More Awesome Than Money (5 page)

If he were hired, the interviewer asked, how much would he want?

Dan wasn't sure.

“How about eight dollars an hour,” the interviewer suggested.

“No way,” Dan said.

“Well, what do you want?”

Dan did not have a figure in mind, but wondered if he could get away with asking for fifteen dollars. Maybe they would go for twelve dollars. He often thought before he spoke. Before he could get the number out of his mouth, the interviewer answered his own question.

“How about twenty dollars an hour?” the interviewer said.

“Sure,” Dan said.

Not for the first time, his taciturnity had paid off.

After he and Max took over the computer club, kids were in and out of the place at all hours.

One day, signs appeared around the computer science building:

THURSDAY NIGHTS
COME AND GEEK OUT!
BUILD A MAKERBOT
EAT PIZZA
BRING YOUR SLEEPING BAGS.

The MakerBot is a three-dimensional printer, a contraption of transformational possibilities. It is a machine that makes things. The 3-D printer works like an inkjet printer except that it squirts molten plastic, not ink. As layers of plastic are added, they can rise into almost any shape—bolts, tools, toys, knobs, bullets—based on digital designs sent to the printer from a computer. In short, it was a factory for the desktop. Already, industrial versions of 3-D printers were making exotic furniture for hotels and restaurants, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing, and architectural models; the television personality Jay Leno had one that created custom part models for his vintage automobile collection, keeping a 1907 steam-driven car on the road. The ready-made commercial 3-D printers cost from $25,000 to more than $1 million. All things considered, the notion that a bunch of college kids would be messing with a 3-D printer would have been beyond conception a few years before. But earlier in 2004, members of a hacker collective in Brooklyn had started selling MakerBot kits, the electronic guts and hardware of an assemble-it-yourself 3-D printer. The cost:
seven hundred dollars. After it was put together, users could download ready-made designs from the Thingiverse, a repository that anyone was allowed to use or contribute to. It was the perfect teething biscuit for the crowd in the ACM room, decided Evan Korth, the faculty adviser to the group.

Korth had spent a good part of his ten years as a faculty member hunting for new trails into the world for NYU's brilliant math and computer science students. The easy, obvious route led to Wall Street, which had an insatiable appetite for programming whizzes. But Korth wanted the students to see that not all paths led to the investment banks, where so many of them would end up twirling algorithms in the financial services rodeo. With Hilary Mason, a data scientist from Bit.ly and Chris Wiggins, a physics and math professor at Columbia University, Korth started a nonprofit called HackNY. Its unofficial slogan was “Save the kids from the Street”—meaning Wall Street. They staged hackathons, twenty-four-hour competitions for teams to hack together a software program that did something fun.

Korth did not begrudge his students the respectability of sweet-paying internships, but he wanted them to also see the possibilities in hacker spaces, the lofts and storefronts occupied by cooperatives of tinkerers. His students were the first generation for whom it was simply intuitive that power was exercised in 1s and 0s. They appreciated technology, but neither feared nor revered it. The most adventurous of them opened the backs of phones and appliances, heedless of the perils of voided warranties, to see what new, unplanned tricks the gadgets could be made to do.

Korth brought the ACM group to Brooklyn to visit NYC Resistor, a hacker space up four flights of steep wooden steps on the top floor of a nineteenth-century building that had once been the home of the Long Island Brewing Company.

“NYC Resistor is a force of chaos in the world,” said Bre Pettis, a member of the collective that started the hacker space. “Imagine kittens with jet packs—flying around in a room.”

It was there that the MakerBot had been conceived by Pettis and a group of hackers who thought that 3-D printing was exciting and that nothing about the technology warranted a price tag of tens of thousands
of dollars. (
In 2013, MakerBot, with backing from the venture capital arm of Jeff Bezos, was sold to an industrial maker of 3-D printers for $403 million.) They had started their business creating build-it-yourself kits and selling them for less than one thousand dollars apiece; with a few extra dollars in the budget, Korth bought the forty-sixth one produced. He invited the two officers, Max and Dan, to figure out something to do with it.

The Association for Computer Machinery began in 1947, after modern computing began to grow from concepts developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann before and during World War II.

The work of Turing and von Neumann “broke the distinction between numbers that
mean
things and numbers that do things,” the historian George Dyson wrote. “Our universe would never be the same.”

Almost seven decades later, college students could try to build their own desktop factory. Max posted the signs inviting people to geek out and build the MakerBot.

