Kushner - The players ball: a genius, a con man, and the secret history of the Internets rise

For Sue, my perfect match

Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

E. M. Forster, Howards End

KATE ( SINGING ) : The internet is really, really great!

TREKKIE MONSTER : For porn.

Avenue Q: The Musical

No one expected things to get so dirty.

It was just a local election, and a seemingly inconsequential one at that, a seat on the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board of Directors. The seven-person board manages the water system and flood control for the 1.9 million residents of the California county, which includes Silicon Valley: patching dams, overseeing water treatment plants, stocking sandbags when creeks overflow, and so on. Its a noble but unglamorous public service compared to the jetset lives of the tech titans in town. The only residents who usually bother to attend the public meetings are a handful of retirees, and the homeless woman who often sleeps in the back.

But, in 2014, voters were more interested than ever. Water district elections are usually low-keyif not boringaffairs, the San Jose Mercury News reported. Not this year. The two-man race had become the most vicious, and confounding, in the Santa Clara Valley Water Districts eighty-five-year history. Thered been allegations of corruption, sexual depravity, scandalous lies. For reasons no one could gather, Gary Kremen, a heavyset, disheveled, fifty-one-year-old dot-com multimillionaire, Deadhead, Stanford MBA, and self-described kook, shelled out $408,492largely from his own pocketto beat incumbent Brian Schmidt, an earnest forty-seven-year-old environmental attorney whod devoted his career to the cause. Why is he spending so much? Schmidt told the Mercury News . I dont know what to say.

The water of Silicon Valley pumped through the heart of Schmidt, who came off like an Eagle Scout. Hed earned his law degree from Stanford, labored locally as an environmental attorney, and blogged about the box turtles he saw while cleaning up the coast. For the past four years, he had proudly served on the Water District board. His fight for the potable reuse of recycled waste water, which could supply half the countys drinking supply, helped him earn multiple media endorsements. But with only a few days until the election, and his money (and dreams) running out, he finally had enough of Kremens Animal House behavior.

One morning in late October, Schmidt bicycled alone to a dried-up pond in the woods near his home in Palo Alto to shoot a last-ditch campaign video for YouTube. Slowly panning his camera across the landscape, he filmed the muddy field limned with dying brown trees. What youre seeing around you is the effect of the California drought, he narrated solemnly. Then Schmidt set the camera in place, and stepped in front of it to tape himself. He was prematurely gray but boyish, and wore a blue Re-Elect Brian Schmidt T-shirt. I am kind of proud to say I am now a target of a negative mailer, he said.

Schmidt approached the camera and held up the cover of said mailer: a custom greeting card that mocked his recycled waste water plan. BRIAN SCHMIDT wants to get our drinking water from OUR TOILETS , the card read.

Its a picture of menext to a toilet, Schmidt explained. It claims not to be from my opponent, but you can take that for whatever you want to take it for. This is a very expensive thing, where my opponent has put a lot of money into the race.

As Schmidt opened the greeting card, it played an audio snippet from one of his stump speeches: Im advocating treatment of waste water to drinkable levels. Then a womans voice came on: Brian Schmidt wants my family to drink water from a toilet? Ewww! she said. Say no to toilet water! Say no to Brian Schmidt for Santa Clara Valley Water District.

As his camera rolled, Schmidt stepped back into focus with the beleaguered expression of a science teacher whod sat on one too many whoopee cushions. Pedantically, he explained that people were already drinking recycled waste water from Singapore to the International Space Station. This is astronaut water were talking about, he went on. Its healthy enough for them, its healthy for the rest of us. He appealed to the brainiacs in town to give him, and his astronaut water, a chance. This is Silicon Valley, he said, as he concluded recording the video he later posted online. This is a highly educated area. We understand what we can do with technology.

But few understood technology better than the highly educated man so curiously obsessed with beating him, Gary Kremen. Silicon Valley had seen its share of iconoclastic visionariesSteve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerbergbut none like Kremen. Though largely unfamiliar to the outside world, he was among the most prescient entrepreneurs in the history of the internet. In business, and in life, true visionaries not only have the foresight to find the next frontier, but the confidence to bet on it. Kremen was legendary among those in the know for his uncanny cocktail of both. As veteran technology investor Ron Posner put it, Hes very energetic, very creative, very smartand never gives up.

Kremen is the father of online dating. In 1993, he founded what was essentially the firstnow biggestdating site, Match.com. Despite about only 5 percent of Americans being online around that time, Kremen brashly told a skeptical TV reporter in 1995 that his invention was going to change the world. Match.com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ, the then thirty-one-year-old declared in his nasally toned Chicago accent. The fact that this prediction was coming from some Belushi in a stained tie-dye T-shirt sprawled on a red bean bag made it all the more dubious.

But as Kremen would prove time and time again, his hunch was right. Match.com became an international phenomenon, spreading to more than twenty-five countries in eight languages with more than 42 million members, and becoming the basis of todays $2 billion online dating industry. The company Kremen started with a $2,500 credit card loan now has a value of $3.5 billion. At a time when most businesspeople barely understood, let alone paid attention to, the internet, Kremen was among the first to figure out how to make money online. Even more radically, he transformed the way people meet and marry in the digital age. As he wrote with characteristic humor on his Water District campaign website bio, I am responsible for over 1,000,000 babies!

But according to his detractors, he was responsible for much that was wrong with the internet too. The genius of love was also the sultan of sex, specifically Sex.com, one of the most notorious websites ever online. And it was his epic battle over Sex.com that made him most legendary of all.

It started in the early 1990s, before he pioneered online dating, when Kremen envisioned another new frontier. He thought that domain namesthe dot-coms and other addresses that signify ownership onlinewould one day have the value of real property as people learned how to build businesses on the net. Because domains were deemed worthless at the time, they were essentially free to register. So Kremen gobbled up dozensJobs.com, Housing.com, Autos.com, Match.com, and the liketo later monetize. It was the online equivalent of coming to America and staking claims across the country. Though he had no intention of becoming a pornographer, in 1994 he registered Sex.com too, thinking it could become a health and wellness education site.

But while he had been busy with Match.com, someone named Stephen Michael Cohen had somehow stolen the rights to the Sex.com domainand transformed it into one of the most profitable websites, earning millions of dollars a month. Kremen wanted his site back, and he wanted to get the money Cohen had earned through stealing it. What followed was an epic rivalry that established many of the rules that enable online commerce today. As Kremens esteemed lawyer James Wagstaffe said, This case established the precedent that a domain name is propertyproperty that can be stolen.