(This is chapter eleven of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

The big idea behind Pathfinder.com was to turn Time Warner's top magazine brands -- Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Life, Money, Entertainment Weekly, the always incongruous Vibe -- into the best and most professional website in the world. As such, it would dominate the Internet the same way Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin's earlier venture Home Box Office had come to dominate cable TV. The Pathfinder plan was an aggressive one, with a lot of money and corporate muscle behind it, and many people expected it to succeed. That didn't mean many people wanted it to succeed -- in fact, several of my web developer friends hated the idea of Pathfinder so much they reacted with horror when I joined the team in June 1995.

I just wanted an exciting place to work. I also loved working in the famous Time-Life Building at 1271 Avenue of the Americas, even though I only went to 1271 for editorial or business meetings, and was otherwise stationed in the basement of the Exxon Building at 1251 with the rest of the tech team.

They put us in the basement for a reason: we techies didn't always fit well into the corporate culture at Time Inc., a company so staid and respectable that the 1956 study of upper-middle-class workplace conformity The Organization Man was written by a Time Inc. employee (William Whyte, a writer at Fortune). I was one of the older and more experienced techies on the Time Inc. New Media team, along with Dan Woods, who'd previously worked at a newspaper and bore the high energy level and gregarious personality that characterizes many newspaper people. Dan's job was to work with the editorial team and build web applications. I was responsible for the advertising systems, and I hired a database administrator with Wall Street experience named Mike Stoeckel to manage the Sybase servers. Mike Coble, who had recently graduated from Columbia University while building their first website, was responsible for traffic analysis and reporting. We got a new manager named Vicki Zilaitis who'd been a director at a pharmaceutical firm, and we hired a mysterious ex-hacker named Dave had once been a contributor to 2600 Magazine.

We were the "grownups" in the tech team, but we were outnumbered by the kids. Many of the younger techies had been hired right out of college, and they were brilliant and cheerful and creative but lacked much sense of how to navigate inside a major corporation. There were occasional behavioral problems, as when we hired a tall bearded hippie named Jack who'd been working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. I interviewed him along with Oliver, Shad and Jorgen, and we all agreed that he knew his C++ and Unix cold, though his personality seemed hard to read. Working late one night, Jack upset a younger member of the programming team named Amanda by getting frustrated and yelling out "blowjob" over and over for several hours. Vicki had to take him into a room and explain that he was fired, because Time Inc. doesn't expect its employees to yell out "blowjob" when they get frustrated (and if the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has different rules, that's up to them).

Delegations from various parts of Time Warner would occasionally tour our basement cages and gape at us while we worked. Magazine people appeared to be particularly frightened of and fascinated by techies, and when we saw them watching we would perform tricks like eating Twinkies while typing. There was a big culture gap between the tech department and the editorial team at Time Inc. New Media.

They had problems of their own on the editorial side, where an eager young editor-in-chief named Jim Kinsella was trying his best to get anybody to pay attention to his decisions. But Jim Kinsella didn't really run the show. Walter Isaacson, a noted writer and intellectual, was the lofty captain of Time Inc. New Media. Gentle-voiced and dignified, he seemed to rise above the day-to-day details of running our site, and so did his deputy, a tall and gangly man named Paul Sagan, who physically resembled his astronomer cousin Carl.

Walter Isaacson and Paul Sagan were the top managers, but they didn't seem to be calling the shots at Pathfinder, and neither were tech boss Oliver Knowlton, editor Jim Kinsella or ad sales director Linda McCutcheon. The person who had the most influence on the early direction of Pathfinder was a marketing maven named Bruce Judson (who would go on to write books and is still active in the Internet marketing field). Of all the senior managers running Time Inc. New Media, Bruce Judson was the only one who ever showed intensity and passion about what we were doing. Bruce was a marketing "quant", a by-the-numbers guy with a successful track record but little understanding of magazine publishing and, unfortunately, no creative vision at all.

As the advertising tech manager, I worked often with Bruce. He was a kind, patient man whose talent, like that of every marketing analyst, was to watch audiences and respond to their responses. If yellow text on black scores higher than red text on white, then you go with yellow text on black. Time's magazine business seemed to thrive on analytical quants like Bruce Judson, but marketing analysts need to be balanced by creative thinkers, and that's where Pathfinder fell short.

Our traffic numbers were okay, but our web presence felt commercial and sterile. We had good raw material from the magazines to work with, but instead of trying to capture Time's sophistication, People's cheekiness and Sports Illustrated's grand scope in an exciting frame, we buried it all in a design that was intentionally bland. Clever art directors could be found all over the Time-Life Building, but Pathfinder's design seemed to aim for a suburban shopping-mall visual aesthetic. Brilliant journalists and columnists worked at our magazines, but our news reports emerged with the mechanical and official reportorial voice of a wire service ticker -- that is, with no voice at all. We were frequently cited as the worst of the major websites by Internet commentators and critics, and we became the laughing stock of the industry on October 3, 1995, the day of the O. J. Simpson verdict.

