Starting at Andy and going clockwise, Dave Goldberg, Renee James, Sheri Herman, Ron Whittier, Hassan Miah, Matthew Cowan, Josh Geer, Avram Miller and Allee Willis.

I recently learned that my old friend Sheri Herman had died.

Sadly, the deaths of friends are becoming more frequent events these days. I don’t know exactly how old Sheri was, but I believe she was in her late sixties. Her sister said that she died in her sleep from some kind of cardiac event. I am grateful that she died without pain or fear. Sheri and I met in 1996, at the dawn of the commercial Internet.

Michael Ovitz, the co-founder and CEO of Creative Artists Agency, and I had put together a joint initiative between CAA and Intel. Our purpose was to introduce Hollywood’s creative community to the possibilities of digital entertainment. The venture included a Media Lab housed at CAA’s offices on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, as well as an effort to invest in companies creating content for the emerging digital world. Ovitz and I shared what turned out to be a mistaken belief: that entertainment for the Internet would come primarily from the established media industry. Things worked out very differently.

Two members of my Intel Capital team, Matthew Cowan and Sriram Viswanathan, were based at CAA. On the CAA side were Sandy Climan, who remains a dear friend, and Bob Kavner, a former senior AT&T executive who was in the process of fleeing  from AT&T to the future, was also involved in helping set up what we called the Media Lab at CAA.

Matthew and Sriram went on to become very successful venture capitalists. I am proud of both of them and think of them as family. They learned the trade, so to speak, from me, and we remain very close.

Sheri and The Spot

The Spot home of America Cybercast-Internet Entertainment in 1996

Sheri had built a career in the entertainment industry and had served as a senior vice president at E! Entertainment Television. When I knew her, she was running The Spot, an early Internet company built around an online soap opera called American Cybercast. Its fictional characters maintained online diaries, and the audience could follow and interact with their unfolding lives.

This was 1996. The World Wide Web itself was still young. No one knew how dominant the internet would become although I strongly suspected this would be the case.

One evening, we organized a dinner in a private room at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard. Andy Grove, then Intel’s CEO, and Ron Whittier, an Intel senior vice president, were visiting Los Angeles. We invited the leaders of several companies in which Intel had invested.

Matthew Sends Me a Photograph

Announcement of the Media Lab (Intel and CAA)

When I told Matthew that Sheri had died, he sent me a photograph from that dinner.

I remember the evening well. But it was painful to study all the young faces and realize that four of the people in the photograph are no longer with us:

• Andy Grove, then CEO of Intel.
• Dave Goldberg, founder of Launch Media—later Yahoo! Music—and the late husband of Sheryl Sandberg.
• Sheri Herman, former senior vice president at E! and CEO of The Spot.
• Allee Willis, the immensely talented songwriter and wonderfully original person who was creating something called Willisville, an idea that, only now, technology may be capable of fully realizing.

Dave Goldberg had founded Launch Media around what were then called “enhanced CDs.” These were music CDs containing photographs, liner notes and other supplementary material that could be viewed when the disc was placed in a computer. I remember meeting Dave and asking him how his technology could move to the Internet. His answer made it clear that he knew very little about the Internet at the time. But Dave was quick and sharp, and he immediately understood the opportunity.

Launch Media eventually moved online and was acquired by Yahoo! It proved to be a very good investment for Intel. In fact, the return on that one investment paid for the entire CAA/Intel initiative including the dinner at the House of Blues. Dave later met Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO of Facebook and they married.

There are several other people in the photograph whom I should mention. Hasan Miah managed the joint activity from the CAA side. He went on to become an investor and entrepreneur across many areas of technology.

Josh Greer ran a company called Digital Planet and is now focused on eldercare. I am glad to report that both Hasan and Josh are alive and well.

Ron Whittier was one of Intel’s earliest employees and held several prominent positions during his long career there. Andy had given him responsibility for managing many of Intel’s software relationships, including the crucial relationship with Microsoft. Ron was also the senior executive with whom I worked most closely on our media investments. 

Sitting next to Dave Goldberg is Renée James. Renée later became president of Intel and is now the founder, chair and CEO of Ampere Computing. Renée and I remain friends, although we are not often in touch.

It was Renée who indirectly gave me the title of my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck. She once told me that Andy thought of me as Intel’s “wild duck.”

We Were So Young

It is difficult for me to comprehend how young we all were. Andy was not yet sixty. He would probably consider me, now  at eighty-one, an old fart.  Andy was seventy-nine when he died, two years younger than I am today. Sadly, he suffered from Parkinson disease in his final years.

Ron Whittier is now ninety, close to the age Andy would be if he were still alive. From recent photos I have seen, he seems to be doing well.

I wish all the surviving people in that photograph continued health and long lives. They are or were remarkable people. 

Sheri’s Gift

Sheri and I probably had not spoken in twenty years. We went our separate ways and eventually had little in common, although I would occasionally hear from her.

But Sheri gave me the greatest gift of my life. She introduced me to my wife, Deborah. For that, I will always be grateful.

And what about me?

At eighty-one, I still embrace the future.  I still hang out with people the age of those in the photo.  Looking at that photograph, I see an amazing evening filled with extraordinary people. Each of them, in different ways, led a life of contribution, curiosity and joy.

I am thankful to have been part of their club.