I just finished The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman about centralized and decentralized organizations. In it he relates a funny anecdote from the early 90s. It seems that Dave Garrison, the then CEO of Netcom, was meeting with some venture capitalists in France to try and raise money. Since it was the early 90s he spent a lot of time explaining what the internet was. One of the investors asked him who the president of the Internet was. He tried explaining that there was no one in charge – it was a decentralized system run on a set of standards that everyone simply had to conform with to join. The French investors didn’t get it. Dave tried every metaphor and explanation he could think of – a network of networks, all the shoppers in a store reorganizing themselves, and everyone sharing the burden of communication. The French investors, convinced that either Dave was withholding information from them or that their message was being lost in the translation kept pressing – who decides?

Eventually Garrison, not wanting to offend the investors (whom he was trying to convince to hand him millions of dollars), gave in. He admitted right then and there than he was the president of the Internet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 8:50 pm by Ari and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.