Excerpts

From Chapter One: A Diamond As Big As the Ritz (August 1996)

I am a reluctant participant in a conference of CEOs of information and technology companies being held at the Ritz in Laguna Beach, one of the poshest in the Ritz chain. I'm embarrassed by my hunger for affection and approval, preferably in the form of another round of financing for my company. Powerful forces are represented here -- principals of venture capital funds and managers of corporate strategic investment pools; these are ordinary men and women with extraordinary powers, who, if they so desired, could let me sleep through the night.

But who am I to be singled out? Most of my fellow CEOs at the conference are up all night too, disturbed not just by earnings that are down or market issues that need to be addressed but by a countdown, measured in weeks, of how much cash they have left. We are the leaders of an industry without income.

Some of the entrepreneurs here, though in similar extremis, hold themselves with striking poise and equanimity, while others buttonhole the venture capitalists, demanding their attention and delivering, in the verdant Ritz hallways, heated sales pitches. In the end, who will be left standing -- the hot and bothered or the cool?

It seems like high school all over again. The VCs are upperclassmen, study hall proctors, varsity athletes. A casual word or familiar gesture from any one of them can confer status, meaning, value. To be ignored is to not exist. The stakes are as high as they were in high school: existence itself.

Attendance at this particular conference has already conferred status. In the technology industry you could (and people do) attend conferences on a weekly basis, but this one has a track record of deals lined up, of good action in the halls, of hot faces in the crowd.

It was not my idea to come to the conference. I would have preferred to stay home, reticently, or modestly, or insecurely, but the lead investor in our company, a young man with large cyber ambitions, thought we both should make an appearance. "This is where we can make something happen," he theorized. "It's all in the halls. We'll just stand in the halls. I'll introduce you to who I know. You'll introduce me to who you know. It'll be very cool. You'll be great."

But the day before our departure, he bailed: "We'll go to the next one together."

I am grateful to be here on my own.

What fuels the emotions of these conferences, and this industry, is change. What is taken for granted today will be a joke tomorrow. All technology, as they say, is transitional. This rate of turnover, of obsolescence, makes it possible for people with heart and imagination, but without capital or experience, to make themselves into moguls within months instead of over the span of a career. All it takes is "the nod," the gesture (in the form of a minority investment) that acknowledges the prescience, the genius, or just the cleverness of the new kid on the block.

I am painfully aware that my lovely, wonderful company, which publishes some of the coolest guides to the Net and maintains one of the most lavish sites on the Web and has grown from four to seventy people in little more than two years, has seven weeks before it will crash and burn without new investment. So much depends on my ability to now attract the attention of one of these Big Men On Campus: not only next month's payroll but growth, expansion, dominance, and my chance to walk away with enough wealth to support generations to come. (This is not a long term plan, but one meant to be accomplished, ideally, by next year's meeting at the Ritz.)

The desperation in the air here is perfectly complemented by the thrill of seeing several faces desperate at this time last year (some who a year ago did not have dreams large enough to make them desperate) now elevated, esteemed, and valued.

From Chapter Three: The Board Meeting

Running a business with three employees, then seven, then fifteen, then thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy -- new neighborhoods of desks every week, a whole city -- I started to dream of being a great business story, of building something that was smart and sound and for the ages.

As a journalist, I found the prospect of defining a new medium, of being Murrow or Luce, pretty heady, too.

But the most powerful of these interests -- my upbringing and personal codes to the contrary -- was the prospect of making millions quick. Of making more money than you ever dreamed of. Of making the kind of money that would allow you to do all the things you ever dreamed of doing without the bastards getting you down. Fuck-you money. The sweetest lucre.

This dream beyond dreams seemed best personified in my former classmate, who in school was someone I took no notice of but who was now larger than life. Ten years after graduation, during one of my first entrepreneurial forays, I was urged by other classmates to "go see him." Or Him. Machinist's success was already a legend -- the Manhattan town house, the uniformed house help, the German-speaking wife and children, the racing cars. I went modestly, without jacket and tie or song and dance, hoping -- assuming -- that my lack of affect, my disdain for the world of high finance, would be as mysterious and compelling to him as his riches were to me.

