The User-Friendly Manual to the World of PC Clones

When Po Bronson started hanging around Silicon Valley to research a novel, he met some real entrepreneurs with a great idea for a CD-ROM venture. In Silicon Valley, great ideas are as common as nice weather. Bronson himself once had a great idea for a greeting card company that went belly up. But he figured that the company behind the CD-ROM might be a gold mine for material, so he threw $10,000 into the undertaking, expecting to write it off as a business expense. Instead, the start-up was snapped up by a bigger company and Bronson’s stake jumped twelvefold.

“I just wanted some access,” Bronson says with a laugh.

These days, that’s not a problem for the clever and irreverent writer, whose work seems touched by good fortune at every turn. The 32-year-old author’s new book--”The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest: A Silicon Valley Novel” (Random House)--has already grabbed the attention of critics and nerds alike.

“Half the San Francisco Bay Area, it seems, is busy playing pin-the-tale-on-the programmer with pre-release copies of what may turn out to be the ‘Primary Colors’ of Silicon Valley,” gushed Time. “Bronson has filled the plot with enough corporate double-dealing, espionage and sleight of hand to libel all of California.”

As soon as sections started appearing in Wired magazine, San Jose Mercury News reporters were quick to e-mail Bronson wanting to know if they were the prototype for the journalist (“Really, it’s me,” confides Bronson, who gathered some of the material while writing for Wired).

Salon, the online magazine, hailed it as the first Silicon Valley novel to live up to the title, declaring Bronson far superior to such cyberhacks as Douglas Coupland and Pat Dillon.

“I didn’t set out to write a great Silicon Valley book,” says Bronson, something of a writerly equivalent of a computer nerd, whose boots could use a shine, his old car a hubcap and his house some furniture. “I just wanted to raise the bar. I think it’s a successful piece of writing; it moves along and gets to the personality and drama of the industry. I just wanted to write a book with a plot.”

The novel tells the story of a group of programmers led by idealistic Andy Casper and their quest to take on the industry with a $300 computer for the masses (the VW, as in Volkswagen, PC). His nemesis is Francis Benoit, an evil genius who, simmering over the dumbing down of his last computer chip, snares Casper and crew into a web of deceit and manipulation, legally stealing their revolutionary computer language and positioning himself to become the Bill Gates of the Net.

To many, Casper sounds like Steve Jobs, the visionary Apple Computer co-founder. Others peg Benoit as Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy.

The hype, however, tends to obscure the point that the book is really about the lowly engineers-- “ironmen” programmers who speak in laconic phrases like the code they write and forget to take off their bike helmets when indoors--and their dreams and struggles against the gatekeepers, moneylenders and power brokers of the valley.

“Silicon Valley was the opposite of the hype,” Bronson says. “It was the real people who were the drama. It wasn’t these great men who were leading the company, but these ordinary people. Dreams don’t come true; people are motivated by these myths and nothing comes true.” To Bronson, Silicon Valley is less a meritocracy than a cutthroat business jungle.

Bronson (ne Philip but dubbed Po since childhood) first learned about the rapacious world of business when his divorced mom tried to jump from being a secretary to bond broker, which meant having to pack off her three sons to live with their insurance salesman father. The job didn’t work out, but the Seattle native kept his mother’s experience in mind while studying economics at Stanford and dreaming of becoming a writer. He took a job at PG & E, double-checking a computer’s math, sold bonds for First Boston, worked at a political newsletter and then at independent publisher Mercury House, before creating his own small company, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, which he still runs.

At the same time, Bronson wrote two novels and picked up a master of fine arts in creative writing from San Francisco State University and finally produced a novel that he liked enough to take to an agent.

“Bombardiers” (Random House) is the story of a young bond trader who blows a bundle of his company’s money and disappears, shaking the world financial system. The book hit the shelves the same week in 1995 that British financial behemoth Barings announced that a 28-year-old employee named Nicholas Leeson had lost more than $1 billion and dropped out of sight.

The book sold fairly well, letting Bronson quit the publishing job and move into the “writer’s grotto,” a flat shared by a number of young authors in the Castro district.

*

A couple of weeks into the writing of “The First $20 Million,” in October 1995, Oracle announced a plan for a cheap desktop computer so similar to the VWPC of his imagination that Bronson considered ditching the project.

His publisher added to his insecurity by asking why there wasn’t any hacking or cybersex in the book. Bronson toyed with the thought of posting the book on the Net. “My brain could just not stay in focus,” he says.

Success has not been without stress (which Bronson fights by playing soccer): His nine-year marriage to his college sweetheart, Nina Schuyler, is breaking up; his landlord just forced the writer’s grotto to relocate; and even Wired took a potshot at Bronson by putting him on its overhyped list.

None of which spoils the good cheer of Bronson’s engrossing home page, where visitors can read scenes cut from the book, interviews with the writer, reviews, e-mail (one correspondent complained that the novel wasn’t technical enough) and take a book quiz: Did an engineer really return his entire L.L. Bean wardrobe to finance a project? Yes. The site also features hilarious recastings of the novel to make it more palatable for Hollywood (romantic comedy, shoot-’em-up thriller, Merchant-Ivory 1880s set piece with Hugh Grant).

Bronson says he still feels more like an observer than a denizen of cyberland, which he views as inbred. “I feel like I’m in touch with it on a grass roots level. But I really don’t know that much about tech.” He does spend quite a bit of time online, as he did the other evening at Hotwired, drinking beer and answering questions in the publication’s chat room.

When someone asked him how long the book took, Bronson replied in his best techno jargon: “9 weeks to proof of concept version, 2 more for beta, another 2 for alpha.”

“Are you married?” asked a participant.

“It’s a touchy subject,” he typed. More typical was the dweeb tapping away about “multi instruction issue 486 superpiplining with 32-bit code.” In English, that was the motivational pivot for the machinations of demonic Francis Benoit. The technical question threw Bronson, but by the end of the chat session, he was asking his interlocutor to e-mail him so they could finished the discussion.

“Tell me more,” Bronson typed, tilting back his beer. “I want to understand it.”