behind the curve of grandparents all across
middle America? “I have this other really bad
trait,” boasts Nguyen. “I never use anyone else’s
products but my own. I never do a competitive
matrix ever. My entire life, I’ve never done it. I
could care less what other people make. I have
no interest whatsoever.”
Kuch, Nguyen’s handler, is sitting by his side
during this exchange, and he rushes to massage
his boss’s confession. “I think you get it by os-
mosis because all of us push it to you,” says Kuch,
who resembles a young, tan Michael Douglas.
Nguyen steamrolls over the suggestion. “I
don’t ever listen to any of it,” he grins. “I mean,
I literally don’t think there’s anything to be
learned from other people’s stuff.”
That is exactly what happened with Color,
which Nguyen never even bothered to test. “I’m
not here to practice. I’m here to play,” says
Nguyen, citing Apple as a company that puts
out breakthrough products that haven’t been
beta-tested endlessly. “That’s Bill’s entrepre-
neurial spirit,” says Satish Dharmaraj, who
cofounded OneBox.com with Nguyen and is
now a general partner at Redpoint Ventures. “If
he’s going to take over a sector, he doesn’t care
what others are doing, he’s going to build the
best thing his mind can build.” But just because
Nguyen sold his company to Steve Jobs doesn’t
mean he is Steve Jobs.
Investor Kedrosky says entrepreneurs like
Nguyen manage to get away with this hubris
because it reinforces their auras as visionary
entrepreneurs. “The fallback of the visionary is
they say, ‘I don’t need to talk to people because
there’s no point in doing focus groups on revolutionary products,’ ” says Kedrosky. “But that’s
such a false dichotomy. No one is suggesting
you make all of your decisions based on how
people respond to surveys.” Says Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup: “The thing that requires
the most courage in entrepreneurship is being
willing to get the actual feedback about your
vision and then still do it anyway. But it’s easier
to raise money and convince people you’re a
genius with an imaginary story and no business
plan, versus having few customers and small
results. It’s a psychological thing.”
In building that myth, Nguyen was aided
and abetted by his investors. Believe it or not,
they never insisted that Nguyen test the product
beyond their inner circle. “The biggest mistake
we made was that we all used the product and
loved it,” says Bain’s Krupka, Color’s first inves-
tor. Remember, Color was based on proximity;
when the investment team tested the app with
one another, they never encountered the “lone-
liness problem” that disappointed those early
real-world users. Color board member Ralston,
who was Yahoo’s chief product officer before
serving as Lala’s CEO, now concedes, “I never
thought it was that easy to use.” And while the
press release for Color’s launch quoted Sequoia
partner Doug Leone (“Once or twice a decade, a
company emerges from Silicon Valley that can
change everything. Color is one of those com-
panies”), now no one at Sequoia will comment.
The first time Nguyen ever pitched a venture
capitalist it was for a product he had never heard
of. It was 1998, Nguyen was 27, and an entrepreneur had overheard him at a tech conference.
“Three weeks later, he calls me and says, ‘I have
a meeting tomorrow with Kleiner Perkins, do
you want to pitch?’ I’m like, Well, what’s the
idea? ‘We’re going to send faxes over the Internet.’ I’m like, Okay, I can pitch that,” recalls
Nguyen. “I never prepared a business model,
nothing, literally just pitched the idea this guy
told me in the parking lot.” That night Nguyen
went home, changed the name of the company
from Ziptel to OneBox, expanded the company’s
business to web-based “unified messaging,”
went to another VC for backing, and, 18 months
later, sold the startup for $850 million—two
months before the dotcom crash.
Since then, Nguyen has been more comfortable pitching VCs than he is mingling at a dinner party. “I don’t like cocktail parties,” squirms
Nguyen, who oddly likes to refer to himself as
a recluse. “At the end of the day, what am I going
to get out of it? I’ve known this person for seven
“Bill’s like an airplane,” says a
fellow VC. “He really knows
how to take off a company
and he knows how to land a
company, and in the middle
he needs a pilot.”
years, we don’t really know each other well,
they’ve bounced from company to company,
and I do the same thing—what do we have to
talk about?” Nguyen’s reclusion is of an atten-
tion getter’s version. He tells stories about
throwing private concerts and of every year
going to Bonnaroo music festival, only to hide
in some dark corner. While showing me around
Color’s space, he takes me to the basement where
his new office will be, a cubbyhole that only
someone of Bill’s childlike size could crawl into.
Despite his relentless charm, he professes not
to care much for relationships, except for those
with his two adopted sons and his wife, the
latter the subject of an almost algorithmic strat-
egy that preceded even their first date, back
when he was 19 and she 16. “I had this whole
theory,” he says. “It was, I think I should meet
someone as early in my life as possible, so that
we would just get to know each other really well.
That was my master plan.” They married six
years later in Maui. When Nguyen told a col-
league at Apple that he was going to start a new
kind of social network, the man “started laugh-
ing,” says Nguyen. “He goes, ‘You have no
friends. What are you doing?’ ”
But pitching a room full of VCs? “Piece of cake.
Oh, that’s just like Fight Club, I’m on. Anytime
there’s dollars involved, it’s like, game on,” says
Nguyen of raising the jaw-dropping $25 million
from Sequoia. “It’s funny because a lot of people,
they think it’s an achievement. I could care less.
I could have gotten it from 10 other places. It didn’t
matter.” Cameron Myhrvold, a venture capitalist
at Ignition Partners who invested in Seven Net-
works, the only Nguyen startup besides Color
that hasn’t been sold to another company, raves
about Nguyen’s ability to raise money: “He’s kind
of a magician, a wizard.”
Nguyen has been cultivating his sales skills
since age 16, when he decided to strike out on
his own. He had a tenuous relationship with his
parents, Vietnamese immigrants who raised
him in low-income housing. “I grew up not want-
ing to be poor. I always worried about that,” says
Nguyen, who describes his enterprising drive
as a stark contrast to his “conservative Asian
engineering parents.” During high school, he
hustled as a used-car salesman during the week
while throwing warehouse raves on the week-
ends, which he says earned him upward of
$5,000 a pop. The money paid for his Houston
apartment, tuition at a Jesuit private school,
and, eventually a Porsche. “His personality
wasn’t for everyone back then, especially author-
ity figures like teachers,” says Nguyen’s close
