For Kurt Rukus>>>Burn, baby, burn
Innovating in Nevada desert
By Rebecca Lynn Eisenberg,
CBS MarketWatch
Last Update: 12:58 PM ET Sep 8, 1998
NewsWatch
BLACK ROCK DESERT, Nev, (CBS.MW) -- Silicon Valley is famous for
its innovation -- especially when it comes to computers and the Internet.
Here in the Bay Area, new high-tech startups appear every day, and some
of them, from Yahoo! and Netscape to Apple and Cisco Systems, even
become profitable. Residents and high-tech workers become rightfully
proud, if not wealthy as well.
Still, in all of our talk about retained earnings,
revenues, profits and performance, we sometimes
forget to pay attention to what lies at the foundation
of every successful start-ups: ideas. After all, at the
foundation of every innovative company is a product
or service newer and better than those that came
before it.
Where does all this creativity come from?
Some answers can be found in the heart of
uninhabitable and painfully hot Black Rock Desert,
Nev., where each year Labor Day weekend,
thousands of adventurous creatives -- more than
half of whom are said to hail from the Bay Area --
congregate to build a modern and surreal city, then
burn it all down.
Named "Burning Man" after the week's closing
ceremony where a 40-foot wood and neon structure
is torched against the night sky, the 12-year-old
tradition attracts some of the most innovative and
iconoclastic engineers from the Bay Area and beyond, from
robot-machinists Survival Research Laboratories to virtual community
pioneers Bianca's Smut Shack, recently acquired by Zapata (ZAP).
More common than the high-tech companies that set up camp together at
Burning Man, however, are the developers who attend the week-long
festival in order to create the work that the day-to-day grind, filled with
deadlines, overhead limitations and managerial beaurocracy, prevents them
from completing.
Pipe, neon, metal and wood
Thus, out in the desert you can find some of the best minds from high-tech
giants such as Cisco, Microsoft, Apple and Intel as well as from start-ups
you have not heard of (yet), building out of metal, wood, neon and PVC
pipe what they wish they could build on their employers' time.
The festival "grants us the freedom to design, create and enact a project
without the stupidity and straightjacket of corporate America," explained
Ron Avitzur, CEO and president of Pacific Tech, an educational software
start-up in San Carlos, California
"I could not have put up this structure at work or in my neighborhood,"
agreed Anne Church, second-level software engineer at Cisco Systems. "It
would not have been accepted. But here it was appreciated."
For her contribution to the Burning Man community, Church built a 10-foot
tall Sierpinski gasket out of PVC pipe, wire and developer CD-ROMs she
had painted black. The structure represents a repetitive mathematical
pattern that emerges from seemingly chaotic systems.
"Within 10 minutes of its completion, people were approaching the structure
and asking about it," said Church. "They knew that it was a mathematical
object, and recognized the pattern."
Like many Burning Man participants, Church had started work on her
project months before the actual event. "Once I heard about Burning Man
last year, I knew that I had to do this," she said. "And it all worked out
exactly as planned."
Church's sentiments were echoed by hundreds of others, who used the
week as an opportunity to design, construct and enjoy exhibits as impressive
as a 15-foot functioning tesla coil, to a laser beam that cut across tens of
miles onto the mountainside, to an electronic sound array made out of
computer-chip-endowed PVC pipes, to a 20-foot high welded swingset and
teeter-totter.
It's no wonder that so many engineers, who often are too busy for even a
weekend away from work, make time to attend Burning Man - - even if
they have to travel there by motorcycle, as did CEO and president of Santa
Cruz-based network provider Tycho Networks Inc., Qarin Van Brink, and
her business partner Matthew Kaufman.
Avitzur summarized the appeal: "Burning Man embodies the best parts of
the hacker ethic ... solving problems for the sheer joy of making things
work."
Although this goal often gets lost in high-tech companies' executive board
rooms, Burning Man reminds us that without the goal of innovation for its
own sake, we'd have no such board rooms at all.
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