Starwave Takes the Web ... (Seriously)

Challenge Number Two

Can your technology keep pace -- or even better, set the pace?

If Mike Slade is an egoless leader, Patrick Naughton, Starwave's senior vice president of technology, is an angry young man. Eight years ago, when he joined Sun Microsystems as a brash young programmer, he took great pride in his status as an outsider. But now he's 31 and widely accorded the status that goes with being one of the most gifted programmers in the world. So he bristles at being left outside -- and today, he's bristling at three old friends from Sun.

In their presentations at a recent conference on Java -- the wildly popular programming language for the Web that Naughton had a big role in inventing -- Sun's CEO (and Naughton's longtime hockey teammate) Scott McNealy, cofounder and Vice President for Research Bill Joy, and Chief Scientist of JavaSoft James Gosling (another friend) managed never to mention Naughton's name. To Naughton it's a slight with epic meaning, a conscious effort to rewrite the history of Java now that Naughton has left Sun. "It's like 1984," he says, "and I've gone down the memory hole."

Naughton has a genuine claim as a founding father of Java. In 1990, a 25-year-old Naughton told McNealy he was quitting Sun to join Steve Jobs at NeXT. Sun was hopeless when it came to software and user interfaces, he complained, and he wanted to go to a company that knew what it was doing. McNealy asked Naughton to write a memo outlining his indictment. The CEO forwarded the email up and down the management chain; the electronic conversations it sparked created the research project that became Java.

Naughton left Sun in the fall of 1994, but he has far from disappeared. Indeed, his decision to join Starwave is generally considered one of the company's biggest coups. His programming skills give the company a major weapon in an uncertain competition where technology both defines the medium and continually reinvents it. Naughton and his engineers are scrambling to figure out ways to create distinctive Web experiences. Why would someone of Naughton's reputation join a startup to design clever screen presentations of NBA box scores?

"Well," he says with typical intensity, "one answer is that you don't get to do a Java -- that is, to revolutionize the way a million programmers work -- more than a couple of times in your life. We created Java precisely because we felt that Sun had lost track of its customers. We wanted to build software that would allow consumers to have a satisfying experience again. That's always been my goal. I try to bring all my experiences to bear to make my work invisible, to create a Starwave experience for consumers that's so positive that they come away saying, 'That's really cool.'"

One of those "experiences" is Starwave TV, and it's already in prototype. Imagine that you could watch the NBA finals on your computer, see footage of, say, Dennis Rodman going up for a rebound, touch the cursor to his moving figure -- and instantly call up his entire career statistics. "Just think of Bloomberg TV and make it SportsZone on the PC," says Naughton.

The prospect of reinventing the technological experience of the Net is enough of a challenge to keep Patrick Naughton at Starwave -- at least for now. "For the next two years," he says, "technology is going to be vitally important here. Desire is still ahead of development. People want stuff we haven't written software for." Then he adds, with typical self-assurance, "But we're already finishing the architectures, so I can tell you that the Web of 1997 will look radically different than it does now."

Challenge Number Three

Can you assemble a team of unparalleled editorial talents -- who are willing to obsolete their proven skills in pursuit of an unproven new business?

If Mike Slade is the heart of Starwave, then Senior Vice President Tom Phillips is its soul.

Tall and angular, with a frame that practically vibrates with nervous tension, topped by a thick shock of black hair, Phillips hardly looks the part. And, at age 41, he already holds the distinction of being one of the oldest people at Starwave. But alone among the people at the company, perhaps in the whole world of the commercial Web, Phillips knows what it means to ride the zeitgeist, to feel both the exhilaration and the decompression of the ride. As a founder of Spy magazine -- one of the defining publications of the 1980s -- he has seen what it's like to be in the hottest enterprise in your medium, what it takes to hold such an emotional business together, and what it feels like when the air goes out of the balloon.

He also knows what building a creative, on-the-pulse-of-the-times company is ultimately all about: finding and recruiting those few people with the rare combination of great talent in their current career and a willingness to throw away that success to take a flier on something totally new, dangerously unproven -- and potentially spectacular.