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4. beware the technological imperative

The fourth thing is to beware what I call the "technological imperative." Many of us are techies. Many of us have engineering degrees, and the natural impulse of the engineer is: if it's possible to build something, we are going to build it. It doesn't matter if anybody wants it, it doesn't matter if anybody cares. We are going to build it.

That's particularly true for a word we've been hearing it in the Internet space for a while now, convergence. As far as I'm concerned, if you ever hear the word "convergence," hold your wallet—somebody is trying to take advantage of you. Interactive TV was a classic example of this. We've got the computer over here, we've got the TV over here. Great, let's put them together. They neglected to realize that for an ordinary human being, interactive TV is when your football team loses and you throw your beer can at the TV.

There was a whole wave of startups in the Valley several years ago that were trying to develop what were basically combinations of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and telephones. These were kind of funny to look at, especially now, because they had these huge screens that weighed several pounds which you had to carry around with a full-on phone on top of it. These kinds of products often share a problem that I call the "houseboat problem." In theory, a houseboat is kind of cool, but it turns out that it's not a very good house and it's also not a very good boat. People just don't think that way when it comes time to actually use this stuff.

Another problem that people fall into as technologists is bad metaphors. We have a great new technology . . . you are laughing ahead of the joke. Don't do that. I did not say, "Gary Hart."

Technologists say, "We have a great new technology. We have a great way for people to use it." When people don't figure out how to use it, we try to apply a metaphor from real life. The all-time classic here was "the paperless office"—the idea that we could build an office and it wouldn't have any paper in it. Again, it's one of those things that we can build in theory, but, in practice, it makes no sense. The more we use computers, the more we use the Net, the more stuff we have to print out. Therefore, there is going to be more paper.

The CEO of Xerox who originally came up with the paperless office concept later came back and said that, in retrospect, the paperless office will be here about the same time as the paperless toilet, which shows the limits of these metaphors.

It's important to look hard not at what we can build, but how people are going to use it. Work backwards from that, even though it's very hard for people with technical backgrounds to do it. At a typical technology company, the plan is: we build it, then we try to sell it, then we hope somebody figures out a way to use it. We have to work our way backwards. We have to ask, "How is this actually going to fit into people's lives?" then work our way backwards to the design. The final question we answer, not the first, is: What technology do we put into it? The technology industry is still, in large part, trying to grapple with this problem. The sectors that go after consumers are still trying to figure this out and having a hard time with it. There's going to be a lot of opportunity there.

5. nobody knows nothing

The fifth rule of thumb is probably my personal favorite. It's what I call The N³ Rule—No one kNows Nothing. It has consistently been the case that when major changes are about to happen, no one predicts them ahead of time. You can go back and look at the time right before the arrival of the Internet when all of the major analyst firms, all of the major researchers, all of the major pundits who we see quoted in the paper today about the future of the Net, they all missed it right up to the day that it happened. None of them anticipated it. It's in none of the writings, none of the reports. Wired magazine came out right when we were working on the first version of Mosaic. It was on the newsstand and mentioned the word "Internet" once. On the very last page was somebody's email address. It said Nicholas@something. They did not get it at all.

A more recent example of how no one knows nothing. A very prominent business magazine that begins with the letter "F," I won't get more specific, named Compaq the best managed company in the country in 1998. Oops. That's the same business magazine that, if you go back to the mid-1980s had a list of people who would never be in the Forbes 500 list of the richest people in the world. Unfortunately, they got a little too specific, and Bill Gates was number three on the list of people who would never make the Forbes 500.

The most important thing coming out of this, ironically, is going to be that you should ignore everything we say, and everything everyone else says, because I can guarantee you that no one knows nothing. And with that, I'm done.

part 5: kara swisher: one of my favorite entrepreneurs

Well, The Wall Street Journal knows everything. Gosh, dead horses, sleeping with chickens, jokes about pigs. I have been away from Washington a little too long.

Now, I want to introduce Ted Leonsis and I'm going to do something that reporters typically aren't supposed to do. We don't like anybody, we don't have opinions about anything, we don't do anything.

I love Ted Leonsis. He is one of my favorite entrepreneurs that I have ever interviewed, and I'll tell you three stories, very short ones.