It was a perfunctory meeting. Machinist was clipped, curt, and uncomprehending. He got me out ASAP. I understood, too. Shown the door, I got it. He was for real. He wasn't playing at this. The hairy, sniveling prep school boy had become an imperial liege. And that office! With its dining rooms, wall-size brand-name SoHo paintings, fresh flowers, and uniformed servants. It meant business on a global scale. Everyone who worked for him was serious; they all meant business. They all believed in business.

Over the years I tried but seldom succeeded in getting Machinist on the phone. When occasionally he did relent, it was almost impossible to talk to him. Our sentences didn't meet. There was always a disconnect. In part it was the money vocabulary, which I admired without comprehending, and in part I don't think he could quite find a context for my small-time enterprises. A hundred thousand dollars was my dream, a hundred million was his. Still, I could drop his name. I could hint that he might be involved with one of my schemes.

And then...

One Monday morning in October 1994, the Banker rose at his country estate in Greenwich and his uniformed servants brought him his cappuccino, his fresh-squeezed, and his Wall Street Journal and there, disturbing his breakfast, he found me and my Internet activities as the featured story.

Because publicity is the currency of our time, it is not unreasonable to assume that there is a Darwinian capitalistic earning process to such riches. Even people who should know better (even those for whom manipulations of the press are a daily accomplishment) are almost always impressed, or rankled, by someone else's publicity. Even though we know nine times out of ten that the fix is in, we somehow can't help regarding rich people as having earned their money, or publicity hounds as deserving their fame.

In short order I received a formal letter from Bob Machinist, handwritten, in fountain pen, on personal letterhead. (He would later ask my advice on a book he thought he was especially suited to write -- how to compose a letter for every occasion, including letters of condolence, letters of recommendation, letters to take over companies. Then, too, he was eager to have his wife write a cookbook; "a Jewish Martha Stewart" he saw her as.) It was a letter conferring high respect on my acumen and vision but sounding a clear cautionary note, too. An opportunity, offered to few people in a lifetime, had knocked on my door. I should look carefully at all that would be required to seize it.

"You can be a big swinging dick for a few days, or realize an enormous amount of money for you and your family. I'm suggesting that you can create a capital base for generations to come," he said in a follow-up phone call.

It was a surprise to me that when you get your name prominently in the newspaper, people call you up. All kinds of people. People who want you on television. People who want to make you business propositions. People from deep in your past. No one is bashful. Of all the many people who contacted me and solicited me after the Journal article -- I could speak to business roundtables, I could have the article encased in faux mahogany, I could contribute to numerous worthy causes, I could fill my dance card with financial firms up and down the West Coast -- I was most helplessly drawn to my former classmate, Robert Machinist.

It was the dynastic sense of capital which he offered that turned me on. My children and theirs born alight, aloft.

From Chapter Five: Internet Time

Well after even normal Manhattan work hours, one evening in early 1994, I picked up a ringing phone in our office, not half a block from Time's, to hear a large, embracing overpowering voice from inside Time Warner:

"Is this Michael Wolff? The Michael Wolff who knows more about the Internet than anyone in New York? This is Larry Kirshbaum. I want to know everything you know. When can I come over?"

Everybody knew Kirshbaum. The Celestine Prophecy, Bridges of Madison County, the Madonna sex book, and the Gone With the Wind sequel -- all were born in Time Warner's book division out of Kirshbaum's overbrimming enthusiasms and phenomenally accurate commercial instincts.

"You're so brilliant. You're so fabulous," announced Kirshbaum the next day, rushing to embrace every Internet accessory in my office (my modem, my Wired magazine, my T-shirt collection, my conference badges). "You understand. You get it! I love you! We have to work together! We're going to do incredible things. What can we do? How do you want to do it? Whatever you want. Whatever! We'll merge! Time Wolff!" he crowed, his face in mine, one hand grasping one of mine, his other hand rubbing my back. A large man with a Lyndon Johnson physicality (reaching, clasping, hugging, rubbing), a watermelon-shaped head, and eyes with an unnatural power surge, it was hard not to get excited by what excited Larry Kirshbaum.

