Hot gossip from Ned Brainard's poison pen
It used to be that the geeks who made it into the ranks of the super-rich had to pull an all-nighter or two on their way to wealth. And lack of sleep, along with the other emblems of hard work (lack of a social life, lack of proper hygiene, lack of a good haircut) invested in product development that generated obscene amounts of cash became a badge that proclaimed "I earned this." But Internet frenzy made it possible for even the exceedingly lazy (or lucky) to realize similar returns. Which, inevitably, has prompted a round of dart-hurling against the Net's instant zillionaires, and our old friend Marc Andreessen is now square in the bull's-eye. The January issue of GQ magazine gives his reputation the sort of whipping previously reserved for a Leona Helmsley. Sour-grapes-laden former co-workers who didn't ride the IPO gravy train with Andreessen suggest to writer Alan Deutschmann that Marc, in effect, coasted to his US$175 million fortune before his 25th birthday.
It may well be true that Marc is an arrogant and possibly back-stabbing punk who didn't invent the first browser, may have taken credit for others' work, and "gasp" is a fast but not good programmer. But we're amazed that Deutschmann so naively swallowed enough spin from the jealous that he was able to write this conclusion: "These days PR and image making, not scientific genius, are the key to wealth creation in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street." Well of course he doesn't deserve anything he's gotten, Alan. Welcome to the software business! Or any business - 75 years ago, people thought that Henry Ford invented the car. (We're pretty sure he didn't.) Repeat after us: He who popularizes gets the best press, along with Midas-like piles of cash. We haven't seen any evidence that Marc's the next Ford - or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, for that matter. But it wasn't their coding skills, original ideas, or kindness to their fellow men that made those guys rich. Marc's just found the slacker's way to do it.
Could the Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers keiretsu be on the wane? The venture capital firm behind Netscape, Sun, @Home, and many a Silicon Valley success story has long trumpeted on its homepages the notion that it is building Japanese-style relationships among the many businesses it invests in. Thus @Home, for example, chose to create a custom version of the Netscape browser as the default for its cable-modem Internet service. It seems, however, that the people actually doing the work inside the keiretsu are finding that to get their jobs done they have to end-run the old-boys' network. We're told that down in the engine rooms of @Home, where their Web pages are actually made, the creative staff is increasingly turning to Microsoft's Internet Explorer as their default browser. And while the Kleiner keiretsu more or less defines itself as the yin to the Wintel duopoly's yang (just ask Sun's Scott McNealy), the @Home creative staff are, in growing numbers, turning what had been a mostly Mac shop into one dominated by Wintel PCs. Bill Gates and Andy Grove, it seems, have found a way to eat the Kleiner keiretsu from the inside out.