When I started covering AOL, I came into the office and met Steve Case, whom I really like, but he is not the most exciting man to interview because most of his answers are "yes" and "no." Yes. No. And besides, he told me, back when it was a very small company, that they were going to be bigger than AT&T. He predicted that and I thought, "Here is a deadpan lunatic sitting across from me."

But I was sitting there thinking, "What am I going to do? This guy won't answer a question." Then Ted Leonsis walked in with a baseball. I think Mickey Mantle had signed it. Ted walked in, I didn't know who he was and I thought, "Here comes another lunatic."

He was so excited about that baseball. "Isn't this a great baseball? Here, Kara, you want this baseball?" I'd never met the man. I thought, "Who the heck are you and who the heck is this company?" I actually started to believe some of the editors at The Washington Post.

Ted was totally a breath of fresh air, just the kind of person a reporter loves because he's utterly quotable, completely colorful and very interesting. Ted has a reputation for being a showman of the Internet, but I think there is a lot more there. If you spend time with Ted, you realize that he has been right at the forefront of so much. He had a list of predictions that he showed me in 1995 and 1996 because he had gone to a bunch of panels and he went out on a limb and made these predictions. Almost everything he predicted came true in many, many ways, including one of his predictions which, and again I thought he was crazy when he said, "We want to be Seinfeld. We want to be bigger than Seinfeld. We want to be that big."

That kind of ambition is something that has been critical to AOL's success, especially during that very difficult period when Ted came to the company.

My absolutely favorite story about Ted Leonsis, and I think this will give you an idea of why he is one of the most interesting entrepreneurs on the Web today, was when I got the contract for the AOL book. AOL had a fair for the opening of their new building out at Dulles, and I ran into Ted. He said, "That's great! You got the book contract." They didn't think people would be interested in AOL at that time. He said, "This is great. We'll put up a popup screen on AOL and we'll sell a lot of copies."

I said, "Ted, that's kind of an ethical problem. I really can't link myself really strongly with that and I can't have you flog my book and it's an independent thing . . . " and he sort of looks at me from behind his sunglasses so I couldn't really see his eyes and I said, "Besides, Ted, you know, what if you come off badly in the book? What if I portray you as a big fat jerk?" And he said, "Well, we'll sell a million of them. I don't care."

So, I did not do the popup screen on AOL and I did not sell a million of them, but Ted is always thinking like an entrepreneur and that's why I think he is a very interesting person to listen to.

part 6: ted leonsis: why is this man smiling?

Thank you. Kathy Bushkin, would you stand up just for one second? Just stand up and face the audience. Watch this, "Kara, that wasn't on the record, was it?" If you ever want to see an AOL public relations executive cringe, have them say, "Kara Swisher is sending me Instant Messages. What should I do?"

I was going to the bathroom on the way in, and someone said, "You're always smiling. How come?"

So as I was walking down, I thought, maybe that would be a good topic for my speech, "Why am I always smiling?" I was thinking, "Why would I be so happy?" I think the reasons are in this room—that this is a great time to be alive. It's really a great time to be in DC.

I disagree a bit with Kara. I don't think the bedrock of all being is in Silicon Valley. I think the bedrock of all being is in Kansas City, and in Vero Beach, Florida, and in Fairfax, Virginia, and in places where real people live and real people work and real people are finding ways to personally express themselves and improve their life using the Internet. One of the great things about the Internet, and about this business we're in, is, as Marc referred to it, there are no experts. Since there are no experts, it means there are smaller barriers and it means that someone in this room becomes the next Marc Andreessen or the next Mario Morino.

And because of that optimism, I think that you all should be smiling. It's a great, great time to be around. It's a great time because the Internet is still fresh and new. Sometimes, when everyone is talking about the Internet, you feel like it's almost passé. As Steve Case reminds us all the time, if we're so good, why do 70 million homes not have the Internet?

So, there are 70 million homes left to go. Now, just think conceptually of how this business will be if we wire up those 70 million homes and 10-15% of the advertising revenue from all of the other media—by the way, just as an aside, I went to Georgetown University. I had a British economics professor who loved Americans, and he would say, "Do you know who is responsible for the fall of the British empire? No one. They lost 1% market share a year for 100 years.

