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I didn’t even attempt to contact Thiel. The entrepreneur had long since stopped communicating with me, especially after a lengthy video interview in 2007 where we agreed on exactly nothing.
I watched founders transform from young, idealistic strivers in a scrappy upstart industry into leaders of some of America’s largest and most influential businesses. And while there were exceptions, the richer and more powerful people grew, the more compromised they became—wrapping themselves in expensive cashmere batting until the genuine person fell deep inside a cocoon of comfort and privilege where no unpleasantness intruded.
Simon Tan liked this
But if you knew them in the before times and have some prior knowledge of their original selves, you either become an asset (truth-teller) or a threat (truth-teller) to them.
Investor Chris Sacca, who also was not invited to the meeting, likewise seemed to grasp what was happening, boiling it down beautifully. “It’s funny, in every tech deal I’ve ever done, the photo op comes after you’ve signed the papers,” he told me. “If Trump publicly commits to embrace science, stops threatening censorship of the Internet, rejects fake news, and denounces hate against our diverse employees, only then it would make sense for tech leaders to visit Trump Tower. Short of that, they are being used to legitimize a fascist.”
French philosopher Paul Virilio has a quote I think about a lot: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
Actual memories faded quickly and all that was left were analog photos. In every single image, my father looks sunny and hopeful as he beams at the camera. It’s clear he loved the life he had built from a modest West Virginia upbringing. A stint in the Navy had paid for college and medical school, and after rising to a lieutenant commander rank, he took his first big civilian job running the anesthesiology department at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. He used the windfall to buy his first house for his growing family. Then he died before he had even moved in.
He provided a very comfortable upper-middle-class environment and then ruined it with a cavalcade of casual cruelties. We had a tennis court, but he locked access to it. I had a phone in my room, but he bugged it (and found nothing, as I was perhaps the dullest of teens, with no interest in drugs or drinking). Dinners served by a cook were an ongoing series of exhausting mind games and tests of knowledge for me and my brothers.
this is upper middle class? who has a tennis court and he cook!?
It helped that I was smart, reading and doing math well above my grade level, a whiff of early genius that would not last past seventh grade when everyone else caught up.
Exasperated by my insistence that it was an embarrassment, even for a very short story, Kramer hired me on the spot as a stringer for the paper.
In those early days, I’d see some of the decisions my bosses made and think, This is how I’d do it. I was beginning to get an inkling of my own tastes and judgment. I just didn’t have the certainty and maturity to act on it.
“I think that sexual harassment is like pornography,” Swisher says. “You know it when you see it. People can tell you look nice and there will be no menace to it. With John McLaughlin, there was menace.”
Then and there, I decided that was the best way to go through life—not caring about the consequences of saying or doing what I believed was right.
“Kara Swisher,” he said loudly, as if he were on a TV set. “Kara Swisher, most people in this town stab you in the back, but you stabbed me in the front and I appreciate it.” Then he let out a giant laugh.
Everything that can be digitized will be digitized. If “God said, let there be light: and there was light” is the most important tech concept ever—and let’s be clear, no golden geek, however much they think so, has topped that one as yet—this idea of being able to turn the analog into the digital is at the heart of the promise and the challenges we still face today.
“The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.”
I got to know Andreessen later, for better and worse (much worse as time went on and he became odder).
common theme? what is it with getting older and richer?
It was the same with texts—all of which I saved in a “Marc” file, because I had a sense even then that these boy men would try hard to reinvent themselves and erase their former selves. Texts from Marc were indicative of a restless and vaguely disgruntled mind.
I liked Barksdale immediately and found him to be the kind of leader I wished there were more of. Highly ethical, but with a love of young techies, he exuded decency at every turn. And one thing stood out: Barksdale never lied to me, as Andreessen did so many times that I stopped counting. (In reply to one text from him that was flatly untrue, I simply wrote: “Pants on fire.”)
