The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth: Entrepreneurship for Weirdos, Misfits, and World Dominators

13Connect with Your Freaks

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a boy growing up in the middle of Maine. Most of the kids in my neighborhood wanted to talk about Van Halen versus Led Zeppelin, Mustang versus Camaro, and the Red Sox versus the Yankees. These were the conversations available to me—which was fine, except that I already knew the answers: Van Halen, Camaro, Sox (but didn't much care about the last one, because the Sox hadn't won a series in over 80 years). These topics just weren't that interesting to me.

I was into Batman and Star Wars and anything weird—whatever my friends and neighbors and relatives weren't into. Worse, I was into old stuff like the really classic sci fi that my dad and grandfather introduced me to. And I could talk to my dad about that, but you know, when you're a kid, that doesn't seem like the coolest choice in the universe (although most of us grow up to learn otherwise).

Flash-forward to my high school years, and the family owns its first Macintosh—the boxy one colored like a manila envelope. My dad bought a modem, to connect the computer to other computers. Then he introduced me to bulletin board services (BBSs). I'll presume that most of you don't know about BBS stuff, because it's long before AOL and CompuServ and Prodigy, and long before the Internet as you know it.

Imagine a program that is like Facebook, but only one person can use it at a time (when two or three people-at-a-time BBSs were developed, it was like the future ...