Here's a neat story about a Broadband pioneer.
>>Broadband pioneer survives At Home's demise
MEDIN'S CAREER PATH HAS MIRRORED INTERNET'S DEVELOPMENT
By Joelle Tessler
Mercury News
On a gray, drizzly morning last week, Milo Medin, founder of broadband pioneer At Home, wandered around the defunct company's former campus in Redwood City.
Two years ago, at the height of the dot-com boom, more than 2,000 people worked in this cluster of nine buildings, bringing high-speed Internet access to the masses.
Now the hulking steel and glass structures alongside Highway 101 are mostly vacant. Rows of empty cubes are visible through some windows. And Medin can no longer take visitors inside.
Last week, At Home, which filed for bankruptcy last fall, was handing the last of its buildings back to the landlord.
But Medin was sanguine.
``Buildings aren't really a company,'' he said. ``The soul of the company is its people and its mission.''
At just 39, Medin could be called the grandfather of broadband. As At Home's chief technology officer, Medin designed and oversaw the construction of At Home's vast data network. In his seven years at the company, Medin saw it grow into a giant with 4.2 million subscribers.
Along the way, At Home helped create today's broadband industry. It spurred the phone companies to roll out their own version of broadband, called digital subscriber line, or DSL, service. And it left behind a thriving market for the cable operators that were once its partners and took over its customers when it shut down.
``I feel sad about what happened to At Home,'' Medin said. ``But what we did lives on through the cable operators. Consumers are better off for this company having existed. And seven years is a long time in the Valley.''
Medin's roots in Silicon Valley actually go back longer than just seven years. He has been here since the early days of the modern Internet, and watched it evolve from a web of government and university networks.
To Medin, those early government networks -- the NASA Science Internet, the National Science Foundation's NSFnet, the Energy Department's ESnet and the Defense Department's ARPANET and MILNET -- are not just ancient history. They are where he started.
In many ways, Medin's own path has mirrored the Internet's development.
Before he was recruited to found At Home in 1995, Medin spent a decade at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, helping to run the NASA Science Internet, or NSI. He left NASA for At Home around the time that the private sector began taking over the Net from the government. And he was with At Home through the entire dot-com boom and bust.
He was there when the high-flying young company shelled out a stunning $6.7 billion to buy Web portal Excite in 1999 in a bold attempt to combine broadband access and content. He was there when the online advertising market, Excite's core business, collapsed. And he was there when At Home went bankrupt last year -- a casualty of the dot-com meltdown and power struggles with the cable companies.
In fact, Medin was there through the middle of February haggling with creditors, lawyers and potential buyers to try to sell what was left of the company's assets.
``It says a lot about Milo that he stuck it out,'' said Jeffrey Burgan, a close friend who worked with Medin at both NASA and At Home. ``There were almost no original executives left at At Home at the end other than Milo. He's a captain who will go down with his ship.''
These days, Medin is taking it easy. He spends much of his time with his wife, Catherine, a paralegal at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, who is also taking a break from work. The two got married a year ago and live in a bright, airy home in the hills above Redwood City, just a 10-minute drive from the At Home campus.
A deeply religious man, Medin is also active in his church, Menlo Park Presbyterian.
His faith, he explained, has helped him see that there's more to life than just work. He knows this is not the way many people think in Silicon Valley. ``Humanism, what man can achieve, and glorifying your own accomplishments -- that's the religion in Silicon Valley,'' Medin said.
Medin hasn't disengaged from the world of high-tech altogether, though. He sits on a National Academy of Sciences committee that just released a report on how to protect children from online pornography.
He is also a vocal member of TechNet, a high-tech lobbying group pushing for faster roll-out of high-speed Internet connections.
Medin believes broadband is still in its adolescence. Today's cable modem and DSL connections can send data at speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second.
But ``there is a real danger in stopping at 1.5 megabits,'' Medin said. ``Computers will get faster and online services like video-on-demand will require faster connections. So we need more bandwidth.''
As a leading voice of the broadband revolution, Medin has come a long way from humble beginnings. The son of Serbian immigrants, he grew up on a grape farm outside of Fresno. His family raised 20 acres of grapes used to make raisins and wine.
When Medin was 5, his father died of a heart attack. His mother, who spoke almost no English and didn't know how to drive, was left to raise Medin and his younger sister. The three learned English together, studying the workbooks that Medin brought home from kindergarten.
Life was not always easy. The family was on food stamps at one point. And Medin's sister, Mary Ann Buchanan, remembers the sacrifices their mother made. ``We were fairly poor growing up, but she scraped enough money together to get Milo a computer,'' Buchanan said.
That computer was an Apple II with 4 kilobytes of memory and a floppy drive. As a teenager, Medin was dialing into Fresno State University using a 300-baud modem -- about 100 times slower than today's 56K modems.
Medin went on to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is still one credit shy of a degree. ``I always meant to go back and take care of that, but I never did,'' he said.
Life was moving too quickly and Medin had a front-row seat to the birth of the commercial Net. In 1985, as a college senior, Medin began working at NASA -- first on the internal computer systems and then on the agency's wide area networks, which turned into the NASA Science Internet.
At NASA, Medin ran the West Coast ``Federal Interconnect Exchange.'' The Fix, as it was known, was a key connection point linking the different government networks. In the late 1980s, Medin also set up MAE West at NASA, to link commercial Internet service providers.
Medin was not eager to leave NASA when John Doerr and Will Hearst of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers -- the valley's premier venture capital firm -- came knocking in 1995. In fact, Medin didn't even return Doerr's phone calls.
``I thought Kleiner Perkins was a law firm,'' Medin recalls. ``I didn't even know what a venture capitalist was.''
But Doerr and Hearst persisted. ``We found Milo by asking around among people in the Internet community and his name just kept coming up,'' Hearst explained. ``He was such a legendary genius.''
The three ultimately met for breakfast at the Good Earth in downtown Palo Alto. Doerr and Hearst had been conferring with cable industry pioneer John Malone on a plan to deliver fast Internet connections over cable lines. They sketched out their idea on the paper placemats.
And Medin explained why their plan wouldn't fly. ``The cable modems would swamp the backbone,'' he said. ``It would be like having a four-lane on-ramp to a two-lane highway.''
But Medin also told them how they could make the system work: build a distributed network that would use multicasting, regional data centers and caching technology to place content closer to subscribers. Medin warned them, however, that this network could easily cost $125 million to build.
They barely batted an eye.
``I was thinking who are these people?'' Medin recalls. ``A space orbiter doesn't cost that much.''
The hard part turned out to be bringing Medin on board. Doerr and Hearst tried every argument in the book, including the money and the technical challenge.
What finally lured Medin was the chance to build something meaningful. ``He said it would interest him if he could get his mother on the Internet,'' Hearst remembers, ``because she didn't really know what he did.''
Looking back today on how it all ended, Medin is not bitter. He knows that At Home made some mistakes. The merger with Excite was poorly executed and caused the company to lose focus. At Home also lost touch with the cable operators, which eventually figured out how to get into the cable modem business on their own.
Still, he has no regrets. At Home did not make Medin rich by Silicon Valley standards since he wound up with some worthless shares. But it left him quite comfortable. As Medin himself points out, wealth is relative.
``One man's poverty is another man's wealth,'' he said. ``I grew up on a grape farm, so I consider myself very wealthy.''
More important, he is confident that his company has improved people's lives. ``We live in a society in which information is power,'' Medin said. ``Broadband gives people access to information in depth and volume. Kleiner Perkins trusted a young guy from Fresno with this very important task and that's a great privilege. I had a blast.''
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