Citizen Plain
By Jeff Pelline
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM
People are often intimidated by Will Hearst's name, but rarely by his presence.
A forceful public speaker, Hearst is mild, almost shy in conversation, glancing down frequently at his loafered feet. Hearst wears the inescapable mantle of his grandfather's legend and his family money as though he's a little embarrassed by his good fortune. If the money and the attention aren't luck enough, Hearst has recently found a way to parlay his lifelong passions, computers and newspapers, into a new career.
Hearst is now vice chairman of @Home, a start-up that last week began piping
Internet content to home PCs via cable television systems. @Home will compete with ISPs and telcos in the Internet-access wars. Hearst made his move from the old media to the new media last year when he left behind a decade-long stint as publisher of the Hearst Corporation's flagship newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, to become a partner of the Menlo Park venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He also still sits on the board of the media empire built by the William Randolph Hearst, the man who inspired the Orson Wells's epic Citizen Kane.
"I think he would have been in this Internet business," Hearst said of his grandfather. "He was in radio and television at the very beginning and in motion pictures when they were going into sound. You cannot be interested in the media and not be interested in the Internet in the 1990s."
Hearst's latest adventure is decidedly low tech. He's looking for a Tandoori oven to use at the family ranch in San Simeon, adjacent to the Hearst Castle. A barbecue fanatic, Hearst wouldn't mind installing one at home, too, on San Francisco's Russian Hill.
NEWS.COM: How did you get involved with @Home?
Hearst: I got involved because I was the new guy at Kleiner Perkins. Normally an entrepreneur comes to a venture capital firm and pitches an idea to get funding. This was a case where the firm had the idea, and management was going to be recruited to run the company. It's almost a tradition at Kleiner Perkins for partners to go in and run these companies to get them started, and then recruit somebody else to come in.
NEXT: The @Home experience
