In New York for a two-day layover on his way to a vacation in Spain with his girlfriend, Po Bronson meets PW at a small café at the western edge of SoHo, a place where the waiters wear orange tank tops and decorate their thoraxes with tattoos. At 35, the longtime San Francisco resident is the very model of the California Boy come-of-age (though he was raised in Seattle). Compactly built, he wears a blue-and-white checked short-sleeve sport shirt and long denim shorts, and has penetrating eyes framed by gently styled hair the color of gray straw. An inexpensive digital watch and a reporter's notebook tucked in his breast pocket complete the look. Remarkably, he appears even younger than he does in the dreamboat jacket photo on his 1997 satire of Silicon Valley, The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest.
For someone who just flew in from the West Coast and has to catch a transatlantic flight later in the day, Bronson is remarkably sharp as he discusses his latest book, The Nudist on the Late Shift, out from Random House next month. The book is a nonfiction consideration of the state of Silicon Valley at the edge of the next millennium -- as opposed to the state of Silicon Valley four years ago, now hopelessly passé in a subculture that evolves at fiber-optic speed.
Bronson is a pretty fast mover himself, packing a lot of experiences under his belt, many of them unrelated to the actual work of writing, evidence of his somewhat schizophrenic need to be both artist and businessman. He's on the boards of both Consortium Book Distribution and the publisher Mercury House. With such luminaries/cronies as fellow novelist Ethan Canin, he tends to The Grotto, a writer's commune housed in a converted loft in San Francisco's South of Market district.
As a reporter, he practices exhaustive "hanging out" journalism, spending months steeping himself in Silicon Valley's subcultures while less-patient business writers content themselves with a few precious hours in the thrall of the Big Boys, scrutinizing every syllable uttered by Bill Gates or Intel CEO Andy Grove. The only significant problem this approach creates is convincing readers that your subjects are actually interesting, as opposed to merely successful and dauntingly wealthy. Many of the key personalities have no life outside work. Everyone is worth a relative fortune -- or can at least amass sackfuls of salary in a zero-unemployment regional economy.
"Silicon Valley is where we exercise capitalism to its fullest in America," he says. However, The Nudist on the Late Shift is scarcely the type of dispatch from the Bay Area gold rush that readers have come to expect from journalists such as Michael Lewis and David Kaplan. "That's not interesting to me," Bronson says. Rather than focus on the big players who have already made their fortunes, Bronson has chosen to catch people on the way up. As a novelist making the transition to a full-blown, less aggressively satirical nonfiction writer, he has found material in less than obvious places, looking under rocks, between the cracks, and ahead of the mainstream curve.
"I caught Silicon Valley at a time when a lot of the research I was doing was about fallen entrepreneurs who had been screwed by the powers that be," says Bronson. In this regard, his excitement over Silicon Valley's "New Paradigm" (in which the new Internet economy, represented by companies like Yahoo!, offers an alternative to the "old" software business, embodied by Bill Gates and Microsoft) makes perfect sense. It has been carried over from the "Author's Note" appended to The First $20 Million. "When I told people in Silicon Valley I was writing a novel about their industry," he explains, "so many of them asked me, `Is it about Bill Gates?' that for a while I considered titling this novel `Not Gates.'" Ultimately, Gates isn't Bronson's idea of a good story: he's too big, too successful already, too easy.
The First $20 Million, which details the misadventures of a paranoid Internet startup as it jousted with a mega-corporation, highlights Bronson's abiding appreciation for the blend of passionate creativity and business daring that characterizes many Silicon Valley zealots.
Bronson, it turns out, is uniquely equipped to chronicle the vicissitudes of this New Paradigm. Bronson's parents divorced when he was 12, and through a series of financial crises, his mother was forced to send him and his two brothers to live with their less-than-reliable father. Although Bronson senior lived hand-to-mouth and constantly dodged his creditors, he drove a Jaguar and projected an image of affluence. Bronson graduated from Stanford in 1986 with a degree in economics, but he also studied studio art (he still paints and sculpts).
Money Talks
Apart from comments such as the one he gave the Village Voice in a feature spotlighting "writers on the verge" -- "If you follow the money, you find the story" -- Bronson d sn't seem to be at all motivated by cash. For him, the money is simply a roadmap to the livelier issue of entrepreneurial personalities, and he claims he can see through the numbers. "I have green vision," he writes in Nudist, describing his ability to look past the dollar signs to the hidden story. His relative detachment, amid a culture where a $20 million net worth is considered normal, has furnished him with an enviable perspective, one not entirely shared by the East Coast business writers who focus on the movers and shakers of the Internet industry, men like Silicon Graphics and Netscape founder Jim Clark. "The young people who come to Silicon Valley know who Jim Clark is," Bronson says, "but that's not who they want to be."