—

The early versions of the MakerBot kit required lots of assembling of hardware parts. Ilya showed up the first night with his own soldering kit, which was supplemented with an electric hot plate for baking parts. To make sure that no one would mistake this cooking appliance for something to actually cook on, one of the students wrote a felt-tipped warning on the lid: “No Food! Lead Only!” A cheery-looking skull and crossbones emphasized the point.

The building sessions went on for weeks, late into the night. Korth, who lived not far from the school, usually stopped by with snacks to fortify them. One time he brought a date along. Afterward, the woman asked: “Who was the kid in the neon blue pants? He was hitting on me like crazy.” That was Ilya, Korth realized, laughing at the audacity.

As the semester was coming to a close, they had not quite finished assembling the bot. Max was determined to see the project through, and the group agreed to gather for a final push on the last Saturday of the term. They hooked up a camera to document progress on the contraption, and streamed video live to the World Wide Web. The revolution was being televised. Korth, at a party, spent most of the time in the host's bedroom watching the video feed on his computer.

After going at it hard for an hour or two, Ilya's stomach was growling. There had been no pizza that night. His voice rose from the box.

“Can we get some food?” he asked.

Max broke the news. “We have some crackers,” he said. “Let's finish the food we have. We're running out of money.”

Korth left the party and headed for an all-night deli to pick up ice cream for them. Dan noticed that the official MakerBot site was tweeting updates on their progress to Twitter, and also sharing a link to the live stream. “Over two thousand people are following MakerBot, so they're going to see what we're doing!” he shouted.

From his perch inside the box, Ilya gave a small sigh of satisfaction as he got a tricky piece connected. “There is something to be said for having the right tools,” he declared.

“And that thing,” Rafi said, “is ‘awesome.'”

Ilya dug into the ice cream. Rafi pushed a button on his laptop, which loaded the design instructions and sent them to the printer. The first layer of plastic was squirted precisely into place. It would take an hour or so, but eventually their first creation would take shape: a plastic shot glass, the traditional product to mark the inaugural of a new MakerBot.

The shot glass came off the printer near four
A.M.
A credible result, if a bit lopsided. They poured Maker's Mark. Dan and Max, Ilya and Rafi, were elated. College students are known to like a drink, but not for making their own shot glasses, much less building a machine to custom-manufacture them.

It was worth toasting, and they did. By the start of the second term, they were looking for something new to do together. The long nights with the MakerBot had baked the four guys together. So when Korth told them that the Internet Society was sponsoring a talk by Eben Moglen on a Friday night in February, they had been ready to hear him say that the world needed fixing and that they could start with social networking. There was indeed something to be said for having the right tools.

D
an was in agony after Moglen's talk. He had not gone to it, as he was backed up with homework, due to graduate in May, and feeling some parental pressure to find a job. So he stayed in his apartment in the East Village. But the other dudes were there, and he wanted to at least be conversant. So he had surfed to the webcast of the speech, and he set it as his aural wallpaper, half listening, then three-quarters, and then stopped everything else.

It was a few nights after the talk that Dan started peeling back the settings on his Facebook account, curious to see if he could find a way to regulate his privacy.

He could not. When Dan saw the guys in the ACM room, he told them that he had quit Facebook, and was going through withdrawal. They really had to build a better social network. In bull sessions there and elsewhere, Max and Ilya, Dan and Rafi, and a few other friends talked about Moglen's assertion that Facebook was just a collection of PHP doodads, with spying thrown in for free.

The running updates from friends? “There's nothing unique about activity streams,” Rafi said.

Pictures?

“We've been putting pictures on the web since 2000,” Ilya said.

If nothing about Facebook was technically exotic, the elements were all pulled together so crisply that hundreds of millions of people had
joined, drawn by a package of cumulatively attractive parts available nowhere else. From its birth in a Harvard dormitory, it had achieved a generational and social ubiquity. It also served as a platform for commercial causes and, occasionally, political ones, providing that local officials did not lean on Facebook to pull pages that gave offense: freeish speech. And access to it was free, as long as the users consented, passively, to a wholesale, virtually uncontrollable surrender of their privacy.

In truth, the social networks were no worse than other web functions, like news, shopping, gossip, pornography, sports, entertainment. Each of them collected shocking amounts of data from users who did not realize little trackers were recording the pages they looked at. Facebook was just the most familiar example of the profoundly uneven bargain that was the hidden secret of the evolving web.

Indeed, by the spring of 2010, it was finally dawning on Facebook's users, as the columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote in the
Los Angeles Times,
that they “are not the sites' customers; they're the merchandise. The real customers are the advertisers and the aggregators who suck up the data on the users and use it to target commercial come-ons more effectively.”

