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At 17, living out of his father’s basement in Salt Lake City, he started a software company, called Serius, and sold it to Novell for $24 million four years later. At 24, he parlayed a 17-page business plan into $17 million in venture capital for an Internet consulting firm called USWeb, and moved to the Silicon Valley. By 1998, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company had announced a merger with interactive agency CKS and become a $2 billion global business employing 2,100 people in six countries.
But that’s about the time the impish exec – having guided USWeb through an exhausting but successful public offering – decided to “go public” in a very different way: A lifelong space enthusiast, a student of philosophy and physics, and the product of a Mormon upbringing in Utah, he made a series of revelations in his own Website and Net-published a 150,000-word book called The Truth that made his colleagues, board members, and biggest stockholders – and soon thereafter the media – run for their mobile phones.
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