Who they want to be is the unsung -- for the time being -- person with the next great idea, a character like Sabeer Bhatia, founder (with Jack Smith) of the free e-mail Internet firm Hotmail, the star of the "Entrepreneur" chapter in The Nudist on the Late Shift (a title that refers to a legitimate, though not atypical, Valley eccentric who would completely disrobe when working during the wee hours). Bhatia, a native of India educated in the U.S., is a living, breathing, wildly prosperous representative of Bronson's "classless, raceless" Silicon Valley. "Spending time there has revealed the sociological side of this new Internet business revolution," he says. "I've seen people from other countries and of many races -- except blacks -- and I've seen this experiment in a classless society with tremendous social mobility."
There's more than a smidgen of the unreconstructed social revolutionary and easygoing surfer dude in Bronson's image (he lives on the beach, still surfs, and plays soccer compulsively), but this quality occupies a tense space alongside his comprehensive understanding of money. After all, before publishing his first novel, Bombardiers ("Perhaps the most entertaining depiction of greed on Wall Street ever to reach print," gushed Business Week) in 1995, he worked in finance and banking, then started a greeting-card company. He publishes with Random House, but his heart lies with small presses and literary collectives. He's the very picture of casual chic, but Bronson -- whose entire uvre fixates on the distinctive, often dysfunctional American culture of work -- enjoys going to the office. "When I stay at home and get nothing done," he told a Bay Area audience in 1997, "my self-esteem suffers."
Of course, the concept of getting nothing done seems as if it would be entirely alien to Bronson, who during a brief stint in New York after graduating from college churned out a novel in longhand in just a few months. Another followed, a young-adult effort, but both remain unpublished and he claims he's never re-read them. Instead, he entered the MFA program at San Francisco State, emerging eight years later with a degree. He attended workshops at night, taking a single class each semester while keeping his assortment of day jobs (assistant bond salesman at First Boston in San Francisco, local newsletter publisher). The workshop model of writing stories and novellas, however, did not appeal to him. "I looked around with jealousy at what other writers could do, writers who had traveled and had experiences that weren't like what I was encountering in the workshops. I didn't know what to write about because I had just been going off to work every day. So I said, 'Well, write about work.' And in doing so, I found that I had a tremendous amount to say. I discovered a broad perspective and a rooted philosophy."
This breadth, in his opinion, has found voice in The Nudist on the Late Shift, which he freely contrasts with his novels: "I was a ferocious cynic in my first two books. But as I do more work on myself and get older, I've learned to listen to people rather than accuse them of things. In my novels, people say I do `empathic satire,' where you like the characters, but you find the world they live in crazy. Nevertheless, listening to inspiring stories made me want to undertake this fundamental change in myself."
Comments of that type reveal Bronson's healthy regard for the way he's perceived, a quality demonstrated on his Web site (www.pobronson.com). A skillful piece of personal PR, it contains a systematic breakdown of the world according to Po: novel excerpts, nonfiction sketches, a run-down of his screenplays and his monologue performances (with examples), blinking images of the author himself and an invitation for readers to e-mail him with opinions of why he's "full of shit" (he d sn't believe he really is). The site also contains a personal manifesto, at the end of a list of the sizable sums he has turned down for jobs, speaking engagements and books deals: "It is incredibly important for me to get out into the world and to hear and be inspired by the real lives of real people."
In this campaign, he says he receives tremendous support from Jon Carp, who has edited all three of his books at Random, and his agent at Curtis Brown, Peter Ginsberg. (He d sn't like to discuss his personal finances or advance numbers, though he has admitted in print that he has made as much as $170,000 a year.)
Channeling the Zeitgeist
"I admit that the tension in my work between going for the jugular with hard-boiled truth versus going at it in roundabout ways with satire or comedy is one I'll probably never resolve," he says. "But I think one can't create a narrative dream unless the reader feels like they're being heard, that their voice is being recognized in the story's point of view." His descriptive talents -- as well as his knack for coining catchphrases -- are a highly effective means of creating this "narrative dream." He possesses an eye that vacuums up every crucial detail, locating the essential article of clothing or personal tick that summarizes each member of Silicon Valley's weird subcultures, from geek programmer to saleswoman to venture capitalist. In one memorable section of Nudist, he even unearths a guy doing a brisk business in secondhand cubicles. Unsurprisingly, Tom Wolfe has pegged Bronson, along with Richard Price, as the two writers he follows most closely. Bronson writes dialogue as if he were taking dictation directly from the zeitgeist. Between books, he remains preoccupied, in his Proustian "writing closet" at The Grotto, with assignments from Wired, the New York Times Magazine, and Salon.
Bronson is, in short, a stealth overachiever, but he's also dialed directly in to the giddy chatter burbling beneath Silicon Valley's big ideas, where vast payoffs are now assumed rather than coveted, and where entrepreneurs fresh out of college start companies with no mission other than to start companies-and sell them at huge profits. As the bard of Silicon Valley's little people with big ideas, Bronson is sensitive to his role as a cheerleader, but he has a larger agenda. "I want to offer people of our generation some hope," he says. "Not to say that you should move to Silicon Valley." Nevertheless, he's a Valley booster to the core, declaring that "we're primed for runaway invention." And so, apparently, is he.
DeBond is a contributing editor at the online magazine FEED and a regular contributor to New York Press.
