and I don’t...
and I don’t know if it’s any different now, but at that time you had to actually
keep pushing all up and down the whole chain or it just wouldn’t move. You’d
push, and you’d think you were making headway, but the beanbag chair didn’t
move.
KPMG Peat Marwick was a democracy. It’s a partnership. Each partner
thought of themselves as in control of their piece of turf. And they were very
much so. They controlled their own revenue; they spent it; it was a democracy.
In fact, every so often they would get together and elect their upper-layer management.
If they didn’t like the upper-layer management—which was just
another consulting office, like any other—they’d vote them out. And they did.
The folks that were really supporting the WAIS project at KPMG Peat Marwick
after a couple years got more or less voted out. Not because of WAIS, but the
partners said, “We want a different type of management.”
So this was still being done within Thinking Machines, but I found that
Thinking Machines wasn’t going to go and build some of the pieces needed to
make this Internet publishing world work. We coined the term “Internet publishing”
and tried to say, “OK, this should happen.” Apple would do their piece
and Peat Marwick would do their piece, but nobody would go and do the central
set of tools, the software needed. So I said, “OK, well, I’ll do that. And start
a company to do that.”
There was a decision to try and figure out where it should be. Should it be
in Boston? Should it be in Silicon Valley? Should it be someplace completely
else? So I went around to the smart people I knew and said, “Where should we
put this company? What I’m really trying to do is build an industry.” Not build
a company, build an industry, so there would be all of these pieces that would
make network publishing come about. Some people thought it was a little crazy
to think about starting an industry, but it seemed like it made sense to me.
The best piece of advice that I got was from Bill Dunn, one of my mentors.
He said, “Go someplace where people don’t think you’re crazy.” Which sounds
like a pretty simple thing to say, but it actually turned out to be a very wise piece
of advice. Boston, especially back in 1990/91, was in recession and having
trouble. California was also in recession, but in California there were dreamers.
There were people who wanted to think about new and different things and
wouldn’t think we were crazy to try to build this thing.
So I decided to start the company out here and start with a contract—it was
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