This New Internet Thing, Chapter 27

Ventures Big and Small

I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.

In Chapter 26 (notes), the TV show that Len and Dan were interviewed on is finally broadcast. It’s not exactly what they they thought it was going to be, but Len still got his message across.

Grant Avery, a blast from the past, is back in town. Now he’s one of the legion of divorced dads who only rarely see their kids. He’s also back in Big Company Land, where he’s most comfortable.

Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.

=================== Ventures Big and Small ======================

Grant had settled into his new job at Taligent. It felt like old times, but whereas at Xerox he dealt with two opposing cultures within one company, now he had three different companies to reconcile: IBM,

Apple, and HP! Fortunately, the Apple and HP parts of it didn’t require him to get on a plane, since they were both in Silicon Valley. For Apple, he could just walk over to their offices in Cupertino, while HP was close by in Santa Clara.

This was going to be the future of computing, he was positive. Microsoft was quaking in their boots, and the proof was all the vaporware they kept announcing to distract from it. It had started as an Apple effort codenamed “Pink” and even though that wasn’t the official name anymore, people in Silicon Valley still called it that. After Steve Jobs left Apple and John Sculley took over, they became tabloid fodder as Sculley flailed about aimlessly. He would have denied he was doing that, but then there was the epic failure of the Newton.

The big question was, how would the Macintosh operating system evolve? Naturally, everyone at Apple had a strongly held opinion, and “object-oriented” became the trendy must-have. Pink was an “object-oriented operating system.” Object oriented programming, or OOP, was something Grant had been familiar with since his Xerox days, and the Smalltalk language was still around and still venerated by OOP devotees. 

But then IBM had joined up, and Apple and IBM had formed several joint ventures, including Taligent. Could anyone imagine Steve Jobs ever forming a joint venture with IBM? The sardonic joke at the time was “What do you get when you cross Apple with IBM?”  The answer was “IBM.”

In early 1994, Hewlett-Packard joined as well. With all this muscle behind it, how could it fail? Grant thought he was lucky to be a part of this. His phone was constantly ringing, and he was always being invited to give a presentation to someone or other. Since he’d lived in Japan and spoke fluent Japanese, he was automatically their guy whenever some big Japanese company wanted to hear about it, and that was often.

It was bittersweet to be back in Tokyo again so often, but at least he got to see his kids. Jun was very good about that. They still loved him and always asked if he was going to move back there again someday. It broke his heart, and sometimes he thought it might be better if they just forgot about him. Jun might get remarried and then they’d have a new stepfather who loved them, he hoped. He didn’t want to promise them that they could come visit him in California without asking Jun first, and she was always non-committal about that. He figured when they grew up, they wouldn’t need her permission.

One day in late 1994 he was planning to visit HP in Santa Clara on Kifer Road, and he realized that Janet worked just down the street, so he called her and they met for lunch. He’d never been to the 3Com cafeteria, and he had some vague hopes that he could recruit her to Taligent, but he didn’t push it. They got their food and sat down. He said,

“Very nice cafeteria here, Janet! Better than ours, anyway.”

“Thanks, I guess. Anyway, how’s Taligent?”

“Giving the exact same PowerPoint preso, over and over. Fielding the same questions, over and over. It’s a living.”

“I don’t know much about Taligent, other than what’s in the press. So when are they going to set the world on fire?”

Grant was used to mock-skeptical questions like this from techies. Taligent had become something of a joke among Silicon Valley insiders. Nonetheless, he was being paid to believe in it and make other people believe in it, so he did.

“Well, where shall I start? Have you heard of the Grand Unifying Theory of Systems?” She shook her head.

“The Grand Unifying Theory of Systems, or GUTS, is a way of unifying all the nonsense about Mac and Windows and Unix into one overarching concept. It’s built on the Mach kernel, which is a very small, fast operating system that connects directly to the hardware. There’s an object-oriented interface to it, so that everything is objects.”

She interrupted him. “So what happens to OS/2, and Windows NT, and all those things? We’re developing on OS/2 right now, which I thought was the new IBM thing. I’m starting to have my doubts about that.”