Yahoo took what AOL had pioneered and put it directly on the Internet. It became the most important web site that was a directory of other web sites, all listed by hand by a group of human Web crawlers. Yes, one at a time, by a group that I dubbed “the Internet bouncers.”
Over the years, I got job offers from every major Internet company and a whole lot of minor ones. I always turned them down, because—well—just because I liked reporting. Many journalists did jump during the boom, but I never did. Such a move seemed soul crushing. Maybe I also knew that I was far too much of an irritant to survive until my shares vested.
My journey to this surreal moment started in 1999 when famed venture capitalist John Doerr pointed out the startup to me. Doerr had invested $12.5 million in an early Google funding round, along with $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz. That the pair of major VC rivals had cooperated was unusual, and they both joined Google’s board of directors. I had grown fond of talking to the whip-smart Doerr, even though he’d often call me up close to deadline on a scoop related to one of his many investments and say: “Are you sure you’re right?”
The food Charlie made was indeed delicious, and the founders were extraordinarily awkward, especially Page, who as CEO did not seem to relish the idea of being the forward-facing executive. Brin filled the silence, attempting to make a series of silly jokes that landed about 46 percent of the time. Wojcicki stopped by to say hello, and it was, as I recall, a moment of sweet relief to have a functional conversation.
But when Doerr and Moritz connected Schmidt with the twins, sparks flew. Schmidt recognized that forming a troika with Page and Brin was the chance of a lifetime. He joined Google first as board chairman in March of 2001 and by summer was named CEO.
Page was a smooth operator and, really, a killer. He looked at me dead in the eyes and added: “But don’t tell them.” Of course, that’s the first thing that I did. When I got to my car in Google’s parking lot, I called up Yahoo cofounder and Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang, with whom I had developed a spiky though friendly relationship that was not unlike two bickering siblings. I did not often warn companies, but I had seen this so many times before that I could not keep it to myself. “You need to get them off your platform,” I said regarding the dangerous licensing deal. “They look harmless, but
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At a TED conference in early 2002 in Monterey, California, five months before the offering, we sat at a table in the conference center late at night and talked about the future of Google. Page was much more open and reflective in those days and, as smart as he was, knew what was coming was something he did not quite understand. While Schmidt loved the attention of being at the hottest tech company of the moment—glad-handing just about anyone who passed him in the tony crowd and forever flirting—Page avoided such gatherings and only appeared when he had to. He had nearly no filter.
At that moment he was sorting through how to go public with some modicum of integrity, as he seemed to loathe investment bankers and all the Kabuki theater that went with an IPO. Google would later go public via an unusual “Dutch auction” that involved collecting bids from interested investors to determine the highest price at which it could sell its shares. In a 2010 Harvard Business Review piece titled “How I Did It: Google’s CEO on the Enduring Lessons of a Quirky IPO,” Schmidt explained the theory: “I know this may sound like baloney, but we settled decisively on the Dutch auction after we
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Even then, Silicon Valley was already littered with look-at-me narcissists, who never met an idea that they did not try to take credit for. Not Page. It was also no surprise that he and others at Google insisted on establishing a set of corporate values that the company could adhere to as it headed into the stratosphere. The founders decided to use the motto “Don’t Be Evil,”
Later, as my spouse got higher jobs at Google, I had to insert links to long disclosures on my stories. Eventually, I stopped reporting on Google altogether.
I noted then that Google had almost none of the obvious menacing aggression that characterized Microsoft when it thoroughly dominated tech. Still, Google was headed toward the same kind of monopoly that it had decried less than five years earlier in its manifesto.
“We’re good people,” he said to me. It’s true they were nice, and it’s true that they did not start out in that simple garage to be the gods of information, as well as the richest and most powerful people on the planet. “I’m not worried about the good people in charge now,” I replied, my history education still acute. “I’m worried about the bad people later.” You know, the evil ones. Since, unlike the people I covered, I had studied history and I had zero doubt they would show up soon enough.
