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After
the Gold Rush I have the questionable distinction of being one of the first Web evangelists in San Francisco. On a damp January evening in 1994, I dragged my SUN workstation halfway across town, plugged it in at Anon Salon – a monthly series of "rent parties" which attracted the arts & technology cognoscenti – and gave demos. The consensus was that the Web was pretty cool, all things considered. A fellow named Jonathan Steuer sauntered up to me, late in the evening, and drunkenly whispered a URL into my ear. Up came the still-secret home page for Hotwired, months before its launch, slick, shiny, and promising that the Web would be around for a while. Call that clue one.
About a month later, I ran into Brian Behelendorf – the nineteen year-old webmaster for Hotwired. He told me that he was starting a company to do web development. There’s a business in this? Oh yeah, he replied. Volvo. Club Med. MCI. Clue two. Fast forward: it’s a year later, and now Organic – Brian’s web company – is consuming most of an entire floor of a huge SOMA building. I’d dropped in, every few months, and with each visit noticed more walls knocked out, more desks, cubicles, meeting rooms and computers. And lots more people. It practically hummed with the sound of twenty-somethings, all irrationally dressed in rave or punk or goth or geek high style, working Photoshop images and EMACS Perl scripts. Now I was going to work; not for Organic, but for BigBook, which took some space in their offices, leveraging Organic’s know-how to create the first Yellow Pages on the Web. It was a great idea, and we knew we could do great things. (I was hired on to create a 3D representation of America’s urban communities, the kind of interface widget you couldn’t get from a Baby Bell.) The founder – who will remain nameless – was a youngster who had graduated from the Stanford MBA program, spent a year at SGI, and now, with his "insanely great" idea and a few million in venture capital, sought his fortune. He was younger than me, richer than me, prettier than me – and more arrogant than words can suggest. He knew his own future – he’d be a player, in the same league as Jerry Yang or Jim Clark. He’d destroy the brick-and-mortar Yellow Pages business, with its multi-billion dollar revenues, and put all that lucre firmly into his own pocket. He was sure, absolutely sure. Consequently, he wouldn’t listen to a word – from anyone. Two stories are worth recounting from this era, which dramatically illustrate the climate of those times. Just 24 hours before BigBook went live, we got a visit from the two individuals at investment banker Hambrecht & Quist who had taken Netscape public – with incredible success – a few months before. I was brought into the meeting as window dressing (see, we have our Web wunderkind right here!), and was amazed to find that these folks wanted to talk about taking BigBook public – even before we’d launched! Just keep us in mind, they said, and left us with business cards, brochures, and the dream of a well-placed IPO.
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As
I did have something to do with the early development of the Web,
I was one of the 350 researchers at the first Web conference in
Geneva that May, participating in a hyperkinetic week – everyone
had done something amazing, and everyone wanted to share their
work. But there where whispers, everywhere, about the biggest
no-show, a fellow named Mark Andreesen, who, just two weeks before,
had decided to build his own Web company. Evidentially Andreesen
had better things to do than hang with the Web’s core developers.
Oh well, I shrugged. His loss.