So if 15% of all advertising moved online and 10-20% of all transactions moved online, then this is the biggest business that we can ever imagine. Speaking as a long-term entrepreneur in this business, it always takes longer to hit than you ever thought, but when it hits, it gets a lot bigger than you ever dreamed.

I think we are right at the beginning of the next big spurt of growth. Another reason I'm so optimistic, and why you should all be optimistic, is that today is the worst the Internet will ever be. What I love about this business, and what I love about it as a medium, is that every day more POPs are added to the network. When you have more POPs added, more people can get on the network. As more people get on to the network, they generate more content. As more content comes on the network, it drives more people to the network, thereby feeding itself.

As a result, every day this business—and your business and your sites and your commerce areas and your ISPs and whatever business you have—can incrementally improve. In no other business do you have that opportunity. In every business before, you waited generationally for a new product to ship. You waited generationally, if you were a media company, for the next redesign.

On the Internet, you do it every single day. If, as Kara said, you just shut up and listen to the right people. And the right people, with all due respect, aren't The Wall Street Journal or Forrester Research. Forrester Research, by the way, the company went public and it's doing great, wrote a report that said AOL would be out of business. We would hit five million members and then spiral downward. I think that was one of their predictions. So, listen to the right people and, as Steve Case reminds us on so many occasions, "It's the customer, stupid." That's the summation of what the Internet allows you to do—listen to your customers and listen to your suppliers.

I just bought the Washington Capitals hockey team. I have gotten 11 letters and 700 emails. It struck me that maybe something generational was going on to get that many more emails, so I subscribed to a email group about the Washington Capitals. I am not exaggerating, I have learned more in three weeks from being on the boards, going into some of the chat rooms and subscribing to the list than the commissioner of hockey or anyone can possibly tell me in three weeks. Just by listening.

It's a great time to be alive. You can just sit back and get research and feedback for free and incrementally tweak your business and your site. It's a great time to be alive because there are companies out there wanting to invest that have more money than brains, and I say that fondly.

We bought a company for $400 million that has no revenues, ICQ. Someone asked me, "Why would you pay $400 million for a company with no revenues?" I said, "Well, I think it can be worth $40 billion." This is the Internet, and there is truth to that. But now someone pitched me—the number seems to be $300 to $400 million—who has a business which they can't tell me about because they want me to sign a confidentiality agreement. It's going to cost $300 million, and then they say the magic words—here are the magic words to use if you want to learn how to sell your company to AOL—"Yahoo! is really interested." Okay? That seems to be the magic words at AOL, "Yahoo! is really interested," so bang, we go and look.

Turns out, it's not a business, it's not a technology, it's an idea seeking funding and there are people in Silicon Valley who are fighting themselves to fund this business. Now, at some point this false economy will end, and I'm optimistic about that, too, because a good shake-out and a good "burning out the underbrush" in any ecosystem is positive. I see it coming, and I think that it's going to be positive for the people in this room who have real businesses.

I can't quote Jim Barksdale as much as Marc does, because he is Southern.

I have a friend who is British. My father's a Greek immigrant, a very shy man, not very educated. I would hang out with this guy who is British. My father hardly ever gave me any advice, but some advice he did give me was, "When you are talking with someone who is from the United Kingdom, you need to deduct about 50 IQ points because they are not as smart as they sound." But when you are talking to people from the South, add those 50 IQ points back.

So Jim Barksdale is a brilliant man, but he is not as smart as Steve Case, right? I know where my bread is buttered.

I'll tell you a couple of gorilla stories. I like the metaphor that we're a gorilla. It's like, we are not quite up the evolutionary scale; we are still dragging our knuckles. My wife would probably think that's right. My wife is always concerned that I'm going to say or do something that's going to embarrass her or the family. This weekend, she said, "Enough hockey, enough technology, we are going to go to the opera ball."

So we go to the opera ball. I have a tuxedo. I have my hair slicked back and I'm looking good. My wife is with me and I'm being polite and nice, then she goes to the bathroom. Dan Snyder, who just bought the Washington Redskins, is there. I start talking to Dan and some guy comes by and takes our photograph because we have this culture of celebrity. The guy asks me, "So, what do you think of this ball here at the French embassy?" I say, "Who would have ever thought that a country that worships Jerry Lewis could throw a shindig like this?" It goes in. I move on. I do my stuff. Monday morning comes and I'm doing email. My wife takes the kids to school early. She comes back. She walks in and she smacks me. "What was that for?" "Look at what you said."

