THE SILICON ALLEY 100

#22 — Edge Foundation/Brockman, Inc.

Business Type Organization/Content
Employees Undisclosed
Symbol Private
URL www.edge.org
E-mail john@brockman.com
Phone 212.935.8900
Fax 212.935.5535
Address 5 East 59th Street, NYC 10022
Chairman and CEO
Age 58
Education "I'm too old to talk about stuff like that-"

Literary agent and cyber-networker par excellence

John Brockman describes the Edge Foundation as "the best graduate school in the world. And there's only one student—myself." An e-mail list administered by Brockman, the Edge Foundation has members like Bill Gates, Brian Eno, and Daniel C. Dennet, who discuss Big Important Questions. A recent example that made quite a splash in the press—Edge's list contains hundreds of journalists—was "What is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?" (For the curious, answers included language, glasses and the eraser.) The Edge Foundation posts excerpts from the discussions on its website and has a deal with FEED magazine (see SA 100 #49) to distribute Edge-related content. Brockman insists that the closed nature of the list is practical, not elitist. He already spends about half his time on the project and would be swamped if the e-mail list grew out of control.

Brockman has recently invested in RightsCenter.com, a Web-based extranet designed to change the way the publishing industry does business—an industry that Brockman calls "the most backward industry in the world." The site, which is run by Kip Parent and Jim McHugh, allows password-protected access to literary materials and allows for secure transmission of book proposals and full manuscripts among literary agents, publishers and authors. RightsCenter was officially launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair and recently completed its first round of investments. Brockman predicts that

RightsCenter will be a billion-dollar business within the next eight to 10 months as it migrates to other industries.

In the next year, Brockman will continue to ask the big questions, including what he promises will be a more interesting take on "millennium fever." His literary agency, which specializes in the technology-centric "third culture" writing found in the Edge, continues to thrive. Brockman claims that his agency—which was paperless even before RightsCenter—is the most successful non-fiction literary agency in the world. And with all that networking going on, Brockman will still have time to eat—and network, of course - at his annual Billionaire's Digerati Dinner, a "who's who" of the cyberworld.

UPS In a networked world, Brockman's personal network is hard to beat
DOWNS RightsCenter needs a management team
BOTTOM LINE If you don't know John Brockman, you're probably not worth knowing
PREDICTION RightsCenter files for IPO, Steve Case and Bill Gates get into "it" at the Digerati Dinner