The NYU guys did not see why that had to be the only deal possible. Their ideal network would be decentralized from the beginning. Moglen had spoken about tiny servers that were starting to come on the market, devices no larger than a cell phone that would be able to securely handle a person's e-mail accounts, web browsing, and social networking. A stack of free software would make the thing run. Plugged into a socket at home, or running at very low power on a battery, they would liberate individuals from giant central servers. Moglen had called it the freedom box. Maybe, the four NYU guys mused, their contribution would be a social network with people controlling their own data on their own individual servers. They could build the scaffolding for the distributed network. Sure, it might be a while before everyone would be living with a twenty-nine-dollar gadget plugged in behind the sofa, but in the meantime, people could use servers of trusted institutions—their schools, for instance, or jobs—to host the new social site. And leave Facebook out of it.

With the exception of Ilya, they all, in one way or another, had grown up with Facebook. Rafi used it to stay in touch with friends he made during summers. Max was on it all the time. Dan, too, until he bailed.

Ilya had never bothered to sign up. For him, abstaining from Facebook was both a political statement and a matter of personal aesthetics. Having instant access to a person's profile short-circuited the evolution of an acquaintance to a friend, he thought, an unnecessary sacrifice of the mystery and pleasure of getting to know someone.

All of them were instinctively antagonistic to, or at least suspicious of, large systems that hoarded and peddled personal information without so much as asking.

Maybe they could build something better. They had, after all, just built their own printer.

—

Late one night a few weeks after the lecture, Ilya called Max. This was a hard, interesting problem, deliciously so, and it took up every minute between job searches and schoolwork. It had a high purpose: they would join the ranks of people who had built free software, the backbone of the open Internet. They were a good foursome. Rafi and Ilya were into encryption. Dan had a design eye. Max knew how to write code and was unafraid of drudgery.

Max and Ilya lamented their halting progress.

“College kids always talk about doing stuff, but nobody does anything,” Max said.

“Wouldn't it be cool,” Ilya said, “if we could just work on it and nothing else for the summer?”

“Let's just do it,” Max said. “My parents have a place in Tahoe. Maybe my mom will let us stay over there.”

“Really?” Ilya was standing in the hallway of his apartment building, near the garbage cans, his voice rising as it often did when he got excited.

“We could just go there and live on ramen, and just code all summer,” Max said.

“That would be awesome!” Ilya practically shouted.

Suddenly, another student yelled into the hallway.

“Dude! Can you shut the fuck up? I have a test tomorrow.”

Ilya dropped the decibel level. But he and Max, then Dan and Rafi, had a fever.

Logistics were not terribly interesting to them, but, as it happened, Max had read that the cost of starting new technology companies was
becoming dead cheap. Virtually all the essential software was now open source and free. Computers got cheaper and more powerful every few months. In fact, for the mature technology companies, often lumbering masses no longer recognizable from their sprightly beginnings, it was less expensive and simpler just to buy promising start-ups than to create new products themselves or spend a fortune recruiting someone.

Max had read essays by an entrepreneur named Paul Graham, who created a program that allowed users to build their own Internet stores. Yahoo! bought it for stock worth nearly $50 million.

Graham argued that the old paradigms of venture capital had shifted. Entrepreneurs did not need to go to business school as long as they knew computer science; learning to program was the hard part. Max was persuaded. By sophomore year, he decided to double major, adding computer science to his communications studies. The world Graham described sounded infinitely more attractive than the ossified music company he'd worked at. In fact, Max was supposed to be writing part of his senior thesis about Graham.

If young people had good ideas, Graham had written, they could take them directly to the public, without risking slow suffocation inside giant companies.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And more to the point, “nobody knows you're 22,” Graham had written. “All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid.”

Moreover, a common condition of twenty-two-year-olds—being broke—no longer mattered, given that the cost of starting a tech company had almost vanished. “It's so low that it has disappeared into the noise,” Graham wrote. “The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn't cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker. You can probably start a startup on ten thousand dollars of seed funding, if you're prepared to live on ramen.”

If you could start an actual company for no more than it cost to hang around in your mom's basement playing video games, how much would they really need for a summer project? They could survive on boiled water and noodles in a cup.

Once again, they were staying late in the ACM room, writing lines of
code. One night, Ilya arrived with a razor and a comb; he would work late, then hit the couch for a few hours before rising for a rudimentary wash before heading off to class. Rafi was horrified. As the work rolled on, he had a choice between dropping out of classes or dropping his social life. He stayed with the project.