So anyway, Steve Case is a brilliant man, but a man of few words. I joined the company early and have been there six years. We wished we were in a garage back then. For those of you who came to AOL early on, we didn't even have a garage. Steve had an office, I was next door and Kathy Bray, our assistant, was in the hallway. When I joined, I got the office next to Steve's with blue carpet, a huge bleach stain, and no furniture. I asked Steve, "How do I get furniture?" He said, "Work late."

I said to him, "You know, I have never been president of a public company before. Give me some advice." I got my pen, my pad of paper and he said, "One, make sure revenues exceed expenses. Two, if ever you are faced with a strategic conundrum, look to see what Prodigy does and do just the opposite." He said, "You have now completed your AOL executive training program. Go."

There was a real genius to something that Steve did, which Marc has touched on and which I can't say often enough. If you are in a big market, and if you have good people, you must ride that market and be flexible, and reinvent yourself and not have the self-consciousness to do what a lot of really smart people do.

I'm on the board of a company that shall go nameless. The founder and CEO is from prep schools, Princeton, Harvard Business School—a brilliant guy, but he would rather be right than win. If you just focus on the winning and doing the right things the right way, especially if you are in the big market, you can become the next Netscape or the next AOL. I'm optimistic because the people that I see at conferences like this are unbelievably talented.

It reminds me. I gave some money to Georgetown University and they put me on the board. I was looking at what they do to let students in. I went to Georgetown, but I'd never get into Georgetown today. I look at who is in this industry today and I have one thought—boy, am I glad you weren't in the industry when I got in it. There is so much talent that it can only be good for all of us. I believe that spirals either go up or spirals go down. The better people you get, and the better you listen to your consumers, that's what gets the spiral going up. The more talent there is with the Internet, the better for everyone.

I'm also smiling and optimistic because when you grow up—some of us in this room are baby boomers—you'd like to think that you can do good things besides working and making some money. The Internet is the place where I see the most availability to level the playing field. It's truly remarkable. I joked earlier about ICQ, but I have spent some time in Israel where ICQ was created, and Israel is booming with Internet entrepreneurs. Just booming. It struck me the last time I was there that this is happening all over the world whether your name is Amir or Inbar, and whether you're in Iran or working in a strip mall in Tel Aviv. No one knows. All they know is that you have great software and it's free and downloadable and 35 million people have it and you can make a business out of it. Or if your kid's in California doing music with Winamp and no one knows you, or you are two people in Sedona, Arizona, and you connect with an audience who falls in love with what you are doing and downloads like crazy, then a company like AOL will buy you for $300 million. There's something magical about that.

So it's just a really, really fabulous time to be in this business, and it's a fabulous time to give back. I look at what Mario has done. When I first moved here, I didn't know Mario. I wasn't familiar with his background. Someone asked me, "Have you been to the Morino Institute?" I thought it was an eye place. I said, "I don't have glaucoma." Now I have gotten to know Mario, and I have to say that this area is in good hands. Mario and Jim Kimsey and Steve Case and the bedrocks of this community have reached the point where they are giving back—not because their PR agencies tell them it's a good thing to do for your career, but because it's a deep-seated approach to doing things. I look out at this group of people, and to think that Mario put this together and invited a couple of lucky schmoes like me and Marc to come really is great. So, I would like to have a round of applause for Mario Morino for doing this.

Marc and I are now going to take questions from Kara. For our entire careers, we have been on the receiving end of questions from Kara, so we are going to turn the tables a little bit on her today. It's two-on-one, and we'll be able to ask her the things that you have always wanted to ask, like, "Kara, The Wall Street Journal circulation was two million six years ago. Today it's 800,000. Why is that?" Also, "Kara, if I recall, The Wall Street Journal's advertising rates eight years ago when the circulation was 2 million were $35,000 a page. Now I believe they are over $100,000 a page. How can you justify charging more and more while offering less and less?"

