned. And then at General Magic they became the wizards and then we’re the apprentices. Phil Goldman and Zarko and Tony, Amy—we were the junior group to this senior group.

  Amy Lindburg: Tony went on to do the iPod and the iPhone.

  Steve Perlman: Phil Goldman and Bruce Leak both founded WebTV with me. Andy Rubin joined later.

  Amy Lindburg: And then Andy went on to do Android. And Zarko spun out the software modem—which was the first modem ever in software in the world.

  Michael Stern: Megan left Magic and went to San Francisco and founded PlanetOut, the first online community for lesbians. It became very successful and of course she ended up as the CTO of the United States of America. Not bad!

  Amy Lindburg: General Magic was the kind of company where a guy who is going to be a billionaire in a couple years didn’t even rate a window cube.

  Chris MacAskill: Pierre Omidyar was running AuctionWeb on his Mac IIci in his cubicle.

  Pete Helme: Supposedly the idea came at a local Chinese restaurant while he and a bunch of General Magic guys were talking, you know, “Wouldn’t it be great to sell stuff on the internet—and what about an auction format?”

  Michael Stern: So Pierre came to me when I was the general counsel in 1994 and said, “I’ve created this little electronic community. I’m getting people to talk to each other about trading tchotchkes. We’re creating traffic on the network and getting people into a community. That’s kind of in our sweet spot, isn’t it?” That was General Magic’s thing: the whole notion of electronic community. I said, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard! If you want to do it, bye, see you later.” That was eBay.

  Amy Lindburg: Everything came out of General Magic like just a big explosion.

  Michael Stern: iPhones, social media, electronic commerce, it all came out of Magic. That’s the story.

  The Bengali Typhoon

  Wired’s revolution of the month

  By the early nineties, Silicon Valley had racked up an impressive array of fascinating failures—The Well never scaled up, VR never took off, General Magic was in the process of imploding. The Valley’s breakthroughs were not breaking through. Meanwhile, up in Washington State, Microsoft was having great success in incrementally leveraging its humdrum operating system into de facto control of the personal computer industry. The money and power was shifting decisively north. Yet the Valley was still the center of an emerging nerd culture, and that culture had a powerful new tool. The Mac II, when loaded up with desktop-publishing software and paired with a laser printer, was a new kind of printing press. It allowed small, tech-savvy editorial teams to create magazines that looked like they were produced by publishing empires. Suddenly the bohemian world of West Coast publishing (of which the Whole Earth Catalog was the prime example) had an opportunity to disrupt the “real” publishing world. San Francisco’s techno-underground launched a raft of new titles, including Future Sex, Mondo 2000, and most importantly, Wired.

  John Plunkett: Where did Wired come from? You have to go back to Nicholas Negroponte and his insight that led to the creation of the Media Lab.

  Nicholas Negroponte: The original idea for the Media Lab was very simple. We foresaw a coming together of three industries which were previously completely distinct. You would pull the audiovisual richness out of the broadcast-entertainment ring. You would pull the depth of knowledge and information out of the publishing ring. And you would take the intrinsic interactivity of computers and put these three things together to get the sensory, rich, deep, interactive systems that today we call multimedia.

  John Plunkett: Stewart Brand wrote a book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, which Louis and I read. It was a big factor in Louis’s realization that, Hey, there could be a magazine about this!

  Louis Rossetto: So previous to Wired we were in Amsterdam and we produced a magazine called Language Technology, which became Electric Word. We changed the name in the middle of its life.

  Jane Metcalfe: We sent a copy to Kevin Kelly.

  Louis Rossetto: We had a piece on Anthony Burgess about how word processing affects writing. And a piece on Nicholson Baker, who was a word worker, a novelist. This is like the seed for everything that came out ultimately in Wired.

  Kevin Kelly: And I thought, Wow, this is interesting! So I reviewed it for Whole Earth. I called it “the least boring computer magazine there was.”

  Louis Rossetto: He had written this gracious thing. And so we said, “We want to go meet Kevin Kelly.” And so we went to visit him in his chaotic office. He had billions of books all over the place.

  Jane Metcalfe: Stacks and stacks and stacks of books everywhere.

  Kevin Kelly: I was interested in the culture of technology. I felt that there was something big moving there, and I was interested in trying to move Whole Earth in that direction. My thing at Whole Earth was I did the special issues and I did this special issue called Signal in 1988 as a kind of a trial, because to me the hippie colors of Whole Earth were beginning to wear a little thin. This was the same territory as Wired would be, but it was mostly about ideas and concepts. There was not a lot of profiles or stuff like that.

