The web I want vs the one we have – daveverse
I remember when I first arrived in Silicon Valley with a couple of products and after meeting Steve Jobs at Apple, and signing with the company that bought Visicalc, I felt like I had arrived, and quickly found my tribe. These people understand what I do, after trying to get folks at my university, in Madison, to understand. It was great.
But I didn’t understand how thin the competence was. That didn’t come until I had lunch with one of two leading analysts who were the influencers of the day, the ones who acted as gatekeepers for the venture capitalists. This was a couple of years later, I was on my own after the Visicalc company decided my outliner was too weird to stake their rep on.
So I was going to explain to this reputed visionary how my outliner worked and why it was so different from the writing tools other people were marketing. Very quickly I understood that this person had no more understanding of software than my roommates in Madison did. They were smart and educated, but they were English majors or studied agriculture or business. They didn’t understand the first thing about computers, and neither did this gatekeeper. I can’t tell you how disheartening this was. This was a famous person who I’m not going to name.
Later I learned that when Symantec, the company that bought my startup, was thinking about making a product, they’d invite this person to hear the pitch and if they didn’t like or understand it, they wouldn’t make it.
