Notes on Chapter 27

In Chapter 27, we had three themes.

Taligent and IBM

Grant Avery is now working for Taligent, a joint effort between Apple (before Jobs returned) and IBM, which everyone involved would rather forget about. Not on my watch!

IBM still thought they could finally, really, really beat Microsoft at the PC game. OS/2 hadn’t done it, so now they were doing Object-Oriented with Apple, and it was going to be the thing that everyone would get behind. Grant’s job is to evangelize for it with other big suckers companies, HP being the one he’s pitching in this chapter.

IBM had the notion of a “guest operating system” on their mainframes, so that your big iron could have different OS “personalities,” and they saw no reason why they couldn’t do the same with PC operating systems. Janet is skeptical. Right so, of course.

Matt and Miriam

Their divorce is final, and Miriam is probably going to marry Patrick, the Marketing guy from 3Com that Matt can’t stand.

Len Meets the VCs

After his TV appearance plugging himself as the Internet Investing Guy, everyone’s calling him, and mostly they just want some free advice. But one call interests him: it’s a VC firm on Sand Hill Road. He can’t resist checking that one out.

(That’s actually the location of Kleiner, Perkins, which I use as a mental model. It’s tasteful, and it’s way back from the road.)

I actually visited one of those Sand Hill Road firms back in the day. It wasn’t Kleiner, Perkins, but I don’t remember anymore who it was.

The VCs want Len for a job which I’m not even sure exists, so I made it up: he’s a substitute VC who gives the client firm the handholding it needs, and also keeps track of it for them. The conceit here is, venture capitalists always like to tell their entrepreneurs that they’ll be with them every step of the way, but that only lasts until they have so many clients that they can’t. Still, sometimes the clients need even more capital, so they have to decide whether to give it to them, and if so, how.

Len realizes that the fact that he’s retired means he’s not a threat to any of them. He’s not going to demand to become a partner, or go out and start his own shop. But of course he doesn’t say that.

In the next chapter, we’ll find out his first assignment