"In five years there won't be any books or magazines or newspapers. It'll be all Net! We're ready. Come over. Let's do this! Let's just do it! We've got to do it!"

It was two hours of pitched and manic enthusiasm. I came to understand that I had somehow become (at least in Kirshbaum's mind) the Dalai Lama of New Media, and that, according to Kirshbaum, the world as we knew it, and my life as I had known it, were about to change.

What the hell.

I had a whirlwind of Kirshbaum and Time Warner over the next few weeks. I found myself marveling at the speed and efficiency and decision-making process of today's synergistic megacorporations. I was beginning to believe that Kirshbaum and I were destined to turn Time Warner into the world's greatest Internet company overnight.

Then, on a rainy afternoon, as I considered the shape and the direction of Time Wolff and waited for yet another executive from Time Warner to arrive, my revelry was interrupted by a smallish, soaking-wet man who seemed to have somehow gotten by our usually vigilant receptionist. As it happened, he was the executive I was waiting for.

"Bruce Judson, general manager, Time New Media," he said, putting out his hand and pulling up a chair to my desk. He had the sense of purpose and entitlement and yet unassuming air of an IRS auditor.

He was really wet.

"I have your book," he said, holding up a dripping copy of NetGuide. "I can't tell you exactly what we're planning," he said in a lowered voice. "We'll need you to sign a nondisclosure first, but it's big. We want you to come over and be our consultant."

"Yes," I said. "Kirshbaum has told me all about everything. I'm up to speed."

Judson looked momentarily saddened. "It's all been moved from Larry. We're centralizing all Internet initiatives. We're creating a committee to study what Time Warner should do. Larry is of course a very important voice at Time Warner, but he's not going to be directly involved."

"I'm a little confused."

Judson seemed genuinely contrite. "I know."

I saw political reality setting in. Kirshbaum, who had made a play to go beyond books -- a profitable but not glamorous commodity at TW -- to the new electronic media, had been brought up short (it was not that easy to escape from books). It also seemed that in my first Time Warner political battle, I was a survivor.

"The New Media group has been asked to report to the CEO on the company's Internet options."

"Poor Larry," I said.

From Chapter Seven: A Working Relationship

We were on the brink of disaster, just as we stood on the brink of success.

We had rolled out our new and improved state-of-the-art Web "product" just a few weeks before.

It was the culmination of nearly two years' and more than six million dollars' worth of shifts and turns and reversals in the industry.

It was based on a hard-fought analysis, involving many Internet generations and business lives, of how the Internet would organize itself and grow and envelop the mass of consumers.

I was wrong in my analysis only about half of the time.

For a long while I had believed that connectivity -- that is, where your modern dialed to get you onto the Internet -- would be the central organizing principle. If you owned the server, you owned the audience. Therefore, obviously, if you wanted to be somebody in this business, you better start an ISP.

Connectivity, I had presumed through 1994 and early 1995, would be organized at a local level because the consumer would only be willing to make a local call and because the price of entry into the connectivity business was reasonable for small operators at a local level. This would give way, I logically imagined, to a form of regionalization: if you were operating in Manhattan's 212 area code, it was easy enough to put a POP (point of presence) in North Jersey's 201 area code and in Long Island's 516 area code. After a while, of course, we would see a rapid form of consolidation. Major players would begin to emerge -- nationals and regionals.

It would be, I had thought, a service game. Value added. Consumers would choose a provider of Internet service on the basis of the ease and reliability of its connection to the Net, the availability and affability of its service personnel, and on the other ways the ISP could add value -- exclusive arrangements with particular content providers, friendly and compelling guides, contests no doubt, and a range of other helpful features and come-on gimmicks.

I wasn't really wrong about this. My screwup came in thinking that this would take ten years to unfold, whereas in actuality it took just about twelve months.

