Andrew Keen: Five Months Of Stomach-Churning Aggravation

Here's a little something from the pages of "The Great Seduction"...

Rushing back to the Bay Area, now known as Silicon Valley, I founded a website called Audiocafe and, securing investment from Intel and SAP, built it into an early paragon of the online revolution.

Um, about that word? Paragon? It strikes me as being ever so slightly off here.

par·a·gon (pr-gn, -gn) noun.

1. A model of excellence or perfection of a kind;
a peerless example: a paragon of virtue.

2. a. An unflawed diamond weighing at least 100 carats.
b. A very large spherical pearl.

3. Printing. A type size of 20 points.

Well, for its investors and employees, AudioCafe.com certainly proved to be a pearl of great price...

But Hamilton, 31, didn't strike it rich. Instead, she got five months of stomach-churning aggravation. After her first week, she got laid off. "So I packed up my desk and started to leave, and my CEO chased me out the door saying, 'Guess what? We just got more money," Hamilton recalls.

The ups and downs continued--"I was laid off three times"--until the company, a high-end stereo equipment E-tailer named AudioCafe.com, finally folded in February [2000].

Her options are totally worthless, of course--AudioCafe.com never got close to an initial public offering. And the company still owes her several weeks of pay...

...but somehow I don't think that's what he meant. Oh, well. You know what they say. "Foolish thoughts and slovenly language have always been bound up with each other."

Here's a chipper little capsule CV from May of 2000. Before the dark time. Before the Empire.

Andrew Keen, Founder and CEO, AudioCafe: Andrew Keen is a leading visionary in the audio business with almost ten years of experience as an entrepreneur, salesman and writer in the industry. Having single-handedly founded Audiocafe in 1997, Keen has driven the development of the site's content and business development.

Wow. He was a CEO. Let's just check back with that former employee of his...

Hamilton now plans a career as a professional photographer.

And it looks like she may have succeeded. Good for her! I'm assuming, of course, that this is the same Ann Hamilton. I certainly hope it is. I love a happy ending...

In retrospect, she says a big clue that something was amiss came on her very first day, when the company's CEO claimed he didn't have the money to buy her a cup of coffee.

Ouch! So what did he do after the company crashed and burned? Well, here are his own modest words...

I’ve played increasingly grown-up business roles at a various technology companies including Pulse 3D, Santa Cruz Networks, Jazziz Digital and Pure Depth, where I currently direct the company’s global strategic sales.

He took a fall, got back up, and carried on with his life. Many of us had to, and as such things go, you might think he's made a good job of it. But clearly, it's taken a psychic toll on him. He's going all Burkean and censorious on us.

As Edmund Burke reminds us, we have a responsibility to protect people from their worst impulses. If people aren’t able to censor their worst instincts, then they need to be censored by others wiser and more disciplined than themselves.

Am I alone in thinking that there might just be a tad bit of projection going on here? My God. If only someone had been there for him...to save him...from himself. We all might have been spared the following clots of spin...

In addition to being an aspiring Terry Gross, I am also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and impresario. I founded Audiocafe.com in 1996 and built it into a cacophonous, generously funded digital media business....

But not enough for coffee!

Before my vertiginous adventures in Silicon Valley, I was a university professor. Born in North London, I attended London University and earned a First Class Honours degree in History. I was a British Council Scholar at the University of Sarajevo in Yugoslavia during the mid Eighties.

I did my graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where I was a fellow at the Macarthur funded Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet International Behaviour. I have lectured about politics, history and modern culture at a number of New England schools including Tufts, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts.

All of which should convince me to tug my forelock and keep my eyes firmly fixed on the ground in the presence of my intellectual betters. Perhaps another day.

The following is taken from "Confessions of a Silicon Valley Thief".

If you should care to read the original, feel free to just click on through. The following version is slightly altered and abridged. Compare and contrast, if the urge takes you...

I’m not sure if I should call myself an entrepreneur, an impresario, a salesman, a visionary, a marketer or a just crazy fool in an even crazier world, I confess to my old friend Tessa Ross.

I have to raise my voice. We are sharing an organic cherry pie at COCO 500...

