Jay Adelson

Internet entrepreneur

• Born: September 7, 1970
• Place of Birth: Detroit, Michigan

Introduction

Entrepreneur Jay Adelson founded several successful and influential internet companies, positioning him as a key player in the development of the Information Age. Among the ventures he developed were the datacenter provider Equinix, the internet television channel Revision3, the social news site Digg, the location services provider SimpleGeo, the productivity service Opsmatic, and the venture capital firm Center Electric. His influence was highlighted in 2003 when he was among the industry representatives called to testify before the US House of Representatives' Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies on the role of the private sector in securing the internet. He was also named onTimemagazine's list of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2008.

Early Life

Jay Steven Adelson was born on September 7, 1970, in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in the suburb of Southfield. His parents, Sheldon and Elaine Adelson, were schoolteachers during his early childhood; his father later inherited a small electric supply store in Detroit that he strove to build into a sustainable business. His parents lost both the business and their house during a recession that hit Detroit hard in the late 1980s. Adelson would later acknowledge that this experience shaped his fiscal philosophy and his belief that it is important to grow a business slowly to the point of sustainability, rather than chase billions in income.

In 1988, Adelson graduated from Cranbrook Schools, a private college preparatory school located in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. That autumn he enrolled in Boston University, and he graduated in 1992 with a degree in film and broadcasting, having minored in computer science. After graduation, Adelson moved to San Rafael, California, because he had an unpaid internship as a sound engineer at Skywalker Sound. To earn money, Adelson relied on his college minor to land temporary tech jobs. He had a friend who was working with the company Netcom, and when he was offered a job there in 1993, Adelson took it.

Life's Work

Begun in nearby San Jose in 1988, Netcom was a start-up put together by Bob Rieger and Bill Gitow to provide dial-up shell accounts to college students who wanted to be able to access their universities' networks when off campus. Shell accounts are accounts on remote servers that provide a command-line interface to a "shell," that is, software built around something, in this case the network connection. Shell accounts were more common before the World Wide Web became popular, because their interface is text-only. Web access was available beginning in 1992 through a text-only browser called Lynx, and other services could be accessed through programs like Telnet (or its more secure cousin SSH), FTP (for "file transfer protocol," to transfer files to and from servers), Pine (an e-mail client), tin or trn (newsgroup clients), IRC (for "internet relay chat," a group chat program), or talk (an instant-messaging program). Netcom also provided e-mail accounts to its customers, with an @netcom.com address.

Although the academic and scientific communities formed the traditional user base of the internet when Netcom began, the company soon expanded its customer base and found that the demand for internet access was higher than expected. Service extended beyond the academic community, and soon beyond the San Francisco area. The staff was expanded, and a Windows program called NetCruiser was developed to provide a graphical user interface (GUI) with the internet service provided, in lieu or in addition to the command-line interface of the shell account. T1 accounts (faster-speed internet access through dedicated lines, such as cable) were soon offered. In late 1995, toward the end of Adelson's tenure, the company expanded into Canada as it grew to become the world's largest internet service provider (ISP) with the largest territory of coverage.

Adelson was hired as part of the staff expansion, initially as an installation coordinator. He soon became the director of network operations and was responsible for Netcom's network. He was in charge of the network at the time that hacker Kevin Mitnick was tracked down by computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura and journalist John Markoff, after Mitnick used Netcom's network to access Shimomura's computer illegally, leading to an arrest that inspired a film and several books. Netcom also made the news during Adelson's tenure when the ISP was sued for copyright infringement for providing service to a an electronic bulletin board system (BBS) that hosted documents alleged to infringe on the copyright held by the Church of Scientology, part of Scientology's ongoing effort to control access to its internal documents and prevent leaks onto the internet.

Adelson left Netcom toward the end of 1996, shortly after getting married, and was hired by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He joined the team at DEC's Network System Laboratory that was developing the Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX). Internet exchange points are part of the neutral internet infrastructure used by ISPs to send traffic back and forth between their networks. PAIX was eventually spun off into PAIX, Inc., renamed the Peering and Internet Exchange, acquired by AboveNet, and sold to Switch and Data when AboveNet declared bankruptcy. Switch and Data was acquired by Equinix (which Adelson founded) in 2010. Adelson worked both on scaling the exchange point's operations to internet traffic and building its data center.

Adelson left DEC along with his supervisor, Albert M. Avery IV, to found Equinix in the summer of 1998. As chief technology officer and cofounder, Adelson continued in the same kind of work he had performed at the Network System Laboratory, responsible for the company's internet exchange points and data centers as well as its research and development and patent generation. Although it was his technical expertise that he contributed to the venture, he proved instrumental in funding as well, raising capital in several private equity rounds prior to Equinix's August 2000 initial public offering (IPO). The Equinix business model was to provide data centers to meet the demands of a rapidly growing internet, and the IPO in the midst of the dot-com boom raised nearly $300 million. Like PAIX, the Internet exchanges provided by Equinix were network-neutral, meaning that no network received favorable treatment. When the dot-com bubble burst, Equinix was one of the survivors, and it bought up, at a discount, many of the surplus data centers left behind as dot-com businesses failed. It was able to prosper when many other companies in the industry were disappearing, and it was the best-performing stock on the NASDAQ from 2003 to 2004.