My notion had been that we would offer connectivity in the New York area -- a flagship locale if there ever was one -- and develop programming ("content") that, in what seemed like a perfectly tried-and-true television model, we would syndicate (that is to say, rent) to other ISP systems, most of which would be run by techies without the skills or interests to develop content of their own.

Rich from our CMP deal and with remarkable optimism and innocence, we set about building an ISP in the fall of 1994. If I had once questioned why Time Warner would so blithely plunge into a technology it knew nothing about, I never once paused to ask myself, as technically disinclined as the next fellow, what I had in mind. The motivation, I now think, was that seeing the future with what appeared to be greater and greater clarity, I just had to go there; anything else seemed like rank cowardice. To be told that you don't have the wherewithal or talent or temperament to deal with the mechanical world is not something that an ambitious American, accustomed to a lifetime of transparent technologies (after all, I can work a computer, and my wife and children can certainly program a VCR, even if I can't), would willingly accept.

Weird Stan said he could build me an Internet provider system. He wasn't happy about it. Nor did he believe that the average American belonged on the Internet. But, technically, he could do it. If that's what I wanted.

Determined that our system would be as technically proficient and as physically stable as possible (when West Coast companies go public, they have to disclose that they sit on top of geological fault lines that could destroy their infrastructure at any moment), we established our servers, after long negotiations, in a secure communications facility run by one of the hottest fiber-optic telephone companies in the country, on top of the New York Stock Exchange overlooking Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. It had the perfect ring to me. I could hear the old radio announcers: "Coming to you from our transmitters atop the Empire State Building..." Now it would be "From our servers at the New York Stock Exchange..."

Anyone who has ever conducted a business that is even remotely dependent on a telecommunications company, a long-distance carrier, or one of the RBOCs ( Are-boks, like Reeboks -- Regional Bell Operating Companies) has stories of pain and frustration mounting to murderous rage rivaled only by, well, one's own family. There's no way out of the dysfunction.

The slick, humming, clean, climate-controlled, fire-proofed wonder-of-modern-technology "facility" we had rented at ground zero of efficient, triumphant capitalism turned out, in fact, to be a dusty, hot, garbage-strewn, just slightly oversize closet, with a cage surrounding our servers. The "support personnel," were off-the-waterfront guys blowing smoke (literal and otherwise) all over our Sun stations and Cisco routers.

For four months Weird Stan sat in the "cage," tinkering, storming, cursing, belittling, and then finally producing a system that could do, well, a lot -- but not everything. Like bill our customers. It couldn't exactly tell us how much people owed. But that was okay. As long as we had something. It was okay because the opening of the system was six months overdue and for the last four months our six employees had been fielding calls from people who wanted to sign up for the expansive free offers (15 HOURS FREE!) we were advertising in Wired and in a variety of computer magazines.

Robert, our office assistant, whom we had hired out of a Long Island delicatessen (The Deli Button) because his mother had gotten me on the phone ("He just needs a chance"), had developed a whole new sense of corporate inefficiency and remoteness, which he communicated to our prospective customers. "Yes, I understand your frustration. I'll pass that upstairs. The final date hasn't come down to us yet. No, no, I'm not privy to that information." There was no upstairs. Robert sat directly outside my office, staring in at me all day, waiting for word that we would actually begin to offer Internet service.

In my short, unhappy life in the service business, I quickly came to hate customers.

From Chapter Seven: A Working Relationship

On Tuesday I was set to appear at a gathering of venture firms; media, communication, and technology companies; and other investors at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. It was a financial beauty contest. Promising companies, such as ours, were invited to make presentations to the investment community. There was a rabble in the halls, then fifty-minute periods, then the bell, then tumult through the halls again. I saw many of the same people who had been at the Laguna Beach conference, but whereas that gathering offered the guise of discussing great industry issues to cover the naked grab for money, this conference pulled away the curtain entirely. We were all here, if we were lucky enough to be invited, to pitch, nakedly.

