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Goliath At Bay

As Forbes ASAP editor Rich Karlgaard and I prepare to leave his office, he asks us to guess the cycle rate of the upcoming ‘96 basic home- based PC. I suggest 100 megahertz. Grove shakes his head. He confides that he is headed for a meeting to decide whether the 1996 PC will bear a 120-megahertz or a 133-megahertz Pentium. “Everyone underestimates the progress of PCs,” he says with satisfaction.

“You could fix on a special-purpose device today, to satisfy Larry Ellison’s mother [who wants a simpler PC], but by the time it came out, the PC will have moved on, powered by incomparably more potent microprocessors, leaving the new machine trivialized and obsolete in its wake.”

In other words, evolutionary products will suffice in this revolutionary time of exponentially expanding Nets and peripheral CPUs. Nonetheless, moving a few miles north on California’s Route 101, out of the hypergravitational fields of Philistea, one can still feel a radical shifting in the spheres of possibility.

“And David took his staff in his hand and chose him five smooth stones.” I Samuel 17:40

FOR THE NEW ORDER, the ultrawideband wireless Sand Hill slingshot—the capitalist conjurer of the forces causing new sleeplessness in Seattle—is John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Shunning Herb Allen’s summits of schmooze, where the entrepreneurial big-time is an “audacious” investment in Coke or NBC, Doerr epitomizes the venture capitalist as industrial demiurge.

As technology investor Roger McNamee puts it: “While other venture capitalists say, “Let’s start a company,” John says, “Let’s start an industry.” “So far, beginning at Intel in the early years, he has played a key role in launching industries in electronic design automation, RISC workstations, personal computers, financial software, multimedia and wireless pen appliances (well, let that last one pass). His current new industry will be the biggest yet. It is broadband Internet.

From the vertiginous launch of Sun, Lotus and Compaq in the early 1980s to a fund gushing Go at pens, his career has seen several peaks and valleys. Doerr has even dallied with middle age. He once weighed a mid- life retreat from the madding bustle of Silicon Valley to contemplate the Tantra or the Tao: “I sometimes think,” Doerr told the New York Times in 1987, “I would like to become a Buddhist monk.”

Sure, John. But, tell me, what yoga discipline was he brewing two years ago in Palo Alto, at breakfast at Il Fornaio head-to-head with Jim Clark? What karmic rites was he conjuring with Clark and Bill Joy in the winter of 1994 on a three-hour conference call among wildernesses of Marriott on the road? What karass was he kenning in December 1994 among the tacky booths and bins, the barkers and indoor bikinis at the Western Cable Show in Anaheim? What tables were tipping in January 1995 in his Woodside home, among pizzas and pastas with his wife, Anne, and Marc Andreessen, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Jim Gosling and Rick Schell (Netscape’s VP of engineering)?

Why, in early 1995, was he lurking around the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif.? Is he seeking evidence of alien IPOs, or just some hard-core Unix Christian libertarian netbender from outer space to levitate a new industry in Palo Alto?

AT&T venturer Thomas Judge told Forbes ASAP’s Nancy Rutter in 1993: “You have to be on the fringes to make money in [Doerr’s] business, and that’s where he is.” Follow Doerr, however, from day to day, call to call, from Sun to Oracle to America Online to Netscape to Macromind, and you will find yourself at the fringes just as they invert into the Zen center of the sphere.

A lean figure, with blondish hair, a cowlick and hornrims, Doerr at 44 is as bashfully all-business and frenetically bitwise as Gates whom he resembles, but he is still flouting the gravity of middle age. On a crisp Sunday in mid-December, I catch up with him at Buck’s restaurant, near his home in Woodside in Silicon Valley. Wearing a dark suit from church, he checks for messages on his SkyTel pager, greets fellow venturer Bill Davidow passing by and then opens a black briefcase full of technotoys. From across the restaurant, this venture colossus looks to be a frowsy salesman perhaps a little desperate to present his wares.

He removes a Mac PowerBook 5300 and Sony speakers and lays them out on the table. Amid empty latte glasses and plates of ravioli pesto and his own half-eaten hamburger, Doerr is ready to give a demo of the new industry—a forecast for next year’s Netscapestyle IPO.

It takes a minute or so to boot up the Mac, checking through the 32 megabytes of RAM (teleputers, Doerr says, will boot up instantly from flash ROM). But from there on out, it is all immediate gratification. Click to ignite a Java Web page with streaming stockmarket data, a c/net talking-head newscaster and a volcano video from Venezuela. “Wow, look at that new PowerBook go,” exults a jolly woman observing from the next table.

But Doerr is on a rush through a world of his own. Click again and you have the Sunnyvale Sun, efflorescent with vivid speech, sports clips and classified personals. Newspapers will be hot on the broadband Internet. Click on the classifieds and you can presumably meet their makers in living color.

This is a glimpse of @Home, a mere demo of Doerr’s new broadband Internet company. As the service develops you will soon be able to download movies and other programs on demand. Over 28.8 modems or even 128-kilobit per-second ISDN lines, all such dynamic fare would be agonizingly slow to access. By contrast, Doerr says, in @Home everything is instant, full motion and always on.

How can this be, you ask, on an essentially middleband Internet? “That’s the genius of Milo Medin, @Home’s network chief,” he explains, “linked to the genius of Marc Andreessen of Netscape.” NASA Ames’s network king, Medin is now building a scalable, extensible architecture for a cable-based World Wide Web. With some help, I might add, from John Doerr and his five smooth stones.

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