Salons

Thu Nov 12 09:44:40 PST 1998

November 12, 1998

Regular Gatherings for Food, Issues Offer Face Time in the Real World

By ANN GRIMES Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

SAN FRANCISCO -- Po Bronson, author of the Silicon Valley novel "The
First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest," says he frequents them for
material. Software entrepreneur Pavel Curtis enlivens his with
European board games. Internet entrepreneur Oliver Muoto says, "There
is definitely an A and B list now."

Silicon Valley, the source of so much innovation, has invented its
own version of the salon. It's more high-tech than high-brow, more
business than bons mots, compared with the gatherings that writer
Madame de Stael turned into an art form some 200 years ago. And true
to the valley, these so-called cybersalons are proliferating like
start-ups.

Round Zero meets monthly at a Menlo Park hotel to discuss topics like
"Is Microsoft evil?" In Berkeley, a group chews over patents and
pizza at Fred and Sylvia's CyberSalon. In San Francisco, a young
Internet executive hosts elaborate Thursday dinners featuring organic
vegetables at his home overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. At one
gathering, he asked guests to "imagine some invention you would like
to see and tell me about it."

Cyber-soirees are popping up so rapidly that Mr. Muoto, who also
hosts a monthly dinner of his own, moonlights as something of a
social secretary, e-mailing a list of monthly gatherings to a select
group of 250 friends and colleagues. He and others note that the
trend partly reflects the development of an elite, as the valley and
its high-tech fringes mature and depart from the computer industry's
meritocratic roots. "People are more picky about who's invited," Mr.
Muoto says.

But the industry's nerd roots also come into play. People here say
they are so connected electronically that they feel unconnected from
fellow humans. They yearn for regular face time to swap ideas,
socialize and network. Ruby Yeh, another software entrepreneur, says
she goes on cyber-outings "two or three nights a week, where I've met
all my contacts."

In suburban Redwood City, at a small ranch house, entrepreneur
Russell Brand hosts a potluck dinner on the first Tuesday of every
month. It's something he has been doing in various forms and venues
since his high-school days in New Jersey -- a shy guy's effort to
create his own in-crowd, he says. He kept it up as an undergraduate
at MIT and as a Berkeley graduate student -- "Until we got kicked out
of the restaurant" where the group met, he says. "There were many
people whose social skills were not up to fine dining."

As people dive into boxes of Chinese take-out on a recent Tuesday, an
engineer in Birkenstocks goes on about his struggle to patent an
electric scooter bike. A geneticist vents his frustration at
unraveling genes.

Nearby, a couple of beaming newlyweds say they first met here in Mr.
Brand's modest abode and subsequently courted by e-mail. "They were
long e-mails," the husband laughs.

"At other parties you're going to hear remarks like, 'Gee, did you
see those 'Niners?' " says venture capitalist Tom J. Schwartz. "I can
count on a stimulating evening here."

The five young men who founded Round Zero say they worked all the
time and hungered for "an intellectual exchange." They limit their
dinners to a fixed number of venture capitalists, journalists and
technology entrepreneurs. The hyperactive crowd sports business suits
and T-shirts as it sits down on a recent evening at small round
tables in a hotel restaurant in Menlo Park, near the Stanford
University campus.

"It's a chance to talk some real issues," says Philip N. Sanderson, a
San Francisco venture capitalist. In preparation for one dinner, he
says he devoured a stack of suggested reading on Internet stocks
before tackling the pasta and wild mushrooms. On the menu this month:
"Consolidation: A Driving Force of the Silicon Valley Ecosystem."

Mr. Bronson, the author, shuns much of the social scene but comes to
Round Zero (the name refers to the prefunding stage of a start-up)
for research. He likes the group and the fact that "there's no speaker
and people here love to debate." A Richard Gere look-alike, he seems
to have spent less time basking in the rays of the iMac than some of
this pallid crew. He laughs about the night the group broached the
question "Is Microsoft evil?" saying, "we had a hard time finding
anyone to give the pro-Microsoft view."

Across the San Francisco Bay, in Berkeley, it was software
entrepreneur Fred Davis and high-tech publicist Sylvia Paull who
started using the term "cyber-salon" to describe their discussions
about computers and society, Ms. Paull says. Mr. Davis, a teen-age
prodigy who earned a B.A. in only one year, recalls that the couple
"used to just throw parties." But after "paying to hear their friends
talk" at industry events, they decided to organize their own events
with "intellectual meat," he says.

On a recent Saturday evening in their spacious cottage built into a
Berkeley hillside, 50 or so people, some in T-shirts touting "Java"
(not the coffee), sit on couches and the floor as Ms. Paull directs a
90-minute discussion on intellectual-property rights. Recent court
decisions to expand Internet patents have software entrepreneurs
worried that an explosion of electronic patents will restrict their
work.

"The patent thing is out of control," growls William Bates, author of
a software program called "MacZilla" that expands the multimedia
capabilities of Macintosh machines. "But we don't know how out of
control because it takes years" before the patent-holder becomes
known.

The shoptalk leads some salon-purists to criticize the cyber-version
as just an extension of Silicon Valley's nonstop business culture,
where a web browser generates more buzz than a hot movie. "Silicon
Valley is as anti-intellectual a place as you get," opines Paul
Saffo, director of a Menlo Park, Calif., think tank called the
Institute for the Future. Before he was married, Mr. Saffo used to
hold regular, serious gatherings dubbed "Nerds' Night Out" for a
group of Stanford academics, entrepreneurs and journalists.

Of course, salons always have been dominated by the "business" of
their patrons. In Washington, D.C., it's the business of politics; on
Manhattan's Upper West Side, it's the business of culture. In Silicon
Valley, it's often the business of technology that gets served up
with the Pasqua coffee.

But there are salons where business isn't the main event. Natalie
Jeremijenko, an artist and lecturer at Yale University's Department
of Mechanical Engineering, frequented the Silicon Valley social scene
before recently moving to New York. In the valley, she says, it's
"not what you've read or who you know, it's about how fast you can do
this puzzle or what code you've written. Those little algorithmic
tricks are really respected."

She points to the gaming parties hosted by Mr. Curtis, the software
entrepreneur, where wits win out. His European board games range from
silly to sophisticated, and guests compete all night over "board
games, card games, long games, short games, droll games and sometimes
computer games," Mr. Curtis says.

Brewster Kahle, host of the Thursday night San Francisco dinners,
says the focus at his table is friendship and ideas. Guests recently
amused themselves with new ideas for inventions -- everything from a
plastic shim (a wedge for wobbly tables) to a cheap coffee maker that
digests and brews beans in one step.

Still, Mr. Bates, a former Simon & Schuster technology editor, likes
to tick off names of startups that sprang from his favorite salon.
"You're more likely to find someone at one of these parties actually
doing something than in New York, where there's a lot more posing and
jockeying for prestige and power," he says. Geeks may not appear chic,
he adds, but here "intellectual ideas are dear and money is cheap."

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