Oh boy.  It's been quite a life so far.  For that matter, just the
last few years have been more than I expected.  If I look at my life
they way it was say 3 years ago and the way it is now, it blows my
mind.

I thought I was going to be a physicist.  Sometime in Junior High, I
decided I wanted to become a physicist.  I wanted to play with
particle accelerators, and radio telescopes and theories of the
fundamental nature of the Universe.  I went through high school, some
point along the way deciding I wanted to become a phsysicist at MIT,
and went to MIT, and majored in physics.

I graduated high school in '91, so I should have graduated MIT in '95.
It's '96 and I haven't graduated yet.  Basically, the web happened.
In '93 I discovered the web and everything changed.

In '93 I discovered the web, and nobody knew what it was.  Everyone
thought it was a fad.  I didn't really know what to think in that
regard, but it was cool.  Gradually, other people began agreeing that
it was pretty cool.  In '94 I dropped out to found a company, and now,
in '96 I'm back at MIT, finally finishing my degree.  Now, everyone
knows what the web is and it seems almost as many people are starting
web companies.

Perhaps even more so than the web changing my life, a group at MIT
called SIPB did.  SIPB is essentially a nerd club, even more so than
MIT is as a whole.  Officially, SIPB is a group that provides computer
related services to the MIT community.  And that is really what SIPB
does, but the means by which is achieves this is probably more
important than the end which it achieves.

SIPB stands for the "Student Information Processing Board".  It was
founded in the late 60's and has been a meeting place for it's
particular breed of nerd for a couple decades now.  In a lot of ways,
SIPB is a social club, like a fraternity.  We even have "Sigma Pi
Beta" jerseys as a spoof on the ubiquitous MIT frat shirts.  By
hanging out in SIPB, I learned more about computers and networking and
nerds than I did in any of my classes, and I often learned a lot in my
classes.

I started hanging around SIPB freshman year and was not really much of
a computer geek.  My family had an old IBM AT, or maybe it was an XT.
I don't really remember, which shows how much I was into it.  I had a
Commodore 64 when I was younger, and loved that.  I wrote a lot of
BASIC programs.

Typically spending time in SIPB involved hanging out there for long
afternoons asking the older members questions and playing with random
stuff, trying to get a program to do something, to learn a new
language, or to make something work for the MIT community.

One afternoon like this in January of '93, Chad asked me over to his
machine where he wanted to show me something.  It was called the
"World Wide Web" and it was developed by some guy named Tim
Berners-Lee in Switzerland at CERN.  I thought this was cool because I
knew CERN was a cool particle physics research lab that I knew about,
being a physics major and all.  The web as it looked then was plain
text, with some words in brackets, followed by numbers.  Sort of like:

This page is maintained by [Tim Berners-Lee][7].

Then, at the bottom of the screen, you could enter any of the numbers
and it would take you to another document somehow related to the words
that had preceeded the number.  It was sort of cool, but was didn't
seem that different from gopher and was a bit uglier when it came down
to it.

Chad was an interesting guy.  He was a year ahead of me at MIT and
maintained an aura of omniscience.  Basically, he knew just enough
more about most computer related topics, that I couldn't tell if he
knew just barely more than me, or infinitely more than me.  The
problem with assuming that people in SIPB were just being arrogant and
didn't know as much as they seemed to was that you were bound to be
wrong.  Not about the arrogant part, certainly.  There genuinely were
some SIPB members who were so nearly omniscient that if they didn't
know the answer, it was reasonable to say that there probably wasn't
one.

So, late fall of '93, after I had played with the web a lot and really
saw that it had a chance to become something big, somehow, I got the
idea that I wanted to think about starting a company.  I didn't know
exactly what, but it really seemed like a good idea.  So, I talked to
a guy I knew who had done some consulting work and asked if he was
interested.  He was.  I asked another friend who I knew, Eric, who I'd
known since freshman year and asked what he thought.  He was
interested too.  By the middle of January, I had a group of 8 or 9
people looking at the idea of starting a company.  We met a lot for a
couple of months and debated strategies and ideas and the feasability
of our entire plan.  We decided the best plan was to basically be a
shopping mall on the web.  We were going to call ourselves "Downtown
Enterprises" or something with the word Downtown in it.  We thought
about it a lot.  In April, we decided we just didn't have the business
knowledge or skills to actually do it, and we cast away the idea.

Two weeks later, I was leaving the MIT student center when a short guy
with sideburns and sunglasses came up to me and said, "You're Matthew
Gray, right?".  I didn't quite know how to react, but I agreed that I
was, indeed, Matthew Gray.  He told me his name was Matthew Cutler,
and he and some friends of his were thinking of starting a company,
doing web stuff.  He contacted me because he knew I was the webmaster
at MIT.  I told him that I might be interested, but had already
thought about it a lot.  So, we said we'd meet all together and see.

So, I met them.  In addition to Matt, the short guy with sideburns and
sunglasses, there was Raj, a rail thin Indian guy, Wiz, a freshman
heavy into the alternative music scene, and George, a Cypriot with a
big leather wide-brimmed hat who said "Heeeey" a lot.  Quickly, it
became apparent that these guys were not SIPB types.  It also became
clear that they had a lot of the business knowledge and skills that we
in Downtown were lacking.  So, I signed up with them.  The company was
called net.Genesis.