Word: brilliants
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...there is one lesson Larry Brilliant likes to distill from his life, it is this: Never settle for one career when nine will do. Starting out in the 1960s as a hippy kid from Detroit with a medical degree and a vague desire to change the world, Brilliant drifted into a surreal series of roles: physician to the Grateful Dead, co-star of a movie called Medicine Ball Caravan, seeker of enlightenment in India. The turning point came when, on his guru's advice, Brilliant joined the World Health Organization's effort to stamp out smallpox. "For a doctor, eradicating...
...Brilliant has been scaling peaks ever since, not in medicine but in technology. Understanding the body, he discovered, helped him understand computers--the science of physiology translated into that of networks. In 1985 he founded one of the world's first commercial Internet ventures, an online community called the Well. Membership cost all of $2 a month, and the Well was a huge hit, a precursor of every online business from Amazon.com to eBay. Brilliant had established a reputation for seeing the future before anyone else and being able to make money...
...Brilliant is engaged in his most audacious climb yet. The business plan he wrote for Cometa Networks--a joint venture of AT&T, IBM, Intel and others--is every bit as obstacle filled as trying to cure smallpox or getting people to pay to talk to others via computer. Cometa's goal is to take a technology that is exploding in every major city in the U.S., Europe and the Pacific Rim--grass-roots wireless Internet service that is as accessible as any radio signal, and often as free--and figure out a way to make...
Enter Larry Brilliant, who had been doing a little consulting for Intel. Brilliant knew the benefits and pitfalls of Wi-Fi, and he was accustomed to working with start-ups. (In the years since the Well, Brilliant had created 14 networks including his own failed Wi-Fi company, AirZone.) The pace of the discussion frustrated him. "It was harder to negotiate a treaty between these three elephants than between India and Pakistan," he says. Brilliant should know. He once brokered a subcontinental smallpox treaty in six weeks. Talks among Project Rainbow's founders over the nondisclosure agreement alone dragged...
...company, today called Cometa after the Italian word for comet, was unlikely to get funding without a CEO. So Brilliant agreed to fill the role for as long as it took him to draft a business plan and find a suitable replacement. His chosen successor was Gary Weis, 55, an engineer and M.B.A. who had worked at AT&T and IBM. Weis wanted the job, but it took more elephant wrangling--six months of negotiation--to secure his services...