April 1, 1998

They're Nerd Perfect When A Bit Of Fluent Geek Is Needed

Eric Ellis, San Francisco

Geeks. Suddenly they're everywhere - on the box, on the golf course, in your face. You can't escape.

Not only are they making the US even richer and more powerful, they're making bars on San Francisco's fashionable Fillmore Street less so, expensive Soho lofts more outrageously priced and helping launch Starbucks coffee in Asia.

Why, the world's richest man is one, and Boris Yeltsin has just put one in charge of the Kremlin.

And Hollywood is in the middle of making a romantic comedy called You've Got Mail, an exclamation heard by 12 million Americans every day when they log on to America Online, the world's biggest internet service.

And they're fascinating company. Hmmm.

Wisconsin-born ubernerd Mark Andreesen, the pimply-faced fat boy who supposedly conceived the Netscape internet browser - despite the contrarian claims of his less wealthy fraternity house schoolmates - likes nothing better, after reading the hundreds of e-mails he gets daily, than to veg out in front of the VCR with a StevenSeagal or Jackie Chan schlocker. And if you get an invitation to dine at Chez Andreesen, eat before you get there, or make an excuse.

"I can do Campbell's Chunky Soup, SpaghettiOs, Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, and cereal," he recently boasted to Fortune magazine.

"The last time Liz (his girlfriend) went away, I couldn't find the can-opener. So I went, like, five or six days and couldn't eat at home."

Andreesen is worth more than $US100 million.

American comic Dennis Miller reckons there's a fine line between serial killers and technology tycoons from Nerdistan - they both suffer from a distinct lack of social skills.

That's what two enterprising women in Silicon Valley think, too. Appalled by the table manners of precocious 20-somethings in smart San Francisco and Valley restaurants, Englishwoman Lyndy Janes got the entrepreneurial bug and saw a business opportunity.

"I couldn't believe what I saw," she told Newsweek recently."Guys acting like cavemen who've just caught their wild game and start ripping it apart."

So the elegantly groomed Janes and partner Sue Fox started a charm school at Saratoga, where they teach techies how to behave at the important lunch and business meetings they find themselves suddenly having to attend when the application they fiddled with last month becomes next month's hot start-up.

It's basic stuff, like how to butter bread, or remove a cork, getting a haircut. All pretty boring to your common or garden techie, but important when foreigners with money from Japan or Italy or Wall Street start showing an interest too.

Says Californian commentator and economist Joel Kotkin, of the right-wing Pepperdine University in Los Angeles: "Over the past two decades, the bespectacled nerd, with his plastic shirt-pocket pencil holder and white socks, has emerged as the new American superhero."

Kotkin says the geeks, mercilessly mocked in the 1984 comedy Revenge of the Nerds, have become "the ones who are ending up with the fabulous house, the good-looking mate and the big bank account". And now they have a challenge.

Kotkin argues that good old California-style Bohemia may be striking back, as a New Bohemia, as big tech firms scour "the ranks of artists, musicians and writers for people who were once regarded as little more than road- kill on the information highway". This next wave is a thrusting generation of multimedia entertainment companies, providing "channel content" for sophisticated online services like AOL and Earthlink. Indeed, it's another merging of Hollywood and Nerdistan.

Just as the market value of Best Actress Oscar winner Helen Hunt - better known as a sitcom star - went up to $US1 million an episode for her hit NBC series Mad About You last week, the internet is developing its own personalities, and adding unexpected extra costs.

The salaries of online personalities, computer-literate "hosts" of "chat rooms", are being bid up to high six-figure sums as users develop a routine and the internet becomes - because this is America - another entertainment medium.

Unlike their televisual counterparts, their value is limited, in part because at the moment these "online Oprahs" cannot be seen, their appeal simply being their instantaneous patter on a laptop.

And Matt Drudge, the pretend journalist who claims to have broken the Lewinsky-Clinton story on the internet, has just had a TV chat show launched. He's an eclectic mix of nerd and New Bohemia.

It isn't just start-ups like Lyndy Janes's etiquette school that have been powered by suddenly enriched techies.

As firms multiply and labour tightens, stock option offers are mushrooming, meaning boom times for headhunters, or "nerd-rustlers" or "director responsible for bringing in cool people", as two business cards circulating in the valley say in all seriousness.

Which is all very well, and probably very exciting to Nerdistan's cliquey and fast-growing population, but do America's wealthy tribes of nerds, geeks and New Bohemians know their brie from the camembert?