Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Michael Wolff
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then at the New Yorker, and then at Wired magazine, writing about media, politics, and technology—but all the time seeming way too large for those jobs. Those were for intelligent scriveners, whereas Heilemann was taking his measure not against other writers, but against the big men he was writing about.
In 1997, as the decibel level of the great boom had unmistakably begun to build, Heilemann wrote a profile of John Doerr, the greatest of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists, for the New Yorker. It was one of the first formal introductions of Doerr and of the Valley financial phenomenon (“the greatest legal creation of wealth in history,” in Doerr’s famous, and regrettable, phrase) to the East Coast audience. On the basis of the Doerr profile, Heilemann had gotten his million-dollar advance to write the story of Silicon Valley. Heilemann promptly moved to San Francisco and almost immediately became a prince of the Valley himself, a celebrity second only to the highest levels of Valley celebrities themselves—indeed, he courted and was in turn courted by those same celebrities, famously, ostentatiously, consorting with Doerr and cohorts up and down the Valley.
Once, during the boom, at a party in San Francisco—and during this time everything was a party in San Francisco—Heilemann was telling a small group of people, confidentially, that he had just met with Jim Clarke, the co-founder of Netscape, who had confided something startling to him. Should he take Clarke seriously? Heilemann was wondering aloud. I, who had already failed as an Internet entrepreneur, said obviously not. Heilemann, from his great height, said, with what I remember as quite impressive scorn, that he was certainly inclined to give a man who had founded two billion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt.
I’d been reduced to a sour-grapes sort, and Heilemann elevated to part of the new, muscular, elite corps of technology intellects—and for several years we didn’t like each other very much.
But then the boom ended (without Heilemann having finished his book—indeed, Heilemann’s lack of writing had become legendary too) and since then there had been no reason for us not to get along. It was possible that some of the same kind of credit that Heilemann awarded Clarke for founding two billion-dollar companies now accrued to me for getting out (even if by failure) of the technology business before the bust.
If Heilemann was too large and imposing to be a mere journalist, his cohort Battelle—Heilemann and Battelle were often billed as a Stan and Ollie or Lewis and Martin combo in Silicon Valley—was too handsome. He was distracted, it sometimes seemed, in the particular way of a too-handsome person—concentrating on people looking at him, rather than concentrating on other people.
Partly because of his distraction, and his failure to ever make eye contact, I had no real insight into whether he was secretly thoughtful or genuinely obtuse. His pure momentum, the imperviousness of the way he moved ever forward, might mean there was another dimension here—or not.
If there was anyone who had been close to achieving a version of professional perfection, even in an era when so many people had been close to achieving that, it was Battelle.
He had lost his no-hitter on the last at-bat.
He’d come out of journalism school at Berkeley in the early nineties to become the number two on the launch of Wired magazine. After a period of wild success, when Wired was thought to be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars and Battelle himself worth various millions, he had then started the Industry Standard, a business magazine about the Internet, promoting himself from mere editorial type to CEO and publisher. I cannot recall anyone initially thinking the magazine had any promise. (I briefly wrote a column for the magazine, while at the same time thinking it had no promise—and figuring that, as soon as I could, I had better find something else.) But the Standard promptly became the most successful magazine of all time in the quickest amount of time, before it, too, crashed—with Battelle being arguably responsible for both its great success and inevitable failure.
Heilemann and Battelle were badly beaten up—but standing. Their wounds contributed to a certain dashingness (a lasting stiffness in the leg, and hint of a limp).
At any rate, here they were, both of them fully aware that everyone else was aware of their hubris and fall, formally calling on me, someone they had reason to believe might be taking some pleasure in their circumstances.
Heilemann began the specific business presentation.
Heilemann is an inarticulate monologist. He can’t stop talking, can’t find a clear way to an end point. He is always restating. There’s a constant quest for synonyms, for adjectives, for new ways to emphasize. It’s a form of buildup, of preface, of drumroll:
He and Battelle were going to hold a conference.
They had together staged some of the most grandiose gatherings of the technology boom, and now… drums… they were back, planning the biggest, the best, the mother of all media conferences. The greatest meeting of media moguls and bigshots ever!
It was nearly Barnum-esque in the telling.
Now, I have been to so many conferences—as many as twelve a year for as much as fifteen years—and there have been so many more that I have managed to avoid going to (while conferences were built on the idea of exclusivity, their sheer numbers made it really hard to make the exclusivity argument anymore—although, of course, conference organizers did), that I was not, at that moment with Heilemann and Battelle, thinking the conference, this conference, might be the perfect setting for my weekend of media moguls.
Instead, I was thinking, Not another fucking conference.
Of course, I knew what was in it for Battelle and Heilemann.
The money could be very good. In the boom years, you could do four or five or six hundred people at a conference like this, for three or four or five thousand dollars a head, with your talent, your presenters, your headliners even, getting nothing whatsoever—which was, I knew, the deal they were going to cut with me (the economic principle was that participants benefited from the same association that everyone else benefited from, that a good conference supplied new and valuable connections to everyone who went). Indeed, if you got a conference going, got on people’s schedules, a once-or-twice-a-year sort of thing, you had a sure multimillion-dollar annuity.
What’s more, there was an opening in the market niche. For twelve years, the TED conference (technology, entertainment, design), held in Monterey, California, had been a vital date on the media-technology-communications complex calendar. It was the big one, regularly attracting nearly a thousand people, at $4,000 a head, with sponsors covering many of the underlying costs—and a staff, functionally, of one. Richard Saul Wurman, a Sydney Green-street figure, ran the conference and every year collected the $4 million or so; the educated guess was that his profit margin might have been as high as 75 or 80 percent. But now he had sold the conference—and whether or not the new owners could do it as well was far from clear. If you could take that place, you could build yourself a powerful base of operations in the media world.
This is where Battelle stepped in. He explained the money part.
It occurred to me that that’s what Battelle did now. That this was perhaps all that interested him: the deal. He knew, better than most—as well as any banker, or mogul—that you lived and died on the basis of the deal. The deal was the force.
The deal was this: Quadrangle, a New York—based investment fund specializing in the media industry, was backing the conference, to be called Foursquare, which would be a partnership among Heilemann and Battelle and Quadrangle. And while, ideally, this was to be a moneymaking enterprise, Quadrangle would absorb any deficit. (Of course, I knew that if Quadrangle was accepting the losses, it was a far from equal partnership, if it was a partnership at all.) What’s more, Quadrangle was contributing its influence to attract the desirable level of speakers and participants.
This made sense. If no one at all paid to attend, if everyone became an invited guest, this was still an acceptable marketing cost for Quadrangle. Everyone they’d ever want to do business with would be a captive audience for three days. The Quadrangle guys would be able to strut their stuff.
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