  Louis Rossetto: We had an incredible high-bandwidth conversation. We really enjoyed each other for the hour, hour and a half that we met.

  Kevin Kelly: All I could say was, “Well, if you’re going to do the magazine like this, you can’t possibly do it in Amsterdam. You have to do it in San Francisco.” That’s all I could say. That and, “Get on The Well.”

  Louis Rossetto: Then we went back to Amsterdam. We tried to keep Electric Word going and we couldn’t do that. Then we came up with the Wired idea and we came to California.

  Kevin Kelly: Two years later, maybe, they reappeared with the news that they were moving to San Francisco and they were going to start the magazine that they were trying to do in Amsterdam but couldn’t. My thought was, Good luck! Starting a magazine
is an assignment for dreamers.

  Louis Rossetto: There was a lot of trying to meet people who ended up becoming subjects of what we were doing.

  Bruce Sterling: They called me up and said, “Hi, we’re publishers, and we’d like to show up on your doorstep because we hear you’re a science fiction writer and we need more science fiction writers to be reporters for our new magazine.” I’m like, “Yeah, come by the spread.” They were on their way to San Francisco to start the magazine. They were kitted out in full Amsterdam euro-techno. Jane was wearing some very handsome shoes, the kind you would never see on a tech chick. I assumed that they were complete cranks. They didn’t look like any of the Mondo 2000 cyberhippies I was hanging out with at the time.

  R. U. Sirius: Mondo 2000 was really the first technoculture magazine starting in 1989. Previous to that, computer magazines were sort of like car magazines. They were entirely designed and oriented toward the mechanics of it, if you will. Mondo 2000 took technology and treated it as an element of counterculture.

  Fred Davis: I had been working for Ziff-Davis as editor of A+, PC Magazine, PC Week, MacUser. Louis and Jane showed up at my house in Berkeley, literally broke, with nothing but this idea to do Wired as a high-end version of Mondo 2000.

  Mark Pauline: The Mondo 2000 people were like, “Well, we’ll see about that!”

  Dan Kottke: Before it was Mondo it was called High Frontiers, and then it changed to Reality Hackers. It was a mixture of technology and culture and literature and music and film with drugs and consciousness studies.

  R. U. Sirius: So it was this merger of the psychedelic influences, technological influences, and strange ideas that were going around in the area of science and pseudoscience and quantum physics and pop culture.

  Fred Davis: Wired was closer to what I would consider potential to be a mainstream mag.

  Jane Metcalfe: Before we launched, we had a private conference on The Well where potential contributors, anybody who was a friend or whatever, could come and comment or participate.

  Fred Davis: Louis had a good concept, but to raise money they needed a good story about the audience. I helped put that together.

  Louis Rossetto: But it became apparent that we still needed something else to sell it. So we said let’s bear down and create something that looks like a real magazine—a real prototype that shows the edit and advertising, the attitude that the magazine was supposed to represent. We began to gather editorial material, advertising, and put the thing together as best we could, and then got together with Eugene.

  Eugene Mosier: I had just left a job at MacWEEK that didn’t work, and I was trying to decide what I should do. Fred Davis said, “Come to a party at my house, you’ll meet some interesting people.”

  Fred Davis: I had a fantastic big house in the Berkeley Hills. It was a great party pad. People like Todd Rundgren would come, Jaron Lanier. Something about programming and music go together, and there’s a high coincidence of programmer-musicians. But what I was trying to do was get the tech intelligentsia together with some of the literary intelligentsia.

  Eugene Mosier: The most interesting people I met were Louis and Jane. They told me their idea, I said, “Wow! I’d like to get involved.” Afterward I called them asking if they needed anyone.

  Louis Rossetto: I said, “We have no money.” He said, “That doesn’t matter, I’ll just help you.”

  Eugene Mosier: I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

  Jane Metcalfe: We were in the building right on the corner of Second and South Park.

  Jack Boulware: It was this building at the end of an alley in a pretty funky neighborhood where we were doing our satirical magazine, the Nose. Then Future Sex moved there. Dave Eggers was doing Cups, which was a coffee shop magazine, then he launched Might magazine—but they all had an office in the same building.

  Coco Jones: It was an open postindustrial space that a lot of magazines shared. I was working for Mondo at the time. To my left were Jane and Lewis.

  Louis Rossetto: It was a really sketchy neighborhood. We got there around mid-June, and within two weeks somebody put a bullet through the front window, a big plate-glass window in the front, and it landed behind Jane’s desk.

  Jane Metcalfe: And then on the Fourth of July somebody shot a bullet through the front door of the place.

  Louis Rossetto: Two incidents. Two bullets.

