When Hotwired - Wired magazine's online effort and now, arguably, the most profitable pure cyberspace business - first kicked off its web effort in earnest, four of its seven initial "advertisers" turned to Organic Online to conceive, create and manage their virtual identities. That initial tally of Club Med, AT&T, MCI, and Volvo represents a client list any other web design studio worldwide has yet to match. Growth has been fast and furious since then, too. More recently, work for Saturn Cars, Netscape, SkyTel, Microsoft, Macromedia, Advertising Age and Montgomery Securities, among others, has only served to extend Organic's lead as cyberspace's first web studio Major. 20 additional projects are currently under development.

Self-funded from its inception, Organic owes much of the impetus for its electrifying start to Brian Behlendorf, its co-founder and chief technologist. Behlendorf was responsible for taking Wired magazine online in September 1993, in the pre-Mosaic era when text, and the occasional paltry image, typified web-based distribution of data; and when the Wired web server was one of less than 100 in use worldwide. Behlendorf's continuing efforts to grow and define a business model for the launch of Hotwired, Wired's formal creation of an online entity separate from the magazine, provided an unparalleled vantage point from which to determine why and how it made sense for companies to take to the web. By the time Hotwired was ready to launch, Behlendorf and his partnership team of Jonathan Nelson, Matthew Nelson and Cliff Skolnick were one of the few groups capable of selling and delivering potential Hotwired advertisers on the promise of an effective web presence.

In Organic's sprawling, fast-expanding workspace in the heart of San Francisco's multi-media gulch, a relaxed and amiable Behlendorf took time out to reflect upon the state of the industry. His easy manner belies a fierce intelligence married to a prescient understanding of the web, its technologies and politics.

Remarks noted:

"Imagine a Norman Rockwell painting. A family of four sitting in front of their television on a Saturday night, cruising the web, checking out a site, perhaps the Smithsonian, or a vacation "catalog." That's exactly where we're headed. It's simply a question of the bandwidth coming up to par with television. That will happen very soon."

"We've got Apache on a 486/66 running BSDI, taking 500K hits a day and the machine's running at about 20% capacity. Not even breaking into a sweat."

"We're already seeing a constant search for control on the part of consumers, or rather, the constant search for a new point of view. The web has allowed 20 million people a glimpse of the future. It will be difficult to take that away. Of course, there's nothing about the design of the Internet that would prevent people taking control, other than the fact that there is no precedent for cutting off connectivity at the borders. But there does seem to be something fundamental about the right of an IP packet to go where it's going. [smiling] IP packets have an inalienable right to get where they want to go."

"We explicitly try and use stuff not-invented-here, here."

"Digicash could ultimately be far more destabilizing than any concerns over decency. On the one hand, once you make it trivially easy for people to pay a fraction of a cent for pages served, that will finally make it possible to create great content without advertisers. The prospect is enormously liberating. Against that, what happens when everyone starts issuing their own money and others start banking on the trust? The social ramifications of connectivity really get very interesting when people start throwing money around. Of course, governments will want to control. It will be very interesting to watch: the barter economy taken to the nth degree."

"Saturn's marketing is based around community, which made it a natural for us."

"Java is pretty much the only web technology that has deserved the hype. It really is a revolution. It moves us away from the client-server model once and for all. In a true distributed object system, objects need to be more than static objects, they need to have some intelligence about them. I see the barrier between local and network machines blurring completely. It will transform the nature of software use and distribution, of course. People will have access to constantly updated, metered software. Users will use whatever they want, whenever they want it. The latest versions. I think you're going to see the Egghead Software companies of this world out of the way."