He was used to that, too.

“Those things are called ‘personalities’ under the Workplace OS. You can have a Windows personality, a Mac personality, an OS/2 personality, and so on. They all can coexist concurrently.”

“Wow, that sounds hard.”

Grant always projected an air of confidence when people asked him questions like that. His usual executive audiences tended to nod and take it at face value: “Oh, they all run concurrently? Very nice!”

He explained to her that the VP’s and CEO’s he talked to were always receptive to this talk. If he just dismissed Windows and Mac as silly obsessions of the propellerheads, without using those exact words, they smiled and nodded. They hated having to care about that geeky stuff.

Janet admitted that she’d had almost no exposure to that world, even when she was in school. Her first job was in the defense industry at TRW, and then it was Xerox, Apple, and 3Com, none of which had anything to do with IBM mainframes. A lot of the customers who talked to her when she was in charge of the 3Com internal network did, actually, work in companies that used them, but even there, these were the people outside the IBM shop. The ones inside had only contempt for Ethernet.

He went on. These IBM bigots really felt in their hearts that Big Blue was going to handle all that stuff for them, and then they could get on with running their businesses. That’s what IBM had done with their mainframes all through the 50’s and 60’s, and the natural order of things dictated that they would now do it again. Hell, they’d offered z/VSE since 1980, and they’d had the notion of a “hypervisor” since the 60’s. They could run “guest operating systems” on their mainframe, so why did this have to be any different? He found that to be an easy sell for the audiences he spoke to.

Techies like Janet were always skeptical, as she was now. She was intimately familiar with how Mac, Windows, and OS/2 worked, and thankfully she was a real engineer so those were not abstractions to her. He could see she was dubious.

“We have the best engineers from Apple, IBM, and HP working on it, so I’m pretty confident they can pull it off!”

She didn’t feel like arguing, so she changed the subject.

“Well, anyway, how are you liking being back in the US again, after all those years in Japan? Do you ever find yourself speaking Japanese and then catching yourself?”

He laughed. “Less and less. It’s all the new stores around here now: I drive down El Camino and I hardly recognize any of the stores. At least Chef Chu’s is still there!”

“Yeah, and the Fish Market! Remember, we had dinner there?”

“I do. I remember I said maybe you liked Walt more than you realized!”

“So you said at the watch party! I still don’t remember that.”

Grant said, “How’s your dad getting along? Did his brush with fame permanently alter his life?”

“Oh, Dad is getting lots of calls from the financial types. He says they mostly just want to pick his brains for free, but he still hopes one of them will turn into something real. I have to admit, this isn’t the retirement I pictured for him. I think he really just wants to be Jessica Fletcher and catch bad guys.”

Grant was puzzled by that name, and she quickly added, “On Murder, She Wrote.”

“So catching old people embezzling to play bingo didn’t quite do it for him?”

She laughed. “The sheriff let her off with a warning, and the church forgave her, too, so I think all is neighborly again up there!”

He snickered. “Well, anyway, if you’d just give him some grandkids, then he’d have something more normal to do!”

“Yeah, there’s this thing called the biological clock. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

“Maybe once. Anyway, what about your other friends? Matt and Cassie, was that their names?”

“They both worked with me at 3Com for a while. I actually promoted Cassie to manager, and then she went and left me to work in Support. Oh well. That’s what you’re supposed to do: develop your people, right?”

“Very good! And now she’s at Palm?”

Janet wondered if Grant wanted to ask Cassie out. She could tell him Cassie wanted to adopt a kid, but that probably wasn’t her business to say.

“Yeah, she seems to be enjoying it. Everyone’s been trying to make a handheld computer and failing, so maybe Palm’s got the answer. Who knows?”

“Are she and Matt an item? I noticed they came in together.”

Janet thought her suspicions about Grant were confirmed now. She pleaded ignorance. He could find out for himself.

“I haven’t talked to either of them lately. I know Matt was getting a divorce.”

