10 years in the internet industry

Filed in archive Technology on August 26, 2005

Auren looks back into the early days of his exceptional career in starting and selling technology businesses in Northern California:

"Ten years ago this month, Scott bonds and I started Kyber Systems. The reason: I had run out of money.

We were both engineers at UC Berkeley and we both had to pay our way through college. Having run a business in high school, I had the luxury of not having to work during my first few years in college (and only working during the summers). Instead, I was able to major in social life, student government, and beer. But as I was closing in on my senior year I realized that I was rapidly depleting my savings.

Around that same time, like everyone else around me, I started using Mosaic and then Netscape ... spending all my free time surfing the newish world wide web. Scott and I decided that we'd help political candidates create web pages ... of course, that was a really bad business model and it didn't last too long. Our first and only political client was San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan (who was running for re-election and lost to Willie Brown). The San Francisco Chronicle did write some very nice things about our web page and I met some terrific people on the campaign (including working closely with Mike Farrah who is now the political advisor to Gavin Newsom). "