Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun

There, I said it.

I sat down and read all the Red Hat papers. Yes, I was subject to a 180-day lockup. Do you have any idea how long 180 days can be when you're a first-time millionaire on paper?

Now I had a new sport (or a sport, period): keeping track of Red Hat's stock price, which continued escalating during the following six months. It went up gradually and jumped a few times and just grew and grew. At one point, Red Hat even split once more. At best, I was worth $5 million from the options.

Red Hat started relatively low and inched skyward as Wall Street, in the throes of its love affair with anything even remotely related to the Internet, "discovered" Linux. We were the Flavor of the Month during the cold-weather months at the end of 1999. Investment pundits on television and in the general press couldn't get enough of this crazy little operating system that was promising to upend Microsoft. My phone rang constantly. It all reached a stunning climax with the VA Linux IPO on December 9th. That was an endorsement beyond anyone's expectation.

Larry Augustin and I went up to San Francisco to be on site at the offices of First Boston Credit Suisse for the IPO. I was wearing what I always wear: a freebie T-shirt and sandals. We brought our wives and kids. It was a crazy scene with the toddlers running around among the buttoned-down investment bankers.

It all happened so suddenly. Figures streamed across monitors indicating that VA Linux, on the first day of trading, was selling in the $300-a-share range. This was unheard of. Even if we hadn't seen the figures, we would have known it was a record because of the way the investment bankers were hypnotized by CNN and the Bloomberg financial channel. For his part, Larry was his usual cool self. I don't think he batted an eyelash during the whole thing. I wouldn't know for sure, because I was busy chasing after my daughters.

Even the dwellers of Madagascar's rainforests probably were aware of how rich it all made Larry. He had driven up to San Francisco without much of a financial net worth, and drove back to Silicon Valley worth something on the order of $1.6 billion. And, as the press continually pointed out, he was still in his twenties.

For my part, I had been given a stock grant and options for shares in VA Linux. As with Red Hat, I couldn't sell shares for six months. But unlike Red Hat, which climbed steadily, VA Linux had nowhere to go but down. After its record-setting opening day, the stock dropped steadily for a year, reaching a low point of 6.62. Partly, the stock was a victim of the market correction that hurt most technology stocks that April. But also, Linux's stint as Flavor of the Month had ended with the spring thaw. Because of the VA Linux lockup period, I couldn't take advantage of the hyper market while it lasted. It was psychologically much harder to follow the company than it had been to follow Red Hat, to know that every night when I crawled into bed, I would wake up with a lessened financial net worth.

But I still felt like the luckiest bastard alive.

Linus drives up to my Sausalito office one evening in January. After snickering about my use of a Macintosh and a non-Linux operating system, he sits down to read the first draft of a lengthy preface I have written, which is in the first person, from his perspective. I sit maybe two inches away. The only noise Linus makes is when he trips over a line about how he never expected to find himself the only global superstar Finland has produced other than Jean Sibelius and Nikki the Reindeer. After maybe ten minutes, he finishes the preface and his only comment is: "Boy, you write long sentences." we spend a couple of hours making the sentences shorter and changing some of the language to words that he would actually use, and learning how to collaborate at work, having already proven that we are champs at goofing off collaboratively. We eventually ditched that preface.

Then Linus attempts, unsuccessfully, to improve the resolution on my flat screen. It was last year's state-of-the-art computer screen, and I thought of it as something of a status symbol. "How can you read from this thing?" he asks. He is unsuccessful at improving the resolution quality to meet his standards. Then he takes out a piece of paper and starts drawing diagrams and explaining how monitors work. At some point I say, "Hey, let's grab some sushi."

"This money thing is driving me crazy," he says. "Just the waiting for the lock-up period to end. It's like having lots of money but not having lots of money. It's on my mind constantly."

I order saki. He orders fruit juice because he is driving.

"Up until now, we almost never had more than $5,000 in our checking account. Except for some stocks and stuff we have for savings that we can't touch, that was all the money we had to spend. So now I have all this money on paper and--"

"Like how much money? A couple of million?"

"How about $20 million? That's what the stock from the VA Linux IPO is worth, as long as it doesn't drop. But I don't have access to the money until the lock-up period in six months. No, now it's five months."

"I don't see the problem here. You have to wait five months before buying a big house? I don't mean to be unsympathetic but. . ."

"Hey, well it seems at first that it's enough money that we should be able to buy any house we want. But we need a house with five bedrooms and we want enough land around the house so we can hear animals and I've been playing pool everyday at work so we'll need a room that's big enough to hold a pool table. And we want a separate unit for when Tove's parents visit, or so we can have my sister's friends come from Finland and stay a few months and help us with the kids. It's funny, we had Patricia when we moved from Finland to the states. We had Daniela when we moved from our apartment to the duplex, and. .."

"So you guys are working on having another kid?"

"Well, we're letting things happen naturally."

"Where I come from, you pronounce that, 'We're trying to have another kid,' dude."

"Okay. So we'll need more space and we've gone to a couple of Open Houses and the houses available are unbelievably expensive. I mean you get $20 million and it's like, wow, I can afford any house in the world. But we looked at a house for $1.2 million in Woodside that had no land and was really trashy. The best house we saw was for $5 million. But if you have $20 million, you've gotta figure that half of that goes to taxes.

Then you have $10 million to work with, but the taxes on a house like that could be like $60,000 a year, so you've got to set money aside for that. And I don't know. This is going to be the only time in my life when I'll get so much money and I don't want to overextend myself and not be able to afford to live in the house. And we don't want to have a mortgage hanging over our heads."

"I'm not feeling sorry for you. First of all, you'll probably do okay if Transmeta does okay in an IPO. "

"Yeah. But I'm only a junior engineer, so I'm not getting that much stock. And my salary isn't that high. "

"Linus, you could go to any venture capitalist in this town and get anything you wanted. .."

"I guess you're right."

This is the place where I slip in my golden rules. Number One is: "Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you." If you follow that rule, you'll always know how to behave in any situation. Number Two is: "Be proud of what you do." Number Three: "And have fun doing it."

Of course, it's not always easy to be proud and have fun. A month before the VA Linux IPO, I accomplished neither when I delivered a keynote speech at the 1999 Comdex Show in Las Vegas. Comdex, as most everyone knows, is the biggest, baddest trade show known to humanity. For most of a week, the sleepy town of Las Vegas, Nevada, becomes a magnet for every conceivable high-tech product that could possibly be peddled and the masses of people who would buy and sell them. It's the only time of the year when you can roll down the window of a Las Vegas cab, lean out, and ask a random hooker strutting past: "What time is the keynote?" -- and she'll know the answer.