On the Frontier

From the Wild East of Russian capitalism to the evolving forms of cyberspace, Esther Dyson likes the promise of unsettled territory--and the challenge of civilizing it.

Virginia Postrel from the October 1996 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

I had a lot of successes, but what really made me fearless was my complete failure at Ziff-Davis [where she was hired to start a newspaper, which flopped]. Once you've lived through that, you know you can survive, and you're not as scared. Everybody should have a real failure, ideally when they are pretty young, that gives them a sense of confidence. I think that was one of Steve Jobs's problems. He was successful for way too long before it finally hit him. There's nothing to build confidence like real achievement, but also like real failure.

Reason: Bouncing back from real failure.

Dyson: Genuine achievement gives you a sense that you can do stuff. And genuine failure gives you a sense that you can survive being imperfect. Because the delusion that you're perfect-- or that if you just do the right thing, things will always work out OK--makes you resistant to change and fearful of failure. Again, you'd rather not discover that you're imperfect, that maybe what you were doing was wrong. The more people can go through those discoveries the better.

Reason: There seem to be a lot of people in the high-tech arena who are comfortable with change, with a dynamic sense of the future. Is that because people with those attitudes are attracted to those industries, or do those industries create certain attitudes?

Dyson: Usually it's both. People come into it and it feeds on itself. Even between Silicon Valley and Boston, it's much more dynamic in Silicon Valley. Those tendencies are encouraged. That kind of behavior and attitude is rewarded. I don't think you're born with it, which is why I think I can bring some of it to Eastern Europe.

As I said, people need models of how this works, they need stories. There's this guy in the Czech Republic who is truly wonderful, Roman Stanek. He's young, he's successful, he's a good model. He started his own company; he was the Informix distributor, and then he went to work for PowerSoft, and then they got acquired by Sybase. I was involved--not invested, but watching, advising, counseling all the way through. I asked him to speak at my conference last October in Slovenia. He talked a little bit about his life and how it had changed. Then he talked a little about Sybase and the things they were doing wrong and how they were going to fix them, because he was now going to be in charge of Sybase for the Czech Republic. He was funny. He was eloquent. He admitted his mistakes. He talked about how he would fix them. What he said was perfect.

There were three guys from Oracle [a Sybase competitor] in the audience, sitting together, smirking: This is great, Sybase is revealing all its problems. So then I did my duty. I got up and said, "I'm listening to Roman, and I want you to understand that what he's doing is brilliant, and I think he's doing the right thing by admitting his mistakes. I know there are people from Oracle sitting in the audience. But what I want you to get out of this interchange is that everybody knows Sybase had these problems. The people from Oracle know, Sybase knows, Sybase's customers know, but the ability for Roman to admit this--his ability to acknowledge his mistakes and to improve--is a model of how business should be done." That is how I'm trying to change the world, by finding [Eastern Europeans'] own models of success, not just discovering them, but lauding them a little and making them more visible.

Reason: Why do you want to change the world?

Dyson: It's more fun than not changing the world. I've said this so many times, but if I were a maid, I'd like a dirty room. I like building things. But again, I'd rather be a gardener than in construction. I'd rather go out and water the plants and clear the path for the sun to shine and have them grow themselves. You can grow a lot more plants than you can ever build individual things. The plants do their own work. You just help them.