Silicon Valley Gets Potomac Fever

John Doerr had delivered his slide show dozens, maybe hundreds of times, explaining his theories of how the Information Revolution was transforming business, creating a new economy built on flexibility, decentralization, customization, and innovation. But he had never faced an audience quite like this.

Arrayed down a long and elegantly set table in a penthouse suite of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles were some of the most prominent names in high tech: Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Kim Polese of Marimba, Jerry Yang of Yahoo, Scott Cook of Intuit, Halsey Minor of CNET, and half a dozen more digital celebrities. All were familiar faces to Doerr; as a principal of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's elite venture capital partnerships, he had been present at the creation of many of their companies.

But it was the man at the center of the table, sipping a glass of wine, who made the evening so unusual. Vice President Al Gore looked a little tired, but he listened attentively as Doerr unleashed his barrage of numbers and ideas, his ode to the personal computer and the Net.

For nearly two-and-a-half hours the group dined on steak and salmon and traded insights on how digital

Technology was driving change. The conversation was relentlessly high-minded -- like a "graduate seminar on the new economy," one participant later said. It never stooped to such grubby particulars as campaigns, fund-raising, or legislation.

Yet a few weeks later the session yielded a tangible political benefit for the Clinton administration when, at Gore's request, Doerr brought 200 high-tech executives to a White House ceremony to endorse the president's call for national educational standards. And three years from now it's likely to produce even richer rewards for Gore, as he launches his own campaign to move into the Oval Office.

The budding alliance between Gore and Doerr and his colleagues marks a milestone in the emergence of a new kind of political machine -- or more aptly, a new political Net. After reshaping the face of the computer industry over the past 15 years, Doerr now aims to launch an assault on politics with the same intensity -- and the same logic -- he's applied to business. Together with a coalition of high-tech leaders, he has founded a new organization called the Technology Network. Its mission: to apply the principles of flexibility, decentralization, and innovation now remaking the business world to education, government, and almost any of the nation's pressing social problems. Its business model: assemble a broad-gauge network of Web-savvy business leaders from all parts of the political spectrum who share a general dissatisfaction with the current entrenched approach to governmental problem solving. Its strategy: turn information technology loose, first to open up and then to rewire the system.

"We are creating something that's a new political form," Doerr says. "It's not a PAC. It's not a trade association. It doesn't represent a particular industry group. There's already plenty of those around. What it will be is a network of individuals and enterprises who are concerned about education and making the new economy go.''

Gore's solicitude -- the vice president has met with the group virtually every month this year -- testifies to Washington's belief that this alliance could become a significant source of endorsements, ideas, and money by the year 2000. In political circles, business -- especially high-tech business -- is now as hot as Hollywood has always been. And Doerr's group is not just wealthy and well-connected. Its thinking about work, change, and organization is in the sweet spot of the moment: it seems to have an answer to where technology is taking society.

In practice, however, politics is a demanding sport that is rarely hospitable to amateurs -- however successful they are in their own pursuits. To build the kind of sustained influence that Doerr envisions, the Technology Network will first have to reduce its intriguing insights into a tangible agenda and then advance those ideas with a level of perseverance, pragmatism, and unity of purpose that even some of its own participants aren't sure it can muster. And like most startups, this high-tech political hybrid already has its share of skeptics and naysayers, party regulars on both sides who are lining up to capsize Doerr's boat before the vessel can even get launched.