Joe Firmage - Early Business Career: Serius, Novell, USWeb

Early Business Career: Serius, Novell, USWeb

Firmage attended the University of Utah, where his father was a law professor, on a physics scholarship but only stayed through his sophomore year. In 1989 he started his first company, Serius, which grew out of a Macintosh program he had written for his mother's greeting card business. Serius produced developer tools for object-oriented programming. The company received funding from several sources, including Novell, which ultimately bought Serius for $24 million in 1993. Its product then became the basis for AppWare, while Firmage became vice president of strategic planning for Novell's NetWare division.

Firmage left Novell in 1995 when the company decided to focus its business on networking products. (Later, Firmage would explain the departure as a disagreement over Novell's strategy in selling its Unix licensing rights and a failure to compete with Microsoft in the network operating system market.) His brother, Edwin J. Firmage, started a new company, Network Multimedia, to buy the AppWare technology back from Novell. The product was eventually renamed Microbrew, but the company disappeared after a few years.

Meanwhile Firmage, together with two other former Novell executives, Toby Corey and Sheldon Laube and two other outside executives, Jim Heffernan and Ken Campbell, also founded USWeb during this period. Originally a Web design company, USWeb grew with a series of acquisitions into an Internet consulting firm, following a strategy of buying businesses with expertise in corporate intranets and extranets. USWeb stock became publicly traded in December 1997, as the company sought to achieve critical mass in an atmosphere Firmage acknowledged was an Internet bubble.

With Firmage as CEO, USWeb continued its expansion and ultimately merged with a rival Web consulting firm, CKS Group. Firmage was originally announced as CEO of the merged company, but was replaced by Robert Shaw in November 1998 while the merger was under way. Initially Firmage took the title of chief strategist, then left the company in January 1999, forced out (though with a generous severance package) because of corporate concerns about the extensive publicity generated by his campaign to prove the existence of UFOs--a campaign that led to him being nicknamed the Fox Mulder of Silicon Valley (a reference to the television show The X Files).