Top O.C. Execs in High Tech Join Steve, Bill as Celebrities

In today’s high-tech corporate culture, a heady stock market has spawned business leaders who market not only their company but themselves as well.

Like rock ‘n’ roll stars, the leaders of the technology world often go by one name. It’s Steve (Jobs), Larry (Ellison) and Bill (Gates). Even their public personas fit into equally punchy sound bites. The comeback kid. The corporate rebel. The spin doctor.

Call them what you will, the idea of CEO as a corporate brand has become just as important as the company’s actual corporate identity.

Silicon Valley executives lead the way, with showmen offering promises that every new product is a “killer” application set to “revolutionize” the industry. Los Angeles, of course, has its ties to Hollywood and its slew of quirky entertainment figures.

And thanks to a new wave of computer and Internet companies stepping into the limelight, Orange County’s executives are loosening up and becoming celebrities in their own right.

Forget the days when the dark-suited executives of Rockwell International Corp. once personified the area’s strait-laced attitude.

Today, there’s chip maker Broadcom Corp.’s Henry Nicholas, the towering, bungee-jumping CEO who zips around town in a Ferrari. And online auto seller Autobytel.com’s Pete Ellis, who spawned a companywide passion for Hawaiian shirts. And Shiny Entertainment’s David Perry, the game developer’s gregarious, party-throwing, helicopter-flying president. And ticket-system creator Advantix Inc.’s Tom Gimple, the cowboy CEO known for his weekend calf-roping antics.

For the public and the media, these executives help put a human face on what often are boring or confusing technologies.

“It’s also the money and the potential wealth these people could make,” said Robert J. Lambert, a consultant at the Irvine office of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. “People follow the money.”

But at least one popular Web site makes light of the public’s fascination with the rich and techy: Ditherati, a must-read among the digital community.

This wickedly funny Web site, at https://www.ditherati.com, posts a daily ludicrous or outrageous quote from a technology executive. As the site points out, when “CEOs like Scott McNealy describe their responsibilities solely as being ‘quote machines’ for the press,” someone needs to poke fun at this highly glamorized high-tech world--and the public’s fascination with it.

P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.