“Andrew, there has to be a single word, just one word, that summarizes what you’ve been doing in Silicon Valley all these years,” she says. The pie is finished now. All that is left are eight empty cherry stones...

Remind me to avoid the cherry pie...

A technology idealist, I suggest.

“That’s two words.”

If you ask my friend Rosebud or Larry and Sergei at Google, they would say I’ve failed. I haven’t made their billions, I admit. In fact, I’ve lost quite a lot.”

“How much?”...

Close to a hundred million, I tell her. Not counting the cents.

Momentary silence while Tessa digests the number. “And that’s other people’s money?” she asks.

Pretty much, I admit. Mainly venture capital. But also angel investment including Rosebud’s cash. And some of my own, too.

Tessa is playing with the cherry stones in front of her. “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,”...With each word, she drags another cherry stone across the plate...“Rich man, poor man, beggar man,” she continues, raising her voice above the din of the COCO 500 lunchtime crowd. There is only one uncounted cherry stone left now.

I'm having a Sinatra moment here. You know,"That's Life"? "I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a kiiiing..."

Over the last twenty years, I’ve been everything in that nursery rhyme.

I’ve tinkered with business models.

I’ve tailored digital media business plans.

I’ve soldiered in the trenches against traditional media.

I’ve been a sailor in the high seas of digital piracy.

I’ve been a rich man in theory and a poor man in fact.

I’ve begged money from every venture capitalist in the Valley.

If words actually have specific meanings, then I would have to say that tinker, tailor, soldier and sailor are being viciously abused here. More's the pity. One should always bear in mind that "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Ross fingers the final cherry stone. “Thief,” my old friend concludes...

I feel myself coloring with a mixture of pleasure and shame. Tessa Ross has nailed me. It is the single word that joins all the dots and turns me into what I really am...

And thus ends the tale of woe. Should such a frank confession garner redemption? Forgiveness? That's probably the hope.

posted by Justin on 04.05.06 at 12:21 PM





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Comments

It seems like you just cant stop writing about him!
I am fascinated by his courage.

lisa   ·  April 6, 2006 12:47 AM

History shows that many courageous people have been wrong.

Eric Scheie   ·  April 6, 2006 08:31 AM

Keen may seem courageous to you. I'm CERTAIN he seems courageous to himself.

He has posted an eleven-point "Manifesto" on his blog, but point four presents the core issue that pisses him off:

"The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. “Good taste” is, by definition, undemocratic. Taste resides with an elite of cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless."

Isn't bitter a taste, Mr. Keen?

Read the third sentence from that paragraph again slowly. . .

"Taste resides with an elite of cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art."

Wow.

Courage, or ego? Boldly "speaking truth to power", or desperately seeking to hold on to power?

Keen is a blogger. I wonder how many other bloggers he feels should be entitled to the "elite" mantle that he so comfortably wears?

Keen dislikes how the new technologies make it easier to create, publish and distribute digital media: web pages, blogs, digital music, film and art. He thinks that the resulting flood of output is a wave of crap that will distract the public from the stuff that he, and the rest of the elite, think is valuable and important.

It doesn't sound like Keen has given much thought to ways that the new technologies have lowered the barrier to ENTER the elite, however.

For example, a bright young person in, say, Nigeria, might not have easy access to the fine library at London University. Twenty years ago, this might have made it difficult for such a person to find and read the many significant, seminal works of literature and criticism that Keen loves to mention at his blog.

These days, of course, that bright young person can just pop over to the home page at www.gutenberg.org and begin to immerse themselves in the works of Hobbes, and Kafka, and Plato, and Machiavelli.

The new technologies, and the new media that they enable, are both a creative and a destructive force. I have faith that works of human intellect that have enduring value, and an evolving elite that is able to recognize and appreciate that value, will emerge and thrive.

Sean   ·  April 6, 2006 07:12 PM

Okay you've taken the joke too far. There is no way, NO WAY, anybody could be that much of a jackass. He's obviously decided to make his life into a piece of performance art- he's parodying the worst side of himself- and Eric you're in on the joke. I get it now!

Do I get to join the club?

Harkonnendog   ·  April 6, 2006 09:16 PM


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