Grant didn’t really expect her to tell him anything, but no harm in trying. He looked at his watch and said he had a meeting at HP to get to, so she walked him out. As they got to the sidewalk, she remembered something:

“Hey, remember Porter and the Dutch Goose?” He did remember the group of folks from Xerox, of course.

“Now they’re meeting at Gordon-Biersch

for lunch once a week. You should come!”

“That’s a restaurant or something?”

“A brewpub. It’s on Emerson in downtown Palo Alto.”

Grant figured it couldn’t hurt to reestablish some of his old contacts, so he agreed, and she said she’d email him.

* * *

Matt’s divorce from Miriam finally became official. He was hoping this would change Cassie’s attitude towards him. She’d been keeping him pretty arms-length, and he could tell that “I’m separated and I’m getting a divorce!” was a line she’d heard before. Half of those guys would get back together with their wives in the end, she knew.

Miriam was probably going to marry this Patrick jerk now. He couldn’t stand the guy, so they deserved each other, he thought. Patrick was working at Microsoft now, which fit for an asshole like him. He wondered if she’d subconsciously identified with Microsoft after they’d basically killed GO Corp! He didn’t know what the guy was doing for the Beast from Redmond, and he hoped he’d never have to find out.

He asked himself if he should roll the dice and join a startup, now that Miriam wasn’t going to get any of the stock. There were so many guys who had been rich, and then they got a divorce and the wife cleaned them out. At least that wasn’t going to happen to him. His Oracle stock was going up steadily, so she got something, but any new options he got were all his.

Startups seemed like such a gamble. In the early 80’s there were lots of startups going IPO, but lately not that many. And working at Oracle was so comfortable! Larry Ellison was a Great White Shark and you knew he’d find some way to make money for you.

He and Dan talked about this all the time. Dan had been scarred by his early 80’s startup experience, which was crappy in every possible way. According to him, without all the rules of corporate good manners and with millions of dollars on the table, people turned into utter animals. This was something you don’t hear about in those romantic myths of Silicon Valley startups, where everyone’s like a family and they’re all pulling together. In lots of real families, they all hate each other.

* * *

Len’s bookkeeping business had been slowly picking up again. His TV appearance had smoothed things out with folks up here, in some way he couldn’t quite fathom. He hadn’t talked about the bingo episode at all, but maybe people now saw him as a Guy On TV whom they should listen to, or something; he wasn’t sure what they thought. Everyone asked him for investing advice now, for one thing. Or maybe it was just that he was a neighbor now.

He got calls and emails from various financial types almost every day. They all seemed to want him to come down to the Valley or San Francisco, and give them some free advice. Or they wanted to place some money under his management. He always told them No, he wasn’t legally allowed to have more than 50, and they all had to be “sophisticated investors.” The latter was no problem for these folks, but the former was a barrier. He didn’t even have to tell them what he really thought: “Besides, I don’t know you and I don’t want your money.”

One Monday morning late in summer 1994, though, he got a call that was a little different from the others. It was from one of venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Right away his interest perked up; “Sand Hill Road '' was almost as famous as “Park Avenue'' in Manhattan.

He was a little curious just to see what it was like. They were pretty vague about what they wanted to talk to him about, but he thought, “Hey, they’re rich guys, it’ll probably be good food anyway!” He agreed to come by on Friday, and then he’d spend the weekend with Janet and Walt.

He got off 280 at Sand Hill and headed east. After all the hype, he was expecting big, impressive looking buildings, but actually, it probably looked about the same as it did 50 years ago. He had an address written down, and he kept looking on the left until he saw a low concrete barrier with a range of addresses on it, and a parking lot behind it, and then some two-story office buildings. “Auspicious!” he thought. “I guess they don’t need to flaunt their wealth.” He pulled in and parked.

The receptionist was extremely pleasant. She offered to get him coffee or water while he waited, and he sat down and took it all in. Everything was understated but tasteful. There were Oriental carpets on the hardwood floors, and modern art on the walls. The lighting was all indirect with no overhead fluorescents.

