Silicon Valley Gets Potomac Fever

The Politics of the Valley

The entrepreneurs and technology executives joining this alliance, many of them young, many in small, rapidly growing companies, enter the arena with a few clear beliefs. They are united in their conviction that the microchip and the Net are fundamentally changing first the economy and then society -- and will continue to change them at an accelerating rate into the next century. "Those of us who are at ground zero are watching profound changes and saying, This is what it must have felt like to be in the Industrial Revolution in London," says Steve Westly, senior vice president for business and market development at Who Where, a Mountain View, California company that provides online collaboration and connections. "The only difference is this is happening over the course of a few years, rather than a few decades."

They are also united by weariness with traditional political formulas. Though the group contains both Republicans and Democrats, the majority isn't at home in either party. In classic swing-voter fashion, they find Republicans too rigid on social issues, Democrats too loose on fiscal ones. At the same time they reject the reflexive conservative argument -- which finds plenty of adherents in Silicon Valley's cyber-libertarian community -- that the key to strengthening society is merely reducing government.

"Like a lot of people in this group, I'm not a Republican or a Democrat," says Halsey Minor, founder of CNET, a producer of online and television programming about high technology. "I'm too much of an economic libertarian to be a Democrat and too much of a social liberal to be a Republican."

Kim Polese, the exuberantly optimistic founder of Marimba, started on Minor's left but has migrated into almost exactly the same position. "I like the Democrats' open mind and the focus on moving forward and bringing people together, but I don't like the fat,'' she says. "I like the Republicans' focus on execution and individual responsibility, but I don't like the rigidity. So the centrist view makes the most sense to me -- the best of both worlds."

This Network, which was formally announced at a July 8 press conference, connects most profoundly around the belief that the technology-driven reinvention of business provides a compelling model for social reform. Its catechism runs like this: most major public institutions -- the schools, the government -- still employ the command-and-control hierarchy of the Industrial Age. But the Information Age is overthrowing the old pyramid approach and writing a new set of rules for success. Now the challenge is to apply those new, more flexible principles of economic success to public institutions. "The model for the new economy is a networked model, not command and control," says Doerr. "It's lots of cooperating independent entities that are really responsive to local needs."

The Network's initial priorities reflect the two issues that together sparked its creation. The first item is an outgrowth of the campaign that Doerr spearheaded against California's Proposition 211, a ballot measure that would have made it easier for shareholders to sue companies for fraud and hold their directors personally responsible. At the top of the Network's agenda is passing national legislation to preempt state rules on such shareholder lawsuits -- making further state-level campaigns unnecessary.

The second item is an outgrowth of NetDay96, an effort organized by Sun Microsystems's John Gage to mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers to link every K-12 school in California with the Net. The Network's approach to education begins with the belief that a better educated workforce is the key to both social cohesion and economic prosperity. "There's a tremendous shortage of skilled people," says Netscape's Marc Andreessen, "and the shortage is a barrier to growth." But generations of reformers have broken their picks trying to improve the schools. What makes this group different?

The answer is less a set of specific policies than a general angle of vision. Doerr and his team would like to see more authority devolved from school boards to principals and teachers; they favor overturning state-level legal barriers that make it difficult for voters to increase education funding by raising property taxes. At the same time,

Doerr wants phone companies to provide cell-phones for teachers and voice mailboxes for parents. As an overarching approach, the group supports Clinton's proposal for national math and reading tests for fourth and eighth graders -- not necessarily to reward or punish, but to provide a common performance benchmark. "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," says Andreessen, "and if you can't manage it, you can't improve it."