Most of the tech team had gathered around the TV in our kitchen at 10 am to watch the conclusion of this long trial. We were heatedly discussing the surprising "not guilty" verdict when an editor from across the street rushed into our kitchen. "They just put up a 'Guilty' front page" she said.

"Huh?"

"Pathfinder says it right on the front page: O. J. GUILTY".

The story was everywhere the next day. Someone on the production team -- I know who did it, but I won't say the name -- wanted to be the first to report the story online, so he rigged everything up for a one-button push. He then scrambled to change the image when the verdict came in "not guilty", but got confused and published the wrong one. Pathfinder's mistake made the front page of a much cooler website called Suck.com the next day.



This got a lot of play, but mistakes really weren't our biggest problem. Mediocrity was, and we soon realized that we'd become a laughing stock even within Time Warner. Jerry Levin's second-in-command Don Logan was quoted in the New York Times in November as saying that Pathfinder had "given new meaning to me of the scientific term 'black hole'". This remark got gigantic coverage all over the industry, and must have seemed hilarious everywhere but inside Time Inc. New Media, where it really hurt. A few of us truly hoped we could shake off our slow start and rise to the greatness that had once seemed our destiny. With Don Logan's remark, it was starting to become clear how bad our image problem was.

Late that year, we heard a rumor that Bill Gates would be visiting our office. Nobody would tell us why, including our bosses Oliver and Vicki, which probably meant they didn't know either.

We began to speculate: what if Time Warner decided to walk away from this mess by selling Pathfinder to Microsoft? We knew that Microsoft was scrambling to enter the Internet marketplace, but none of the Unix developers on the team relished the thought of switching to Microsoft's clunky closed-source software. Many web developers saw Bill Gates as a predatory presence on the web, and we all understood that it was only because the Internet was built on Unix that it worked so well. If Bill Gates and Microsoft had built the Internet, we knew, it would crash constantly and charge by the minute.

As the day of the mysterious visit approached, several of us began planning ways to decorate our cubicles and bodies with symbols that would be hostile to Microsoft: Sun posters, Linux manuals, Apple baseball caps, Java t-shirts. I offered to wear the black Hot Java t-shirt I'd picked up from a Sun salesman, and several other developers pledged to dress similarly. We'd show Bill Gates where our loyalties lay.

The day came, and I was the only one who followed through with the plan. I hate when this happens! I'm sure I have many flaws, but I am a person of action and resolve, and when I say I'll do something I'll do it. Disappointed that not a single one of my co-workers had shown up wearing Unix or Java or Linux or Apple paraphrenalia, I decided to go ahead with a little demonstration by myself.

The black and gray suited delegation finally arrived at our office, including Time Inc. CEO Norm Pearlstine (formerly of the Wall Street Journal, a soulless stuffed shirt as far as I could ever tell), Walter Isaacson, Paul Sagan and many editors from Time and Fortune magazine, all of them visibly excited to be hosting the wealthiest software developer of all time. They toured our cubicles but didn't swing down my own hallway, so I had to watch from a distance as the delegation ensconced itself in our glass-walled conference room for a private meeting.

We all gathered to whisper. "Did you see him?" "I saw him". John had been working on the server racks when the entire delegation walked into his refrigerated room, and so he had gotten to shake Bill Gates' hand. "Clammy," he said.

A stairway offered the best view inside the glass conference room, and I conjured up an excuse to walk up and down the stairs so I could see Bill Gates' face and make sure he saw my Java t-shirt. I walked up the stairs, scanned the room, walked down again, but could not spot Gates among the men in suits. Embarrassed at my obvious unsuccessful grandstanding, I waited ten minutes before trying again. This time I saw his unmistakable face, wearing an expression of polite concern as another person spoke. I caught his eye, puffed up my chest, made sure my big Java logo was highly visible, and walked on down the stairs. I like to believe that Bill Gates caught my intended insult. Hell, at least I tried.

Needless to say, Microsoft never bought Pathfinder, and a few days later a co-worked named Chris from Time magazine told me his theory: the editors had invited Bill Gates to visit because they were considering naming him "Man of the Year". This theory made sense, since the launch of Windows 95 and the growth of the Internet had been among the biggest news stories of 1995. I can't imagine that Gates would not have been one of the candidates, but he must have failed his "interview", because a few weeks later Time's "Man of the Year" issue came out with Newt Gingrich on the cover. I don't know which choice is worse.



Pathfinder's problems in 1995 were serious, but they were not fatal. Walter Isaacson would soon leave Time Inc. New Media to become editor of Time magazine, and Pathfinder started gearing up to find a bold new leader and a bold new direction for 1996. We had a lot more mistakes to make; we were just getting started.

Myself, I was losing interest, because the web was growing fast and Pathfinder was starting to seem like the least exciting thing going on in Silicon Alley.

I didn't know where it all might be heading -- it all looked murky to me -- but LitKicks was more popular than ever, and I was starting to come up with big plans of my own for 1996.