It was a weird marketplace, a bizarre mating game. It was a morphing exercise. By the process of mergers and acquisitions, we would each turn into something else, partly into one another but, then again, into something further, stranger. This was some kind of cellular process, evolutionary, Darwinian, but absurdly random, too. There were no boundaries. There was a great symbiosis. The outcome would either be predictable -- Microsoft hovered at the side -- or, as likely, unimaginable.

In the hotel lobby I ran into Seth Godin, the Internet game show impresario who bore the unflattering resemblance to me. I'd last seen him at the Laguna Beach conference.

"Hey, I've been talking to your guy," he said.

"My guy?"

"Rubin."

"Yes," I said neutrally.

"Smart guy. Very sharp. We were really thinking about doing something with him. He really wanted to invest in us."

"He mentioned you were talking, yeah..." I was racing to understand the implications, if any, of Rubin having conversations with Godin.

"But we've decided we're going with Softbank on this. But you've got a good guy there. Very sharp."

"Oh. Very, very sharp."

I had a paranoid moment of clarity. If I were Jon Rubin, if I were a boy wonder with millions at my disposal and eager to make my business bones, I'd go after these underfunded companies, get control of them for the price of a preferred minority stake, draw them all together, and roll out an offering. Was that the game I was in?

The lobby was filled with people I knew. I saw Bruce Judson. He was sitting on a panel with Benoît, our aromatic twenty-something, the kid who had been our tech support telephone person less than a year ago but who was now an executive at a major public Internet company. I saw the people from Patricof. I ran into Seth Goldstein (known as "the other Seth"), my twenty-five-year-old assistant who had quit his job to start a company called Site Specific, one of the new breed of Internet advertising agencies. "If you mention me in your speech," he said, "I'll mention you in mine."

Our $40,000-per-month PR firm was everywhere in evidence -- silent, eerie women in black suddenly at your side, whispering in your ear.

I saw Jon Rubin with his technology advisor cross through the lobby.

Three or four presentations went on at once. It was a minicompetition. Who would get the audience? I went upstairs to see if we were popular today.

We were doing well. Better than the online sports company in our time slot. Better even, I thought, than the Motley Fools, AOL's hugely successful investment advisors, who were also in our time slot.

I was pleased. Our room was filling up. I knew this crowd.

There comes a moment when you know an industry well enough. You know its personalities, its moods. You're like a good politician who knows his voters, his town.

I had been thinking this through. I had an idea that I could push the electorate. Change their thinking. I had an idea of how to break through. It was an industry that wasn't much more than a year old. It had to be looking for some meaning.

Most presentations were by the numbers. With low-tech slides or overhead transparencies or, for the snappy people, Power Point. CEOs walked the audience through assumptions and projections. It was preparation for an eventual road show. That was partly what the VCs were looking for -- not only companies selling good ideas but companies with showman CEOs. Who can talk the talk?

I dispensed with charts and numbers. I came around from the podium. I showed myself. I made eye contact. I looked for the heart of the audience.

I knew how important this presentation could be and wondered, briefly, if this was my Checkers speech and whether or not it could save me.

From Chapter Seven: A Working Relationship

It's easy to start to think that your own behavior is extreme when carefully composed, highly analytic, proudly reasonable businessmen start to scream at you. How far out on a limb was I? How much had I defied ordinary business conventions and manners by what I had done? It seemed to me I was just negotiating. Being tough was supposed to be a business virtue. But I was beginning to feel like an outlaw. No doubt, this is what your adversaries want you to feel. The context is dominance and submission. Money is dominant. Or believes, however irrationally, it should be dominant.

Part of money's job is to control the entrepreneur. In business mythology the entrepreneur is a breed apart. The entrepreneur is neither capital nor labor, neither investor nor employee. While the entrepreneur is the inspiration, the visionary, the leader (i.e., the unreasonable risk taker), the entrepreneur is also the unstable element.

The coming together of an entrepreneur and capital, with the attendant participation of lawyers, bankers, and other lesser interests, is an economic and political bargain of the most opportunistic sort. Conflict is inevitable. In most cases, the entrepreneur will be "dealt with." Sometimes though, if the entrepreneur has particular reserves of nerve and wile, well, the outcome might just be unexpected; the entrepreneur might turn the tables.

