The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future Read Online Free Page A

limited. And those who sensed the potential were unwilling to take the risk of partnering with a young company, particularly one that had a failed product and angry creditors and investors.
    We finally found a willing ear at Commodore, at the time one of the leading home computer companies. Commodore’s founder had departed in a huff, and the remaining management team was struggling to figure out a path forward. Competition was intensifying, and they knew they needed a new act, an angle that would allow them to stand out.
    Commodore’s head of strategic planning, Clive Smith, was willing to be our advocate, but other executives had concluded it would be too risky to partner with CVC.
    “You guys have a ton of baggage and it’s a liability for us,” Clive said, without pulling any punches. “Everyone has a lot of respect for what you guys are trying to do here, but no one wants to get in bed with CVC. There’s just too much risk.”
    I asked him for advice. Was there anything we could do to get around it? Any chance for a second shot? There was a silence on the other end of the phone. We were doomed, I was sure of it, and he just didn’t know how to say it.
    “I don’t know, Steve,” he finally responded. “Have you thought about starting a new company?”
    Oddly, I hadn’t. And yet it seemed so obvious once he said it. A new company would mean more than just a new name. It would mean a clean balance sheet and a clean slate. A genuine fresh start. All we’d need to do was license the software from CVC, move the team over to the new company, and dissolve the old one.
    In the summer of 1985, just before my twenty-seventh birthday, we took Clive’s advice and created a new company, Quantum Computer Services. We took over the lease on CVC’s office space in Tysons Corner, Virginia, and hired most of its team. I joined together with Marc Seriff and Jim Kimsey, another CVC executive, as one of Quantum’s co-founders.
    Jim was a truly colorful character. Like many of us, he had come to the company with no professional background in technology. He owned a group of bars and restaurants in Washington, DC, and had a lifestyle to match. A graduate of West Point and a veteran of two tours in Vietnam, Jim often laced his sentences with expletives and non sequiturs. He had a thing for quoting historical figures. Nietzsche was a favorite; I must have heard him say “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger” at least a hundred times. He was twenty yearsolder than most of us and, to the outside world, was clearly seen as the adult in the mix. Our investors referred to him as our “adult supervision.” This served an important purpose in those days, when companies with twenty-somethings hadn’t yet established themselves as a force.
    Frank Caufield, one of Jim’s best friends and the co-founder of a young venture capital firm called Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB), had talked to Jim about CVC. Jim got excited about the GameLine vision and bought the franchise rights for the DC region. When KPCB joined H&Q as early investors in CVC, Frank joined the board. When problems emerged with GameLine, Frank asked Jim to step in to try to stabilize the situation and protect KPCB’s investment. Jim agreed to help, even though he didn’t really understand technology—and didn’t really want to. He viewed it as more of an interim stint, figuring he’d help out for a few months as a favor. He ended up doing it for more than a decade.
    Without Jim, we wouldn’t have had the ability to raise the capital to survive. And without Marc, we wouldn’t have been able to build the core technology of our product. I played the role of the strategist and hustler, coming up with the ideas, building partnerships, designing many of the consumer-facing aspects of the product, and handling our branding and message. It was the perfect combination of highly complementary skills. And we hoped it would make us a credible bet—particularly