OT RE Geoff Goodfellow
Excerpt from NYT article 1.17.99
Saying Goodbye, and Good Riddance to Silicon Valley
By JOHN MARKOFF
MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Until last year, Geoff Goodfellow was a Silicon Valley Wunderkind, a pioneer in the field of wireless electronic mail. Now, as a resident of the Czech Republic, he wakes up each day and gazes from the balcony of his loft over a jumble of rooftops at the Prague Castle on a nearby hill.
Half a world away from Silicon Valley, Goodfellow has become a member of a small fraternity of engineers and entrepreneurs who have dropped out and walked away from ground zero of the Internet economy.
Goodfellow's departure is an exception to the popular notion that working in Silicon Valley, the world's high-technology capital, is its own reward. He left with a darker vision of life there and a disdain for the corrosive human effect of the region's workaholic, dollar-obsessed culture.
"In the Valley, it's all about power and money and work, work, work, work, and this expectation among your peers that you're going to do the next big thing," he said recently. "Eventually I saw that was a false god."
The different path taken by Goodfellow and a handful of others who have left Silicon Valley is particularly striking, because for the best and the brightest, dropping out or even retiring early has become increasingly rare.
Making a huge fortune in a high-flying Internet or semiconductor stock, which would be a life-changing event for most Americans, has in Silicon Valley become merely an occasion for, say, buying a new house or car and then transferring to a new start-up company.
In this former agricultural region, it has become typical to find "serial entrepreneurs" -- hardware engineers, scientists, marketing managers and software programmers who often feel that they work not for a given company but rather for Silicon Valley Inc. Changing jobs has become as simple as turning into a new driveway when you head for work.
And for many of these people, each successive job demands an intense commitment that squeezes out any outside life, whether it is family or recreation. Like the Apple Macintosh team of the 1980's whose members wore T-shirts that read "Working 90 hours a week and loving it," many people who work here now wear this workaholism as a badge of courage.
The modern role models are those who have founded a string of successful companies, like Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape Communications, or Federico Faggin, a former Intel engineer, co-inventor of its first microprocessor chip and founder of the Zilog Corporation and Synaptics Inc.
Indeed, the popular Silicon Valley career goal has become graduating to "corporate angel" status -- wealthy enough to emulate the venture capitalists who have long been the lifeblood of the Valley. Entrepreneurs like Andreas Bechtolscheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who is now a computer designer at Cisco Systems, and Mark Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, have become start-up investors while keeping their day jobs.
To find the Valley's most celebrated dropout, by contrast, it is necessary to reach back more than two decades. Robert J. Widlar, a legendary chip designer at the National Semiconductor Corporation, quit and moved to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in the 1970's, saying he "didn't like the water" in Silicon Valley. His idyll was cut short in 1991, when, at the age of 53, he died while jogging on a Puerto Vallarta beach.
It was Steven P. Jobs, a college dropout, who brought to Silicon Valley the mantra that "the journey is the reward."
Jobs was a co-founder of Apple Computer in 1976. After leaving Apple in 1985, he founded Next Computer and almost simultaneously bought Pixar, at the time an ailing supercomputer company.
A decade later, Jobs had transformed Pixar into a digital animation studio and became a billionaire overnight when he took it public. Then, in late 1996, he returned to Apple as interim chief executive and has orchestrated a stunning turnaround.
So it is that, with technologies advancing at the headlong pace known as Internet time, one accomplishment can often blur into the next.
"When you think of Jean-Paul Sartre's observation that there are no second acts in life, you realize that it simply doesn't apply in Silicon Valley," said Fred Hoar, a longtime public relations executive and a founder of the Band of Angels, a group of independent private investors in the Valley.
For some people, however, Silicon Valley's rewards come at an unjustifiable cost. Most of them share a passion for the technology that sustains the industry, but somehow lose their sense of fun in this work. They also become alienated from a culture driven by values they consider shallow.
Following are the stories of three men whose second act was to walk off the stage.
An Epiphany in Heaven, in a Loft In Beautiful Prague
For Geoff Goodfellow, 42, a tall, thin man with short blond hair, life after Silicon Valley unfolds far from the world of endless business meetings, late nights and 90-hour weeks.
As a teen-ager, after discovering the Internet's predecessor, called the Arpanet, Goodfellow asked for free access to the computers of SRI International, the Menlo Park research center that helped give birth to the Internet, and began spending time there, helping to maintain the SRI computer systems. He became a computer hacker, dropped out of high school, never to return, and in 1988, from a spare bedroom in his Menlo Park apartment, started the Radiomail Corporation with the goal of providing nationwide wireless electronic mail.
But in 1996, after working first as chief executive and then as chairman, and after a long struggle with his investors, Goodfellow left Radiomail. Although his shares in the company had not made him fabulously wealthy, he walked away with enough money to live well. Working as a consultant, he immediately made plans to start several new companies, each of which he thought could grow into new industries related to music and the Internet.
Then, last year, while on vacation, Goodfellow, who is single, made a brief stop in Prague that changed his life. It was, he said, like meeting someone and knowing immediately that this was the person he would marry.
"When you have found the most beautiful and cultured city on the planet, it changes your view of the world," he said. He reflected on his life and work in Silicon Valley, and even though he had a network of friends there, he sold his home and rented a loft in a city he had visited for only a few days. "I've arrived in heaven," he said, "and I didn't have to die first to get here."
Goodfellow's disaffection with life in Silicon Valley had been building for some time. In 1996 he moved to a loft in San Francisco and began commuting to the Valley, spending his evenings frequenting the city's fine restaurants and taking in the underground music scene.
Life in Prague has changed his outlook on many things, he said. "In the Valley there are these nervous battles for power and money," he said. "And the hype -- it is a culture that has no culture."
Not that Goodfellow has totally abandoned his old world. He typically wakes at 6 A.M. and shuffles to his portable computer. By then it is 9 P.M. in Silicon Valley, and he catches up on technology developments by way of E-mail and a complex set of electronic tools that monitor the news services.
Still an inveterate news hound, he reads four newspapers each morning on the Internet and at lunch catches up on two more, The International Herald Tribune and The Financial Times.
He left Silicon Valley a wealthy man, by Czech standards, and in Prague he has become a full-time investor, with the booming United States stock market making him richer. He returns home from lunch by 3:30 each afternoon to track before-hours American trading and then uses the World Wide Web to do research and to make investments until leaving at 6 or 7 for dinner. Later each evening, he returns to monitor the New York market close.
He now calls Prague home, has a new set of mostly Czech friends and says he is far more at peace with himself.
"If you can imagine life with zero hassles, zero bureaucracy and zero conflict," he said, "that's the environment I live in."
He still believes that "the journey is the reward," but with a twist. "That was my goal," he said. "But sometimes when you start a journey your goal changes in midcourse and the currency in the reward can change as well."
[continues with portraits of other SV "dropouts"] |
