My Books, Essay #2

The oddballs of the first Internet wave

My first book, Under the Radar, came out in 2001. It reflects experiences, including my own, during the first wave of Internet mania. I listed what I thought were the six characteristics of successful entrepreneurs in the context of the Internet:

Charm. It’s not something that you read about in most books on entrepreneurship, but charm is really important. You needed to be able to get people on your side. I was sufficiently charming that a lot of otherwise busy and more experienced businessmen took time and trouble to offer me advice and assistance.

Talent Scouting. You really need to be able to play Moneyball, finding the teammates that other entrepreneurs overlook.

Information sponge. There was a lot to absorb in trying to keep up with developments in the early days of the Web.

Ability to stand up to the bear. Your natural tendency in selling to established businesses as customers is to be timid and charge a low price so as not to discourage a purchase. Wrong! You need the revenue more than they do, and they have no idea that your costs are as low as they are. What I mean by standing up to the bear is setting a high price to business customers. I was terrible at this. The guy I eventually partnered with excelled at it.

Beginner’s Mind. In an ambiguous environment, you have to be able to get by on guesswork and improvisation.

Ability to Focus. In a wide-open field, you will notice many opportunities out there. When you find one that you can take advantage of, stick with it.

I was thinking in terms of a really democratized business environment, in which you would not need venture capital backing or blitz scaling or other recent buzzwords. If today’s AI frenzy ends up reminiscent of the first wave of commerce on the Web, which I think it will, then these characteristics will be important for current entrepreneurs.

One point that I did not make explicitly, but which you can clearly take away from the book, is that entrepreneurs in the Web’s early days were oddballs. Normies stayed away until the Web became respectable, which was 1996 or later.

Consider my description of Chris Locke.

I also read the first magazine devoted to the Net—Internet World. I sent an email to one of its columnists, Christopher Locke. . .That weekend, Locke himself called me, treating me to his four-letter-word-laced hippie-visionary rap about Mecklerweb, his big project at the time. That effort…died at its premature birth

Locke’s Wikipedia entry says,

In 1994 he initiated and oversaw the development and launch of MecklerWeb, an ambitious project that sought to introduce commerce to the Internet and garnered much attention in the business press. Locke's e-commerce concept was abandoned two weeks after the launch by the site owner, who chose to turn MecklerWeb's into a conventional product catalog.

Notwithstanding the respectful-sounding Wikipedia entry, I believe that Locke’s trajectory was downward, and he died almost penniless. From the time I first spoke to him, Locke came across as somewhere between a visionary genius and a crazy homeless person. He was far from the only Web-head who came across that way. Today, you mostly read about the ones who ended up classified as visionary geniuses, as opposed to those who wound up at the other end of the spectrum.

In Under the Radar, I quoted a wonderful passage from Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose.

That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. . .he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong. Hope was way out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Pioneer time. It was a very common affliction in the first wave on the Web. A lot of ideas that many of us had in 1994 or 1995 were unworkable then. Some of them became possible in 1997 or 1998, some became possible a decade later, and some of them still have not materialized. If you were lucky, you were still around to catch the wave when it came. For Chris Locke, and no doubt for many others, being on pioneer time was a misfortune.