A VISIONARY ASSHOLE

[samhexum]

On New Year’s Day 2000, NYPD and FDNY squads descended on a building in lower Manhattan, where members of the art world had been partying nonstop in the basement since mid-December.

 

Every inch of the space, including the toilets and the shower, was covered by cameras streaming live to the internet — a raunchy, real-life “Big Brother” bash.

 

After weeks of flagrant public sex and drug use, authorities swept through the main doors, confronting dazed partygoers who were, as one first responder said, “living like pigs.”

 

But as they were dragged into the sunlight, none of the guests knew the raid had been instigated by the event’s organizer — dot-com millionaire Josh Harris.

 

And few would have predicted that, within 18 months, Harris would lose virtually everything, as Andrew Smith recounts in his new book “Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle” (Black Cat), out now.

 

Harris grew up in California, the youngest of seven children. His father was usually out of the country on CIA business, though he did bring the family with him to Geneva and Ethiopia briefly before dying when Harris was 15.

 

Harris went on to the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Southern California for grad school, where professors refused to let him build a multimedia computer instead of taking a final exam. So he dropped out, came to Manhattan and eventually launched his own consulting business.

 

By 1993, Harris was ready for something bigger. The internet had long been the domain of techies, but now the general public was starting to find its way online.

 

He created Pseudo.com to deliver streaming audio and video shows to these new audiences — an early version of podcasts and YouTube videos.

 

Pseudo’s headquarters at Broadway and Houston became a focal point for “Silicon Alley,” New York’s tech-industry scene. But the company’s reputation had less to do with its cutting-edge product than its “anything goes” culture.

 

Pot smokers held “Code Green” meetings during office hours, and at night things got even wilder. Though Harris usually stuck to whiskey and cigars, he acquired a 6-foot-high glass bong for one party, described by one eyewitness as “bigger than my bathroom.”

 

In the late 1990s, investors gladly overlooked such shenanigans, pouring money into just about any company that even hinted at being connected to the internet. Pseudo acquired millions of dollars in funding, but the pressure for financial success that came with it may have taken its toll on Harris.

 

He developed an abrasive, clownish alter ego named “Luvvy” who wandered through the workplace “saying the s–t nobody wants people to hear,” as one former Pseudo employee put it. At the extended blowout in lower Manhattan, Luvvy spent one night trying to coordinate a three-couple orgy for the cameras.

 

He also promised $100,000 to anyone who could make it to the end of the bacchanal — and, with hours to spare, none of the 60 official participants had dropped out.

 

So he called the cops on his own party.

 

The raid was a harbinger for even greater disasters ahead. The Nasdaq index had grown by more than 500 percent since 1995 as investors fell in love with one technology stock after another. But when the dot-com companies failed to generate enough revenue to become profitable, the market plummeted.

 

By the middle of 2000, Pseudo had spent everything it had and, unable to attract more funding, was forced to shut down.

 

Harris, who had retained a stake in his old consulting firm, was a millionaire several times over on paper. But instead of taking sensible steps to shore up his fortune, he started funneling his money into bizarre multimedia projects. Shortly after Pseudo’s closure, he installed webcams all over the downtown loft he shared with his girlfriend so he could stream their relationship online.

 

Less than 100 days into the project, his girlfriend got fed up and moved out.

 

By the spring of 2001, Harris sold the last of his stock and fled the city for an apple orchard he’d bought upstate and later a remote compound in Ethiopia.

 

In 2008, he wrote an open letter with a new spin on his financial collapse. “Pseudo was a fake company,” he declared, claiming he’d intended from the beginning to burn through millions in investor funds as “the linchpin of a long-form piece of conceptual art.”

 

Eventually, he returned to the US, attempting to reinvent himself as a professional poker player in Vegas. Once worth more than $50 million, according to the Financial Times, Harris was now earning about $650 a month playing poker online.

 

And yet, despite his highly public failures, there was one thing Harris was successful at — predicting the future. As he told one interviewer in 2009, “We’re moving into a world where our status and value will be measured by how many people are watching us.”

 

A decade later, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook are all proof he was right, as they capitalize on a vision that peaked way before its time.

[+ quoththeraven]

With "visionary asshole" and the tech talk location, I was convinced this was about Steve Jobs.