A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder

Author:Tracy Kidder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-19T22:00:00+00:00

karl: Uh oh. I know this was supposed to be reassuring, but it has the opposite effect on me! Does this mean the end is in sight?

pme: No, not in sight.

karl: I hope you’ll take me with you, if possible. :-)

pme: I certainly will, whenever that is…

Whenever came two months later.

pme: Call me at work today or at home tonight. I need to speak with you.

7

Around 1994, Paul and Bill O’Donnell came up with an idea for a utility that would let Interleaf customers create their own webpages. Billo designed and wrote the software. It won a prize, but when he and Paul presented it to Interleaf’s sales force, they were all but laughed out of the room. One of the salesmen said, “Boeing’s not going to use the Web. People have pictures of their cats on the Web.”

The sales force wasn’t wrong. Only eight million Americans were connected to the Internet at the time, and most of them used it just for email. And the Web was all but brand-new, its content very thin. But the technology represented a vast improvement in the distribution of electronic documents and thus, potentially, a great enhancement of the Internet. Paul saw unbounded promise in it and in the growing host of new online technologies. So he was disposed to listen when, in 1995, the founder of a local Internet-related start-up began recruiting him.

This was the fledgling company NetCentric. The founder pitched it as a twenty-first-century phone company, its first product facilities for faxing over the Internet. Businesses and law firms all relied on faxing for the rapid exchange of documents, but they were obliged to use telephone lines, and the rates, especially for long-distance transmission, were still high. In principle, NetCentric could offer them a much better deal, because faxes could travel over the Internet for free. Two reputable venture capital firms in Boston had already bet five million on the new company. Paul was offered the job of running engineering, in return for a substantial share of the company’s stock.

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