Jack, Ah, et al: Excellent article regarding ATHM with Milo tale.
thestandard.com
Just a snippet of a long article, but appears to cover many bases.
2/14/00
In the beginning it was just an idea, a notion tossed around by venture capitalist John Doerr and TCI cable exec Bruce Ravenel. Back in 1994, Doerr recognized this Internet thing was going to be huge business. But he also saw that the slow, cumbersome modems people were using posed a serious problem.
He realized that cable companies owned a solution: fat pipes, with nearly unending yet practically untapped bandwidth and direct connections to millions of homes. Why not turn those cable networks into a high-speed Internet alternative? By 1995 he had a company, AtHome, and a cable partner, TCI, and he was ready to make it happen.
In the five years since then, the company Doerr helped found has gone through some of the most tortured convolutions in Internet history. It's had to invent an industry on its own, and that caused bitter infighting with partners and painfully slow growth. AtHome didn't count on the length of time it would take to get into the game, or the competition that would pop up in the meanwhile – everything from other cable systems to wireless, satellite and DSL operators in every market. Through it all, the company has soldiered on, one of the most maligned, gossiped about and misunderstood outfits in the Valley.
And now, when AtHome seemed ready to emerge, along comes its most serious competitor to date: AOL (AOL) , cable operator. If its deal with Time Warner succeeds, the king of Internet providers will own probably the most attractive cable plant in the country – and it is poised to come rumbling onto AtHome's turf.
But don't bet against ExciteAtHome. It has more than a five-year head start on AOL and still has exclusive contracts with every major cable company in the U.S., except Time Warner. Legal challenges to those contracts are on their last legs, so until they expire in a couple of years, ExciteAtHome has the leeway and wherewithal to become the single largest broadband company in the world.
As soon as the plan for AtHome was hatched, Doerr and Kleiner Perkins' Will Hearst, the newspaper heir, took the idea to Milo Medin, a U.S. government network guru. Medin had burst onto the scene as the 23-year-old prodigy who led a team in building the NASA data network known as the NASA Science Internet. But while Medin was a Silicon Valley hero, he was still innocent to the Valley's burgeoning business scene. "I kept getting these calls from John something-or-other at a company called Kleiner Perkins and I thought, Kleiner Perkins? What's that, a law firm?," Medin says.
When he finally did break bread with Hearst and Doerr, things did not go smoothly.
Doerr and Hearst sketched their vision, simple and elegant, on a paper place mat: Cable modems would bring Net access via the same pipes through which people get cable TV. Medin laughed them off, making him one of the few people ever to tell John Doerr he didn't get the Net.
"I asked him, 'Do you know how the Internet works?'" Medin says. "The Internet is full of bottlenecks. A cable modem would be like putting a six-lane onramp onto a one-lane highway."
Medin grabbed the place mat and sketched his own diagram – a much more elaborate, extensive, private network that would speed up the content enough so it could run on Doerr's cable modems. From then on, the AtHome vision became much more complicated, and much more difficult to execute.
Click link for the other five pages! Worth the read.
|