—

Walking along Fourteenth Street, Max glanced at the papers on a newsstand. A word from a headline stuck in his head. He carried it back to the ACM room, and proposed it as the name of their project.

“Diaspora,” Max announced.

“What does it mean?” Dan asked.

“I never heard of it,” Ilya said.

Rafi knew it well. Beginning with the exile of the Jews from Babylon, the word had been used to describe a community that had been widely dispersed. To Max, it reflected the scale of their ambitions. It wasn't just about Facebook. It was like restoring the world.

Dan was indifferent about the proposed name. It might not have been a word everyone would recognize, he thought, but at least they could call the project something other than “That thing that we're trying to build.”

Ilya looked up the word, saw that it originated from the Greek for scattering of seeds.

“It's perfect,” he said.

They coded through the night: headphones on, each one absorbed in building the ladder of logic needed for a function to work.

—

By the end of the month, they faced the first adult test of their scheme. They had to get money for it—not for that very moment, while they were still in school, but for three months down the road. As it happened, Paul Graham, the subject of Max's unwritten thesis, ran a program for start-ups called Y Combinator. Graham had created a seed fund that would offer up to twenty thousand dollars and three months of advice. Twice a year, Y Combinator accepted applications. Not only were business plans not required, Graham pointedly said that they would not be read. Once they were accepted into a class, the new ventures were required to move, at least temporarily, to Silicon Valley. For three months, they would have regular skull sessions with the Y Combinator partners. They also had to
meet once a week with big names in the tech world at off-the-record dinners. (Its name was wordplay familiar to those who had wandered deep in the arithmetical forest: the Y combinator is a mathematical function that generates other functions, and Y Combinator was a company that generated other companies.)

The next cycle of the Y Combinator camp would run from June through August, and the application was due at the beginning of March. The Diaspora guys gathered on the final Sunday in February to work on it.

Name. Company name. Phone number. Link to a one-minute video introducing the founders.

They did have a company name, although they were hardly a company. They were four nerds. Or, when their self-esteem was cresting, four dudes.

Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (noncomputer) system to your advantage. Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this start-up that each founder has built or achieved. How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?

The application form was a blizzard of provocative questions, twenty-seven blank spaces to fill in, most of them requiring responses to three or four deep queries. As a whole, the inquiries were perfectly reasonable, considering that they were designed to figure out if it was a good idea to hand over twenty thousand dollars to complete strangers with little to no history of running a business.

How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If you're launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)? If you're not incorporated yet, please list the percent of the company you plan to give each founder, and anyone else you plan to give stock to. (This question is as much for you as for us.)

“Man, all these questions,” Max said. “We're four smart kids.”

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

There were easily another fifty questions along those lines. Within a few minutes of looking over the application, they bagged it. June was still three months off. Something might come up. In the meantime, they would continue writing code. Unlike the application, it was too interesting a problem to let go of.

—

In February 1997, a piece of dismal news reached the online message board of the Freaks, the fans of a British and Irish progressive rock band known as Marillion. Their record label had gone broke. The keyboard player, Mark Ryan, wrote that the band would not be touring North America with their new release.

In Bedford, Massachusetts, this seemed outlandish to Jeff Pelletier, a fan of Marillion. They might not have been the Rolling Stones, but plenty of people were devoted to the group; the bulletin board hummed with news and conversation about it. So Pelletier put the idea to the online Freaks: why don't we raise the money so they can tour? The band members were dubious, and said it would take thirty thousand dollars to cover their touring costs. Even so, they assigned a friend to oversee whatever money did arrive so that the well-meant efforts of Pelletier did not turn into a fiasco.

In short order, small contributions began to roll in, from all around the world. “People were giving money just to see this happen, because it was such an amazing thing,” Pelletier later told the
Chicago Tribune
. All told, the Freaks raised about fifty thousand dollars. Marillion toured triumphantly, rewarding their backers with autographed DVDs. The market, or the street, got to vote.

Five years later, Perry Chan, who had worked as a day trader and a nursery school teacher, tried to put on a concert during the New Orleans Jazz Festival, but could not risk twenty thousand dollars of his own money. There had to be a way to round up people online who supported good music. He moved back home to New York and found a job in a Brooklyn diner. Wouldn't it be good, he would occasionally muse out loud, if there were a way to use the web for lots of people to provide small-scale backing for creative projects? One of his regulars, Yancey Strickler, a music critic, thought it was a fine idea.