AIM INTERVIEWS

Who are you?

I literally ask myself that question every day. Proudest of being a dad to Orson and Zoe. Known, if at all, for Wired, which I created with their mom Jane Metcalfe. So troublemaker? Helped start a groundbreaking chocolate company TCHO, which still stands. So entrepreneur? Wrote a couple of novels. Writer? Caromed around in wide-eyed wonder for more than half a century at a world in transition. So witness?

You started your first magazine Electric Word in 1987. What originally made you interested in publishing media focused on emerging technology and futurism? Was there any inspiration?

I had no big vision. I was an expat in Amsterdam, and I needed a job. This translation company hired me as a technical writer, they just got this big contract to do all the documentation for Fokker's new airplane. Then Fokker cancelled the project, and here they were, stuck with me, since firing people in Europe is a bitch. So they repurposed me into the editor of a new magazine they wanted to start as a marketing vehicle to sell the translation tools they were developing. I told them that was insane, better they should just hire two salesmen and put them on the road full time. They wouldn't listen to me. They wanted to call the magazine Translation Tech or something like that. I said, what about Language Technology? I didn't know anything about language or technology, so I took the brief as an excuse to get a post doc in both.

I set out to visit the people making technology to deal with language. Propitious time to do so, in the mid-80s, when PCs were taking off, companies were networking, people were starting bulletin boards. In my wanderings from Brigham Young to MacWorld to the corridors of the EC (forerunner to the current EU), I discovered that the people creating and using these new technologies were not only smart, not only cool, (hence the final name change of LT to Electric Word) but had outsize ambitions to revolutionize the world – and they were doing it. Oh, and they were invisible to media. No one at the New York Times understood what was really going on. Bingo. Opportunity.

In 1986, Jane and I and a friend Jeff Mann sat down to write a business plan for a new magazine covering the people changing the world at the cusp of the new millennium. I wanted to call it Millennium, but discovered there was a film magazine with that name. Jane renamed it Wired. Took us five years, but in 1991, we quit our lives in Amsterdam after a decade as ex-pats, moved to the US like my immigrant grandparents without any business contacts, and moved to SF where we had no family or friends. Life is not about a master plan. It is like a board game – full of chance and opportunity. Chance brought me to Amsterdam and that translation company and meeting Jane. Opportunity was realizing the people creating and using these new technologies were the most powerful people on the planet – and no one was talking about them.

Wired appeared to be an instant success after its first release. You brought on iconic editors and art directors to make Wired a lifestyle magazine that uniquely captured the culture of technology at the time. What in particular do you think made Wired so popular? What was the most surprising thing that happened while running it?

Wired wasn't an "instant success." Jane and I spent two years just raising the money, everyone in media and investing just knew we were crazy. I was 43 when we finally launched; it had taken me all my life to make this instant success happen. Wired wasn't a "lifestyle magazine." For its first years, it was literally an intelligence operation that broke news and delivered insight into the most powerful phenomenon of our times, the digital revolution, to all the people who needed to know about it – before anyone else. Hard to imagine that now. Wired started before web media.

John Battelle, Kevin Kelly, and I used to sit on the sofa in my office and dream up the stories we wanted to know about. There weren't enough writers who knew what we wanted, so we repurposed them from other places – like scifi: Bruce Sterling wrote our first cover story about virtual training for war in Iraq. Indeed he was our first cover boy, his face on that first cover. Then we brought that news to the world with panache. When Jane and I returned from Amsterdam, we stopped in London, and I bought a case of Tom Wolfe's The New Journalism, a compendium of the writings of the best authors who changed journalism during the Rolling Stone era. I gave them to our editors, and our writers, and told them, this is what I want our editorial to be like, this irreverence, this authenticity, this energy.

When John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr came on board as creative directors, their mandate was to make the magazine look as revolutionary as the subject we were covering – like it had fallen out of the sky from another planet. Maybe people wouldn't completely understand what it was about, but it looked so compelling they would feel compelled to figure it out.

And finally, Wired wasn't a magazine. It was, as I said, an intelligence operation for a digital revolution. Because of the timing of the publishing cycle, from story germination to magazine on the newsstand was six months (two months to write a story, two months to edit, two months to produce, print, and distribute). So at Wired, we were seeing stuff six months before anyone else. And we realized at a certain point – this internet thing is insanely powerful, and the web is going to change the face of media and the world. Let's start migrating to that space.

So we pioneered web media when we launched the first website Hotwired where we combined original content made specifically for the web with Fortune 500 advertising. We brought ATT and Volvo and ClubMed on to the web. We invented the banner ad (a lasting regret: we didn't patent it). Which gave a financial foundation to web media, and enabled its explosion. We weren't just the mouthpiece of the Digital Revolution, we were eating our own dogfood, we were making the revolution.

Why was Wired so popular? Because we told the story of our time – of heroes and exploits, bravery and insanity – with flair and conviction. Because while it seemed like we were indulging in hyperbole, in fact, we were absolutely accurate in the stories we told and the predictions we made. People could rely on us. And because we were young (average age at Wired was 26, at Hotwired 24), part of a revolution, believers, and we were having fun – you could see it, feel it, in everything we created, from our magazine, to our websites, to our books, to our offices, to WiredWare (our merch). Media is two things. Content and community. Our content was impeccable. And the community we gathered was incandescent, and everyone wanted to be part of it. And, amazingly, everybody could, they just needed to embrace the revolution.

After the sale of Wired you've been involved in some interesting projects including founding TCHO chocolate. If you had unlimited resources (time, money, etc.), how would you spend your time?

Unlimited time? Seems akin to Thiel's question of how you would live your life if you could live to 150. And the answer is, do it again: see as much of the world as possible, find the perfect mate, have babies, birth companies on the edge, try to be honest and righteous, try to have some fun. And be kind. Because if you live to 150, you're probably going to run into the same people again along the way. Would be good if they thought well of you.

Are there any people or projects you particularly admire today?

Too many to cite. When we were doing Wired, there was one overriding revolution in motion, the Digital Revolution. Today there are five: biotechnology, energy (fission and fusion, not solar and wind), augmented intelligence (what it really is), the blockchain (not just cryptocurrency), and space. All the people making and using those technologies to change the world for the better are heroes. Theirs are the stories that need to be told. Unfortunately, the zombie media's business model is anxiety. So, also heroes are the citizen journalists who are spreading that story, and spreading that awareness, post by post. The original Wired today would have no shortage of new, wild adventures to highlight.

What's a message you have for the world?

Be open to the opportunity chance brings your way. Focus on the change you can make directly, not on utopia (if everyone made the world better for their family, friends, and community, utopia would take care of itself). Be optimistic – because, as Noam Chomsky put it, "Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it's unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so." And finally, be brave, it's all prelude.