  Eugene Mosier: They said, “We don’t have a computer.” I said, “That’s okay.” They were borrowing office space near where I lived. It was a matter of walking to the office with my stuff. I put my Mac IIci and Apple LaserWriter II on a cart and rolled them down the street.

  Louis Rossetto: Eugene brought his computer, got another computer and another screen for me to work on while Jane got a hard drive, an incredible gift from the universe to help us finish. For the last two weeks Eugene called in sick to his day job and then worked to produce the prototype and then helped us actually print it.

  Jane Metcalfe: He’d worked for MacWEEK when they converted to desktop publishing and just didn’t want to work for the Man or whatever.

  Fred Davis: Desktop publishing was the killer app for the Macintosh. It fueled an explosion of people buying Macintoshes just to have the LaserWriter—which cost $6,000, by the way. That is the most anyone in the personal computer industry had ever charged for a printer. People bitched about the price. But the Apple LaserWriter could do real typography and allow you to create camera-ready copy from a device that cost a tiny fraction of what a big printing press cost. This was a whole new thing in publishing. It was a whole new underground culture, which was the Mac culture.

  Erik Davis: The counterculture of the sixties and seventies had split into a wide variety of subcultures, and one manifestation of this was the explosion of “zines,” which were a pre-web, pre-Listserv way for small communities of obsessives to get together. The eighties really was the decade for zine culture. And pretty soon people realized that, by bringing in these new technologies, you could sort of make a whole cultural space that was partly fantasized, and then almost instantly became partly real because when you have the publishing tools that let you be slick, you can make your own pop universe. You can make something that feels pop because it looks pop, and then you draw people to it, and it becomes pop. So it was kind of like a subcultural hack that just did very very well.

  Jack Boulware: I don’t remember anybody ever buying a copy of any of the software, never. It was a sign of weakness if you bought software. People were trading floppy disks all the time. You would just ask somebody. “Oh, I’ll make you a disk!”

  Jane Metcalfe: Eugene was a whiz at figuring out digital production issues.

  Eugene Mosier: The challenge, early in the desktop publishing days, was how to get the stuff out of the computers and onto paper so it could be shown to someone. The first PostScript interfaces for color copiers were just coming out. We found this copy shop in Berkeley that had one. Jane convinced them that it would be good publicity if we ran out the dummy of our mag on their machine. So we brought our files and started printing. We quickly realized it was taking way longer to reproduce a page than we had imagined. It was going to be an afternoon. That stretched into evening, and then became obvious it would run overnight. The people at the copy shop gave us the keys and went home. We proceeded to spend the entire weekend pressing the Print button and taking catnaps. We managed to print an entire magazine over the course of three days.

  Jane Metcalfe: Oh, we did not sleep. And of course they opened up the next morning and people started coming in so we had to go over to a little corner and share the printer. This was when I had started having hallucinations because of the spray mount.

  R. U. Sirius: The guys from Wired were upstairs. I remember Louis coming down and showing me a mock-up of the sample issue they had put together to get funding. I definitely had a visceral reaction, the suspicion that some people within the tech culture, establishment people, had looked at Mondo 2000 and said, “Well,
this won’t do.”

  Louis Rossetto: All this time we’d been trying to get in touch with Nicholas Negroponte. His secretary said, “He’s going to speak at TED. He’ll look forward to talking to you three.”

  Richard Saul Wurman: When I first did TED every single conference was white guys in suits that were either politicians or CEOs sitting on a panel, or a guy who stood at a lectern and put down a speech and read it. Every conference was about one subject—siloed. TED was not siloed. It was about a convergence between disciplines. I had captured this audience at the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design. These two people came, the beautiful Jane Metcalfe and the somewhat acerbic and very bright Louis Rossetto, a handsome couple. They said, “We found an audience for everything that we’ve been thinking about,” and TED was their audience. TED was Wired—what they had in their minds.

  Jane Metcalfe: The conference started at eight a.m.; I think we met with Negroponte at seven thirty. He said looking at a business plan this early is like doing a shot of bourbon for breakfast. He flipped through it.

  Louis Rossetto: The lights are down. Nicholas Negroponte sits there and looks at it page by page. He closes it and says, “I’m in.”

  Nicholas Negroponte: I asked them, “How much money do you need?” They gave me a number, and I said, “Fine.” It was a handshake.

  Louis Rossetto: It was like the sun came out and rainbows appeared.

  Nicholas Negroponte: And to protect my investment, I told them I wanted to write a column.

  Jane Metcalfe: Oh my God! He’s going to help us! And he’s going to write a column! And help us find more money!