Thread, Article...USWB/CKS Flying high..
forbes.com
Sept 02 1999
By Jon Swartz
A scrum of reporters jockeyed for position at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art recently to cover a marginal news conference for a middling Internet startup. Journalists from newspapers, computer magazines and web sites strained to get a glimpse of the proceedings.
The star attraction? Not a hot new technology or landmark business partnership, but a slight, unassuming 20-something who happens to believe in aliens.
The neck-craning attention didn't phase Joe Firmage, the Fox Mulder of Silicon Valley, who has parlayed infamy into fame and fortune for himself and USWeb/CKS (nasdaq: USWB), the billion-dollar Internet consulting firm he cofounded. Despite (or because of) Firmage's controversial views on extraterrestrial life and its impact on history, USWeb/CKS is soaring higher than one of the spaceships that Firmage swears by.
The company has moved its headquarters from the South Bay Area to San Francisco's tony Multimedia Gulch and is in the midst of its biggest recruitment drive. The 3,000-person company has added more than 1,000 employees worldwide in the past year. By September, its workforce will approach 4,000. Sales, meanwhile, reached a record $101 million in its latest quarter, and USWeb/CKS is adding corporate clients faster than you can say "ET."
Firmage displays the panache that helped him start a high tech company in Utah at 18 and become a millionaire shortly after he started shaving.
Funny. This doesn't appear to be a company reeling from the self-inflicted public relations wounds of an alien-believing executive. In fact, the company is prospering. Or was this all part of a carefully orchestrated PR stunt? Did Firmage deceive a gullible press into unwittingly making him and his otherwise pedestrian company into major names in the Valley?
"UFO Joe's" otherworldly views about extraterrestrial intelligence earned him sensational headlines--and a pink slip from USWeb/CKS in January. At the time he made news promoting his 600-page online treatise, "The Truth" (http://www.thewordistruth.org), which linked many of history's major religious and technological events to visits from aliens. He even recounted a close encounter of the third kind in his Los Gatos, Calif., home in 1997.
Firmage has steadfastly defended his unconventional views. "Why would a young, successful CEO risk his reputation on something this fantastic?" he once asked. "Because I believe so much in this theory. And I am in a unique position to communicate an extremely important message. I have the money, credibility, scientific grounding and faith."
Firmage, who has since softened some of his more off-the-wall comments, insists that he is not trying to cash in on the enduring UFO craze. Rather, he has sunk more than $3 million into establishing Project Kairos (derived from the ancient Greek word meaning "the right or opportune moment") to prepare mankind for aliens. "There is no money to be made--just to be lost," he says. But Firmage never really left USWeb/CKS. He maintained a modest office there as a consultant and frequently contributed to corporate strategy. While technically away from the company, he did the rounds in national TV and print interviews that established him as a cult figure and thrust his company into the klieg lights. Was it all calculated? Perhaps we should expect nothing less from a shrewd individual who cofounded a firm that specializes in brand marketing.
A prime example was this summer's MOMA fete. In his first public appearance since the UFO flap, Firmage promoted a more down-to-earth venture. He unveiled Intend Change Group, a consulting company for Internet startups in need of expert advice on writing business plans and schmoozing with venture capitalists. USWeb/CKS is a major investor in the startup.
The publicity surrounding Firmage is all well and good, company officials reluctantly acknowledge, but they maintain that USWeb/CKS is leading an e-commerce revolution. "There is a huge push across all industries to have an online presence. The emerging digital economy has reached a point where absolutely nobody can ignore it," says Ian Small, USWeb/CKS chief strategist and knowledge officer.
To that end, USWeb/CKS is adding a veritable Who's Who of Forbes 500 firms to its core of customers. In the past several months, it has signed up America Online (nyse: AOL), 20th Century Fox (nyse: FOX), Walgreens (nyse: WAG) and Williams-Sonoma (nyse: WSM). Meanwhile, a long list of wannabes--Viant (nasdaq: VIAN), Razorfish (nasdaq: RAZF) and iXL (nasdaq: IIXL)--are mimicking USWeb/CKS' formula of Internet strategic consulting services and web design in hopes of striking it rich.
"The fact that [Firmage] opened up the issue required a lot of courage. He stuck his neck out."
USWeb/CKS executives are reluctant to talk about Firmage. Still, it doesn't hurt to have the mug of a company figurehead on network and cable TV. NBC's Dateline, A&E Television Networks and Fox Family Channel filed reports on Firmage this year. Additionally, documentaries are in the works to promote a hardcover version of his book, The Word is Truth.
Truth be told, Firmage is an extremely persuasive speaker. He is witty, articulate, believable and charming. He coolly and easily displays the panache that helped him start a high tech company in Utah at 18 and become a millionaire shortly after he started shaving. In many ways, he is the ideal spokesman for USWeb/CKS--whatever his unorthodox views.
And the public's overwhelming verdict? The clean-cut Firmage is an earnest, brilliant individual who has put the truth, as he sees it, before his career. He seems to have touched a common chord.
"These are certainly speculative and provocative theories but, on the other hand, he's not a crackpot," says Harold Puthoff, a respected physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Tex. "As far as whether we'll meet up with E.T., the jury is still out. The proof is yet to be found. The fact that [Firmage] opened up the issue required a lot of courage. He stuck his neck out."
Jim Marrs, a journalist in Dallas who has written extensively about UFOs and the John F. Kennedy assassination, says: "Firmage is a brilliant guy. He picked the brains of top researchers to come up with his ideas. There have been dozens of works on the Roswell-technology connection."
The authoritative 1997 book, The Day After Roswell, is one of them. Coauthor Bill Birnes says: "Joe is right on." Like Firmage, he contends the origins of high tech inventions such as lasers and the microchip can be traced to a purported alien spacecraft crash in 1947 in Roswell, N.M.
USWeb/CKS' recent meteoric rise, in part, can also be traced to that spaceship. |