Thank you very much and I look forward to your questions.

part 7: the audience: questions & answers

Ms. Swisher: I don't love Ted Leonsis anymore. No, I'm kidding. That's a good question, Ted, I wish I worked in the business parts of The Wall Street Journal to be able to tell you that, but I'll make no comment.

Mistakes Are Opportunities

Ms. Swisher: I'm going to start things off initially by asking what was the biggest mistake you think you made and how did you recover from it?

Mr. Leonsis: My biggest mistake was probably cooperating with you in doing the book.

Mistakes are opportunities. If you are a true entrepreneur, besides having the nerves of a standup comedian, you have to look at every mistake as an opportunity. I'll give you a case in point.

I have made some good calls in my career, but I made a really bad call. I thought that this would be an entertainment medium, so we went out and I spent a lot of money. I did deals with Brandon Tartikoff. I wanted to do original content programming. I thought the medium would be good for it, and that didn't work, so I wanted to know why it didn't work. We started to do research, and guess what we found? The medium is not ready for entertainment, but entertainment planning is really big. So I took the mistake of moving us too fast and too early into entertainment, and I positioned our local business, Digital Cities, to do more local planning, like where you go to dine out; then we bought MovieFone which tells you where to go to movies, offers a map and the like.

If you are an entrepreneur, you never make mistakes. If you make one mistake, it's okay. Two mistakes is really good research.

Mr. Andreessen: Well, let's see, maybe I can get away with one more Jim Barksdale quote. When he first got to the company, he told us, "All right, here's the operating plan for the company. The first rule is: when you see a snake, kill a snake." That meant, when you see a problem, go after it and just fix it. Don't spend a lot of time analyzing the snake and having a committee study the snake.

The second thing he said was, "Don't play with dead snakes." That one was particularly important because we had a habit, when we made a mistake, of going back and trying to correct the decision. We would dwell on it, and we'd change our mind again. We'd flip-flop, and he got us out of that mode.

The third thing he said was, "All opportunities start off looking like snakes."

So, I agree with what Ted said. What looks like a mistake provides a tremendous learning experience. For example, early on, I guess probably fall of 1994, a colleague and I took a couple of Stanford graduate students out for a beer because they had this interesting little thing on the Web which they were trying to figure out what to do with. Should we just ask them to come to work for us or should we put a little money in it? We had the beer and we said, "Well, you should come to work for us. That other thing is never going to be a serious business. Don't get your egos too big on this, because there is a lot more work that has to be done. Of course, that was Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!.

Mr. Leonsis: I'd like to tell you one quick story.

Ms. Swisher: Ted made a bigger mistake.

Mr. Leonsis: I bought a company called Webcrawler. There was one guy, Brian Pinkerton, and I paid him a million dollars for Webcrawler. Later, I went to a show and everyone was saying: Yahoo!, Yahoo!, Yahoo!. So I flew them to DC, and Steve Case and I met with them. They were looking for people to host their sites. Steve says, "What do you think?" and I said, "Well, we gave Brian Pinkerton—one guy— one million dollars. This is two guys, make it $2 million." We offer them $2 million. They said, "We want to think about it." I proceed, for half an hour, to tell Jerry Yang he is making the worst decision of his career.

Ms. Swisher: I'll give you a quick follow up to that. The first time I went out to lunch with Jerry Yang, this is the story that's in my book, he said, "You know something, I would have taken three."

Mr. Leonsis: I guess that was a mistake.

Ride The Wild Stock Market

Ms. Swisher: Everyone is talking about the Internet, and everyone is thinking about Internet stocks. It's obviously fueling a lot of this—I'm going to use a nice term—euphoria. Others have used "mania." What do you think of what's going on right now and how do you think it's going to affect the entrepreneurial class? As Marc pointed out, in Silicon Valley there are all of these people for whom their whole business plan is to sell to Yahoo! or AOL, or to make money in an IPO and then sell out. What effect do you think the stock market is having and what's going to happen?

Mr. Andreessen: I think that the capital markets are playing a very interesting role here. It's driving a lot of this, whether we realize it or not, because of what's happening with the stocks. Right now, for a lot of startups—not all, but a large number—capital is all but free. It's as close to free as it's likely to get.

