Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble
Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble
What Bill Nguyen lacks in size at a wispy 135 pounds he makes up for in energy. The gregarious kind of energy that’s as light as the path of a Frisbee, lobbed back and forth forever. It’s the kind that has him walking into a room flailing his hands into the air like a juggler when he’s only just welcoming you to his office in downtown Palo Alto. It’s the kind that makes him gush like a teenage girl when his engineers develop a new feature for his app. It’s the kind that lets him stay up all night, fueled by CokeZero and 5-Hour Energy shots, so he can tinker with his new products and still play ping-pong with his developers in the morning, and generally pretend, as everyone else does in Silicon Valley, that he’s 20 years old, not the 40 he turned this year. It’s the kind that drives his wife nuts because he always talks his way out of traffic tickets. It’s the kind that in high school won him the title of president of the Black Student Union, despite not being, well, black. It’s the kind that, as Tyra Banks would say, puts his eyes in an almost perpetual Botox-frozen state of “smizing” (smiling with your eyes). “There’s a great thing Don King says,” smizes Nguyen, quoting his general outlook on life. “The fight’s only interesting if people show up.”I thought we were going to build a better Facebook,” says Nguyen. “[But] within 30 minutes I realized, Oh my God, it’s broken. Holy shit, we totally fucked up.” Photo by Mark MannThat certainly was the case last March when Nguyen (pronounced win) had locked in the attention of virtually every venture capitalist, entrepreneur, tech journalist, and app fiend. A little more than a year prior, Nguyen sold Lala, a cloud-based music service, to Apple for a reported $80 million. Depending on how you’re counting or who’s doing the telling, it was his third or seventh startup. After 10 months of working for Steve Jobs in Cupertino, Nguyen decided it was time to move on and launch another. “As I spent time there, I realized what Apple had done is they’d ushered in this post-PC world,” says Nguyen. “I started thinking a lot about how we would take advantage of that because this post-PC world was big.” He didn’t know what the company would be, but after more than 15 years in the Valley as a serial entrepreneur–including one startup he sold at age 29 for $850 million–it wouldn’t matter. With his new venture, Color, he would deploy his signature formula: Raise some venture backing (in this case, $16 million), hire the best engineers he could find (six of them), and throw them in a space (a 22,000-square-foot storefront) until they stumbled onto the big idea.Nguyen’s team spent the first few months toying with becoming a “Pixar for mobile,” a plan that would have started with an augmented-reality game called Furr, in which as “this furry creature you would basically colonize the world,” Nguyen explains, and “everywhere you went physically with your phone, buildings would emerge.” But after three months, he decided people wouldn’t want to walk through life with their phone in front of their eyes. Then in December, his team had a bold idea: a social network built for the mobile age. Color, as he eventually named it, would be a photo app that would not require a user name or password; instead, photos taken by other Color users within 150 feet would appear in your “elastic network,” a visual queue that would shift depending on people’s location and level of interaction. The premise was to create a mobile social network of people you didn’t know, rather than ones you already did. Nguyen believed Color would be the Facebook killer. “When Steve”–whom Nguyen refers to often by single name, like Madonna or Cher–“describes the post-PC world, all the things that were written in the PC world are almost doomed to fail.Everything that Facebook built as a technology was based on old technology. It was all around this premise that you’ll sit in front of this machine that has no idea who you are, so you have to tell it–who you are and what you like,” Nguyen told Fast Company in March before Color launched. “I do think Facebook is broken.” Nguyen is the only child of two engineers, but he isn’t one himself. He prides himself on being a “product guy.” He designed Color’s user interface and created new nomenclature around his revolutionary elastic network (“multilens,” “visual bulletin,” etc.). He shelled out $350,000 for the URL color.com and another $75,000 for colour.com. He hired some 30 more employees and scored two high-profile execs: Peter Pham, of Photobucket and BillShrink fame, was named Color’s president; two weeks before launch, D.J. Patil, formerly chief scientist for LinkedIn, was hired as head of product. For weeks, Nguyen and his VP of marketing and communications, John Kuch, made the rounds with tech press from San Francisco to New York, hyping Color with bombastic declarations. “IBM didn’t survive the PC, none of the PC guys survived the web, and I don’t think any of the web guys will survive the post-PC world,” Nguyen told Fast Company back then. (Never mind that IBM is a $100-billion-a-year company.) On March 23, his team released news that left the tech world in awe: Nguyen had raised another $25 million in venture backing from Sequoia Capital, bringing Color’s total to $41 million. For an app. Before it had even launched.