Still, from the start, I had no doubt that Jeff Bezos would eat my face off if that is what he needed to do to get ahead.
And at the time, there was no one more performative than Bezos. While I could catch flashes of irritation and even anger under his mannered breeziness, he disguised it well.
Since I was also more coldly business minded than the average reporter, it was a relief to talk to Bezos. He had none of the awkward social deficits, and while he was more obviously venal, I appreciated that he never spewed the “I’m changing the world” craplets that had become de rigueur among the tech set.
I thought better of him because of her. Coincidentally, it was the same with Bill and Melinda Gates.
As it turned out, neither the Bezos nor the Gates marriage would last… and neither would mine. But it definitely was nice to see a softer side of these relentless men.
If Page and Brin were whimsical brainiacs, Bezos personified muscular ambition.
“You’re not a tech company, you’re a souped-up logistics company,” I said to him once. He responded with that maniacal laugh.
He pontificated on all manner of subjects. He met with smart men and invested craftily in the early rounds of companies, including putting $250,000 of his own money in Google at four cents a share. Most importantly, he started a business to realize his dream of putting humanity in space.
At one point, he asked me why I would use an anonymous donor versus someone I knew… like him. It was in no way an offer, but I joked back that while he was rich, certainly an attractive trait, he was too short and bald for my needs. Of course, he broke out into his famous laugh, and his chortling attracted the attention of the entire party. People turned and asked what we were talking about. I must have jokingly responded that Jeff had volunteered to be the donor of my child. We all had a good laugh.
On January 10, 2000, AOL forked over $182 billion of its highly inflated stock and debt to buy Time Warner. The media giant owned Warner Bros., HBO, CNN, TBS, and Time Warner Cable, as well as Time, People, and Sports Illustrated magazines, while AOL had just 30 million subscribers to its largely dial-up service. Later, this acquisition would be dubbed by me as “the heist of the century.”
In Amazon’s first letter to shareholders after going public in 1997, Bezos had focused on the company’s “established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy.” They’d all be dead or dying soon enough, except Bezos, who was feral enough to survive the coming cataclysm.
I realized, in short, that I was and would always be a great reporter and a less good employee, which led me to the obvious conclusion that I wanted to have control of my work and my destiny.
we both knew one thing clearly: We did not have the time to wait, and no one has that kind of time, in truth.
my biology teacher once tried to make me understand it with one simple rule: Everything is always on its way to something else.
In 2007, he shared our stage for a historic joint interview with his longtime nemesis Bill Gates. This extraordinary meeting of tech’s two greatest pioneers revealed both their deep rivalry and enduring respect. It would turn out to be one for the ages. And it almost didn’t happen.
We persevered and asked Gates a question about some small detail. Suddenly he blurted out: “Why would I know that? I run hell.” We all froze. Except Jobs, who was holding a very cold bottle of water that was drenched with condensation. He extended his hand with the water bottle toward Gates. “Let me help you,” Jobs said playfully. And that, thankfully, broke the very ice that he had made.
Gates and I had a prickly relationship through most of the time that I covered Microsoft’s weak-sauce Internet-focused efforts, but once he stepped away from the company in 2008, he became much more willing to listen than overtalk. He grew to understand the much longer game he was in and could impact.
And then, he delivered his famous one-more-thing. “I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or Beatles song,” Jobs said in perhaps one of the more wistful moments I ever saw him in. “And there’s that one line in a Beatles song, ‘You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.’ ” He paused for exactly the right amount of time, the consummate performer, and then added: “And that’s clearly true here.” He gestured to Gates with a little wave. The audience broke into an audible “Awww,” and then began applauding. Gates’s eyes darted around, avoiding eye contact
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“You’re probably right.” He acknowledged that Apple was following in the social space and not leading, a fact he hated as much as he hated Facebook and Myspace.
Other companies didn’t seem to care about either the consumer or the product. It sucks when people settle for an uninspiring product. Facebook comes to mind.