This is, by and large, a very healthy thing and I think it speaks very well for the American economy. Alan Greenspan said that, so I think I can agree with him and not be in too much danger. It's very healthy because it means there's been a massive shift in capital away from industries that are either dead or dying, in many cases, or certainly just less exciting and with a lot less opportunity, and shifting towards these new growth industries. You can travel throughout the rest of the world, and it's not happening. Israel is possibly the only other place on the planet outside the U.S. where it is occurring. It speaks very well to the strengths of the U.S. economic system, and, clearly, there is froth around the edges. There are mania aspects to some of it, but the vast majority is extremely healthy and I think extremely good that it's happening.

Mr. Leonsis: I think, once again, the experts don't get it. I think we overcomplicate things. We overanalyze things.

Peter Lynch is probably recognized as the great investor of our generation for what he did at the Fidelity Magellan Fund. When you read all of his books, he essentially comes down to one premise which is: buy what you know. If you are a businesswoman and you wear pantyhose, and you buy them a lot, buy Sara Lee stock because they make the pantyhose.

I think that's what's happening. I think people are saying, "I subscribe to AOL. I have been a member for a long time. The system gets better all the time. I'm going to buy AOL." Or, "I've bought books at Amazon. They got here fast. It was cheaper. I'm going to buy some Amazon. I used Yahoo!, I used eBay, I used e*trade." Before you know it, the individuals who are using these services, through their day trading or just by spending their own discretionary funds, are starting to buy what they know. The big shift, I believe, is that the buy and sell side analysts who have been the gatekeepers of this business don't matter to those people. Half of all stocks are projected to be sold online in two years. From a value standpoint, people will buy what they know, and, as more and more people buy and use the Internet, that's what they are going to invest in.

Ms. Swisher: In traditional businesses, people were trying to get to profitability. Do you advise what they are calling "Internet economics" where you grow, grow, grow, take some money and get ahead of the market, or do you think it's beginning to shift back. What strategy would you suggest to a small or medium-sized entrepreneur? The capital markets are indicating they are very tolerant of profitless situations, for a long time, actually.

Mr. Andreessen: I think this is a time-based phenomenon. It's ironic that back in the 1980s you always heard that the Japanese were better than Americans at business, in part because Japanese investors were willing to value things for the long term while American investors demanded quarter-by-quarter results. Well, American investors right now are willing to value things over a fairly long time horizon. I think that if you are in a very fast-ranked part of the market, where the capital markets are telling you that you can go without profits and should grow instead, then that's absolutely the logical response. It makes total sense and the market is correct in doing that. However, that will change. It will change for different parts of the market at different times, but there comes a day of reckoning, in all of these spaces where, eventually, there has to be a real business, there have to be real profits, there have to be real earnings and, eventually, every stock that we know and love is going to be trading at a PE of 35 or less. It's a matter of looking out over time and saying, "Let's grow like mad while we can for whatever business we happen to be in, but when it comes time to show profits, we better be sure we can do that."

Mr. Leonsis: I'm of two minds. Being with the company that, honestly, has the only true multiple revenue stream business model, AOL, and is generating a lot of cash and a lot of profits, it would be good for us to be measured that way. We are a real business. But I do think that this is still a new business. I remember 15 years ago a Wall Street Journal cover story saying that Ted Turner's cable wasn't working. Where are the profits? Turner totally misjudged the market, it said. It wasn't working, and weren't ABC and NBC and CBS smart not to get into the business. Five or six years later, Turner became the brain for news and eventually sold to Time Warner for $8 billion when they could have had the whole thing for $200 million.

I always hark back, frankly, to a personal experience. I was in charge of the AOL main brand from 1994 to 1997, and we spent a lot of money on marketing. One analyst, one day in 1996, just sat me down and pointed his finger at me— sort of like "you kids today, why can't you be disciplined and well managed and predictable and generate earnings . . . like CompuServe.

It's about your business model. I do think reality eventually does set in, but I remember saying to people at AOL four years ago, "Go fast, because it will never be easier, it will never be cheaper than it is today." I think that maxim is still correct. It will never be cheaper or faster or easier than it is right now, because tomorrow there will be more competitors and there will be more venture capital, so I'm of two minds.

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