IP Democracy: Silicon Valley's Secret Society of "Young Guns"

Rolling Stone has a cover story in its November 16 issue on the new breed of under-30 Silicon Valley billionaires (OK, only a couple are actually billionaires) who congregate twice a month in what they jokingly call the “Young Guns” secret society. And it should make for fascinating reading based on this excerpt — the full piece is presumably available only in print.

The club includes Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Blake Ross, creator of Firefox, Seth Sternberg, founder of Meebo and Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, among others, (although Hurley often doesn’t make the get-togethers because he now has a family.) Despite their fame and fortunes, this bunch is not a hard-partying crowd.

Writer David Kushner sat in on one Young Guns gathering at a bar in San Francisco, where the scene was ripe for misbehavior. But this group of rich and brainy nerds wasn’t tempted by the hotties and booze all around them.

But the richest guys in the bar cower together at their table like Weird Science geeks at the high school prom. The wilder the scene gets, the more oblivious they become.

In breathless prose, Kushner elevates this new breed of web entrepreneurs to revolutionaries who are turning the media world upside down.

Together, they stand for a place where all Americans are intuitively, and seamlessly, online, where the Net is less a destination than an inextricable extension of our lives — from the entertainment we choose to the social networks we form. Partly due to the combined efforts of the guys in this room, the long epoch of top-down culture — when publishers, producers and DJs could dictate the tastes of a generation — is fading faster than anyone predicted.

But this gaggle of geniuses don’t see themselves as doing anything remarkable — they’ve grown up with the Internet and to hear them tell the story, their inventions just seem like helpful tools more than anything else.

“What the old guard is missing is that this doesn’t feel like a revolution to us,” Ross says. “It feels like common sense.”

And although Kushner doesn’t exactly come out and say this, it sounds like these guys get together with each other because, well, they don’t have anybody else to hang out with — at least they don’t seem to have a peer group, aside from each other, capable of understanding them.

“Social life?” Sternberg says. “This is it.” Now they’ve got the future on their shoulders, and they’re doing everything they can to stay true to their grand visions and survive. “It’s incredibly stressful,” says Ross. “People around here see us as iconic figures, but we’re just college students who got thrust into this role.”

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 2, 2006 5:17 PM to IP Democracy