I was now functioning under this burst of hubris.

From Chapter Eight: The Twenty-First-Century Corporation

I wasn't taking anything for granted. I was shepherding Ameritech with great care. We were looking to close a few days before Christmas. We were on target. This was the factotum's real talent; he was a document guy. He would pull this together. I was checking in with him on an almost constant basis -- two calls in the morning, two calls after lunch. There were no wrinkles. Say what you want about the boring Midwestern guys at Ameritech, they were steady. What you see is what you get. The factotum was totally confident about the deal. And he didn't have any doubt that we could bring it in right on schedule.

We were all a little less sanguine about the Washington Post Company. They weren't necessarily less interested, but they seemed all of a sudden interested in the wrong thing. They were interested in our book business. It was odd. They kept gnashing their teeth about the Internet, about what the Internet was costing them already, and about all the costs to come. And would it really happen, the Internet? How could you be sure? Books suddenly seemed like a great thing to them. Now, our books were a decent business -- we pumped out a new guidebook to the Internet every twenty days or so, which provided a nice revenue stream and even a little profit -- but because book businesses, no matter how profitable, tended to be sold at about a multiple of one times revenues, and Internet businesses, no matter bow unprofitable, could well be sold at twenty to forty times revenues, the last thing that we wanted to talk about was books.

***

Ameritech was on the phone. I was on one end of the floor and asked for the call to be put back to my office at the other end. It was going to be a schmooze call. I was starting to like these guys and had begun to balance in my mind the relative value of AOL glamour, with its attendant dysfunctionality, against Ameritech's flat-footedness and its accompanying dependability. At the moment, certainly, AOL had the business by the tail. But that could change in a second, I figured, and you could easily see the RBOCs slowly, doggedly coming to control the Net. It was a pretty fundamental choice. Glamour on the one hand, infrastructure on the other. It was one of those choices that you could make either very right or very wrong.

When I picked up the phone, the guy from Ameritech, a very affable sort in his early thirties whom I had first met at the conference in New York and become friendly with during a fair amount of conference room time, said, "We're not going to be able to do the deal."

An echo chamber seemed to open up.

"I know that's not what you expected to hear. And all I can do is say that it wasn't what I expected to tell you. But a decision has been made to curtail all of Ameritech's Internet investments for at least the next quarter and probably two. It's terrible that yours was so close to getting done. I'm sorry. This is really a hard one."

"I understand. Thanks for calling."

"I'd like to stay in touch."

"Definitely. Definitely."

Our office was just down the street from the Museum of Modern Art. The museum was an awfully good place to hide from reality for a couple of hours.

From Chapter Nine: Exit Strategy

I flew out to another conference in San Francisco, where I was scheduled to speak to beg for my future. More VCs mingling in the event rooms of a downtown hotel. More pastries. More fresh fruit. Many of the same entrepreneurs from the last conference, a few fresh from successful IPOs, a few with recent funding in hand, most running out of dough. There was a new crop as well, as determined as the old. And, as always, our PR people, our $40,000-per-month PR people in black garb, moving in their snarky fashion through the crowd.

Push was the word. Push instead of pull. Because users were not reliably coming -- that is, being pulled -- to most of the five million Web sites (or six or seven or eight million. They were growing in some weird Malthusian inversion: population grew arithmetically, Web sites geometrically) that resided in cyberspace, there was a new technology, whose strategy was to push the Web to them.

"Destination is bullshit," my former assistant, Seth Goldstein, now cyber ad agency CEO, lectured me. "If you build it, they won't fucking come. Forget about it. If you don't got distribution, you don't got nothin'."

By which he meant, you had to get your Web site in front of people's faces -- like television. PointCast was the company to beat in the push field; virtually everyone, including Microsoft, was trying. PointCast wired your PC to serve the Web up to you in your idle moments. The Web was your screensaver. Neat.

Except that it didn't exactly work. And if you did get it to work, the question people seemed to ask was, Why? Why do I need this? If I want television, I have a better one. People in the know were saying, "Push." People really in the know were saying, "Push is stillborn."