During this period, Adelson testified before the US House of Representatives' Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies and worked extensively with the government in its inquiries into the nature of cyberspace threats and vulnerabilities. The work reportedly exhausted him.

Equinix grew into a company with more than one thousand employees, a growth attributed to its flexibility and efficiency in creating "ecosystems" for different types of business customers, including an ecosystem of data centers and related services for the prosperous financial industry, designed to meet its needs. The company took advantage of the surplus of postboom data centers and used many of them for data colocation, the off-site storage of data for businesses like Microsoft, Google, and major banks. The boom in cloud computing was a boon to Equinix, with other companies using its data centers to back up much of their clouds for safekeeping. In addition to offering simple data storage, Equinix allowed companies to outsource their information technology functions.

Adelson left Equinix in October 2005, a few months after starting the privately held companies Digg (in February) and Revision3 (in March). Digg was a social news website designed by Dan Ries for Adelson, Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, and Ron Gorodetzky. Rose and Adelson had met when Rose was interviewing Adelson for TechTV's Screen Savers show (which, following TechTV's merger with G4, became Attack of the Show). Rose put up the initial investment in Digg while Adelson acted as CEO, provided mentorship based on his experiences with Equinix, and raised a round of venture capital, after which he left Equinix to focus on the two start-ups full time. The offices were established in San Francisco despite Adelson's residence in New York at the time.

Adelson also became CEO and chairman of the board of Revision3, cofounded with Rose, Gorodetzky, Dan Huard, David Prager, and Keith Harrison. The name of the company referred to the third "revision" of television delivery, of which broadcast and cable were the first and second. Revision3 was founded to produce and distribute special-interest television shows (reflecting the increasingly narrow audience of any given show over the course of television history, from the age of three networks to the present day's diminished ratings expectations) for the web. Most of the employees were former TechTV employees Adelson met through Rose. Revision3 series had much in common with Screen Savers, as well as with the podcasts that were becoming popular. The flagship series, begun in July 2005, was Diggnation, hosted by Rose and Alex Albrecht (previous hosts of the Screen Savers), discussing stories from Digg. "Diggnation" had originally been proposed as the name for Digg.

Adelson stepped down as CEO in 2007 but continued serving as chair and hosting the Ask Jay show, answering viewer questions. Later Revision3 initiatives included a partnership with Gawker Media to produce video podcasts associated with the site, including the Lifehacker show and io9's We Come from the Future and the popular cooking show Epic Meal Time. (In 2012 Revision3was acquired by Discovery Digital Networks, and the site was closed in 2017.)

Adelson left Digg in April 2010 over disagreements about the direction of the site, which by then had experienced a decline in popularity. In November 2010, he became the CEO of SimpleGeo, Inc., replacing cofounder Matt Galligan; Galligan had founded the company with former Digg lead architect Joseph Stump, whom Adelson had advised. The company provides location-aware services to mobile app developers. Adelson became an adviser to the company in 2011 after it was acquired by Urban Airship.

In 2013 Adelson was among the founders of Opsmatic, which focused on monitoring cloud infrastructure to improve operations teams productivity. When the company went public in 2014 he moved away from an active role. Opsmatic was sold to the software analytics company New Relic in 2015. Meanwhile, Adelson had cofounded another company, Center Electric, in 2014. A venture capital firm, it focused on investments in early-stage technology companies involved in the "internet of things" (IoT). As of 2024, Adelson was also the non-executive director of Megaport, a platform that gives customers access to elastic interconnection services that align with cloud-based models.

Personal Life

In 1994, while working for Netcom, Adelson met Brenda Shea. They were married in June 1996 and had three children together. Unlike many individuals associated with the dot-com boom, Adelson never made accumulating a fortune his goal. He has said that his career choices were guided by the long-term effect of his work and his desire to pursue projects about which he felt passionate. In 2008 he was named to Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People in the world.

Bibliography

Grossman, Lev. "The 2008 Time 100: Builders and Titans—Jay Adelson." Time 5 May 2008: n. pag. Print. A profile of Adelson during Digg's peak.

Lacy, Sarah. Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0. New York: Gotham, 2008. Print. Lacy's Silicon Valley history includes a chapter on Adelson in the early twenty-first century.

Rafferty, Brian. "Jay Adelson: 2009 Time 100 Finalist." Time May 2009: n. pag. Print. Brief profile of Adelson a year after his first appearance in the Time 100, noting that the shine was gone from Digg's apple.

Sarno, David. "Digg Gets $28.7M Boost, Plans to Double Size, Go Global." Los Angeles Times 23 Sept. 2008: n. pag. Print. Coverage of Digg's rise from the company's peak period.

Shah, Syed. "Jay Adelson Biography." Business Mind, 11 June 2021, businessmind.blog/jay-adelson-biography/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.