In a few minutes a tall, good-looking man in a blazer and open-collared dress shirt came out to meet him. He introduced himself as Brad and ushered Len back to a conference room, which already had four other guys, Jonathan, Tom, Mark, and Jim sitting at the table, all dressed the same as Brad. Mark had a Golden Retriever by his side, who seemed to know immediately that Len was a dog person and came right over to him.

Len nuzzled her and asked the group, “So did you all hear about the role my dogs played in that embezzlement thing?” No one had. “I’ll tell you later.”

Brad asked if Len was familiar with what their firm did, and he said he thought so.

“You know I used to be at Chrysler. We never had any contact with this stuff! It was like another world for us when Apple IPO’ed.”

“Yeah, that’s how we feel about Detroit. I’m sure we’d all love to hear all the nuts and bolts, if that’s the right term.”

Jonathan said, “Literally ‘nuts and bolts’ I guess!” Everyone chuckled.

Len said, “I used to be able to tell you exactly how many nuts and bolts went into a Chrysler LeBaron and what they cost us. But I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it used to be.”

Brad said, “None of ours are, either. But you’re probably wondering why we brought you here!”

Len looked expectantly.

“We’re getting an increasing number of what we call late-stage financing requests. Everyone thinks of venture capital as the initial investment for a startup, and that is most of what we do, but if we’re lucky, some of those startups grow up and need more capital. A lot more capital.”

“OK.” 

Brad continued, “Even aside from the financing, we sometimes feel like we need to be in closer touch with them than we can be. Eventually, they all need more money, which we call ‘mezzanine round’, and we get kinda worried that maybe they’ve gotten away from us.”

Len still didn’t see where this was going, but Mark jumped in.

“Really, we want you to be our eyes and ears there. Especially, and this doesn’t happen very often, but we have to be sure they’re all on the straight and narrow: marketing isn’t spending like drunken sailors, the salesmen aren’t padding their numbers, and so on. You know how all that works.”

“I see, so you want some adult supervision, or something like that?”

“Exactly. The partners here are being stretched pretty thin, at this firm and actually most of the firms around here. I don’t know of anyone else who’s tried doing this, and to be honest we don’t even know if it’ll work. At Kleiner, Perkins they have John Doerr, who takes a very activist role in his companies…”

Len asked for the spelling of that name and wrote it down. Mark continued,

“But we think you might have the skills to help us out here, sort of a force-multiplier for us. None of us here are John Doerr, since he’s one of a kind.  It helps that your daughter’s a tech veteran, too.”

Len thought, “And I don’t have any ambitions, plus I’m too old to be a threat to any of you!” but didn’t say it.

Tom added, “”We’ve been burned once or twice with companies who, let’s say, lost track of their mission. It was pretty embarrassing.”

“So would I be your employee, or contractor, or what?”

Brad said, “We think we’d like to start it as temporary employment. We’d pay you per job, and then we can see where we go from there.”

“OK, I guess it depends on how much time I’d have to do this, and how much access I’d get to their books and their employees. I don’t know, right offhand, how I would do this. You know, at Arthur Andersen, we were the auditors and we could demand to see everything. This wouldn’t be like that.”

Brad said, “Definitely not! But you showed a lot of ingenuity with that embezzlement case. We were all impressed!”

Len laughed, “Well, thanks. That was pretty fun.” He asked, “Do you have a particular job in mind right now?”

“Glad you asked! Why don’t we get some lunch, and then you and I can go back to my office?”

Len thought he was going to get to go to some fancy restaurant, but the receptionist brought in sandwiches, potato chips, soft drinks, and cookies. These guys didn’t waste time on eating lunch.

While they were eating, he regaled them with the full story of the embezzlement case, including Gretchen the retired police dog violently shaking the guy’s sleeve. They all laughed uproariously.  Mark turned to his dog Missy and said, “You’d defend me if someone attacked, wouldn’t you, Missy?”

Len said, “Well… I also have a Labrador, almost the same dog as Missy. Let’s just say they’re not fighting dogs.”