I had no opinion.

I do not believe I have ever been so tired. I looked at the cheese Danish in my hand and wondered how it had gotten there. I stood at the podium in front of the VCs in my little hotel conference room and thought it is not at all unlikely that I was going to throw up. I watched myself, out-of-body like. There I was. Precise. Sober. Elegant. Gray double-breasted suit. And about to deliver a projectile vomit.

"Need I say more?" I hoped I'd have the aplomb to say to the financial and technology community after my hurl.

Exhaustion, this kind of exhaustion, is not just what happens when you haven't slept enough. It happens when you've roamed the far reaches of your mind and experience and just don't know what to think anymore. There was no exit from the cell.

I was scheduled to go home on the red-eye, too.

I wondered how other people here, the people who were doing what I was doing, begging for money for months and months on end, did it. I sure hoped they weren't wondering how I did it.

After I did my pitch -- by the book, with numbers on projected growth and return on investment -- without an upchuck, I had a few hours to kill and decided to stop in at Wired. I found Louis's empire to be both profound and comical. A magazine, an electronic media company, a book group, many projects to come, 350 employees, real estate all over downtown San Francisco. He had achieved the commercial manifestation of exactly what he believed in. Of how many visionaries can that be said? But the financial prospects of the Wired empire were slim to none. He had failed at his second IPO. At the end of 1996, he had been forced to take money on terms perhaps even more onerous than the terms I had taken money on -- $20 million with impossible-to-meet performance hurdles. I wondered if he thought he could yet pull this off. Certainly no one who knew anything about the rules of preference thought be could. What do you do when you know that you're fucked?

Louis looked even more tired than I felt. He sat in front of a big monitor doodling with his mouse. His eyes were deeper. His face gaunter. I would have liked to reminisce, to spend a moment remembering when there was no Internet, no cyber business, no millions to die for. A lot had happened in a short time, after all. That was worth something. More than just something. Many people would certainly be willing to regard Louis as heroic, if not entirely successful. I would.

He had made a revolution. Hell, me, too. In a way.

I suppose, though, it would be a little while still before we knew if it was a revolution in the way people think and communicate and relate that we had helped make, or just a revolution in the way people shopped.

I did not succeed in getting Louis to open up.

I went out to the airport and was back in my office in New York just a little after dawn.

From Chapter Nine: Exit Strategy

The Internet itself was also starting to close in on me, I felt.

We were publishing as many words a month on the Internet as a monthly magazine publishes in print. And we weren't stopping there. We were moving to a schedule where we would be publishing that many words every week. Given the speed of the Net, given its ability to deliver information at a speed that made television seem sleepy, we would be publishing more and more words faster and faster. Ever spiraling. Already we had five million words residing out in cyberspace.

We were building an audience, too. We were making our distribution deals. We were getting traffic. We were selling ads.

Because this was cyberspace, because this was server technology, because this was a revolutionary new medium in which we could monitor the interests and habits and behavior of our users, we knew something about the users of the Internet that I deeply, desperately even, wished I did not know.

Here is the incontrovertible truth:

No one reads on the Internet.

Not conventionally. Not as I read something printed on paper. Not as I write. Not in word, sentence, paragraph, article, and longer-version form.

We could see the "user" hover for a second, or a half second, and alight, like a bug, on a paragraph and then linger for a moment and be gone. Bolt. Vamoose. Vaporize.

I used all the tricks: screaming headlines, audacious jokes, in-your-face conflict. I used short sentences. Shorter sentences. Exclamations!

Nothing worked.

There were many explanations. We hadn't configured lines and pages right for the eye. People had to get used to monitors. People still didn't really know what they were doing on the Web. It was early. Behavior was still in flux.

But I knew. I just knew.

In some perfect irony, we had invented this new publishing medium, and no one read.

And no one would read. They would do many exciting things. They would be stimulated and informed in ways that we had not yet invented and could not begin to imagine. But they wouldn't read. I understood that.