Joe Firmage

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 in November 1998 Robert Shaw took over as CEO while the merger was under way. Initially Firmage took the title of chief strategist, then left the company in January 1999, with a generous severance package.

Extraterrestrial and astrophysics interests

Around the time of Firmage's departure from USWeb, extensive publicity was 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). Word began to circulate about his belief in extraterrestrial intelligences, which was the subject of a book he wrote called "The Truth". Published online at www.thewordistruth.org, it contended that extraterrestrials had appeared on Earth periodically to help spur human technological advancement. For example, important elements of modern technology were explained as deriving from an alien spacecraft supposedly recovered from the 1947 Roswell UFO incident. Firmage also related his own contact with an otherworldly figure, shortly before the USWeb IPO, with whom he discussed space travel. “...he has sunk more than $3 million into establishing Project Kairos (after an ancient Greek word meaning "the right or opportune moment") to prepare mankind for aliens.” The book was published in 2001.

Tim Sebastian of BBC’s HARDtalk interviewed Mr. Firmage about his alien encounter several years after publication of “The Truth”.

Pursuing these interests, Firmage founded a group called the International Space Sciences Organization. In October 1999, his organization was reportedly sponsoring a private meeting to discuss propulsion technologies in space, which attracted attention from a NASA investigator concerned that proprietary technologies might be discussed there.

Projects after USWeb

After leaving USWeb, Firmage's next business project was known as Intend Change, launched together with USWeb co-founder Toby Corey, and also supported by the investment of an undisclosed amount from USWeb itself. Intend Change also went into the consulting business, this time as an advisor to new Internet businesses seeking venture capital. In exchange for its services, Intend Change would take a ten percent equity stake in the client, which an analyst described as "pretty significant." The company did not plan to contribute any capital for these equity stakes, but Firmage and his partners indicated they might invest personal capital or help arrange funding with Intend Change's own venture capital partners. They also sought commitments from startups to set aside stock and dedicate it to charitable causes, saying they would donate half their equity in Intend Change to unspecified nonprofit agencies.

Prior to the dissolution of Intend Change in 2001, Firmage began working with Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, and her Cosmos Studios organization on a concept known as "Project Voyager," which would develop a web portal focused on science-oriented entertainment. They raised $23 million for the project from the same venture capital firms that supported Intend Change. The site was launched in 2001 at www.onecosmos.net and emphasized the use of three-dimensional navigation over text hyperlinks. The venture planned to draw content from the Sagan-founded Planetary Society while helping to support that organization and the SETI@home project in their other endeavors. However, it struggled to secure funding to remain operational.

Firmage founded ManyOne Networks in 2002 as the successor to OneCosmos with the intention to reshape the content landscape of the Web. With another $10 million raised from angel investors, in 2005 he announced the purpose of ManyOne: to create a "Digital Universe", which he called "the PBS of the Web." This would consist of a number of subject-area portals, serving as "an ad-free alternative" to large portals such as AOL or Yahoo. It would also partner with nonprofit organizations to sell Internet and Web services The first elements of the Digital Universe to emerge include the Earth Portal (http://earthportal.org) and its Encyclopedia of Earth (http://www.eoearth.org). Some have described it as Wikipedia "with adult supervision."

Firmage has written extensively on “third millennium theories” of economics and physics. In 2006 Firmage released what may be the first "open source film" about the history of the Cosmos, Earth and human society called I Am Awakening. In pursuit of one of the film's motivations—to inspire children to seek peace in the Middle East—it has been translated into Persian, Arabic, Hebrew as well as Spanish. In May, 2008, the web site it had been on, IAmAwakening.org, changed ownership and the film was no longer there.

Return to USWeb

In October 2011, USWeb issued a press release saying that Firmage had rejoined the company, now called USWeb Central Worldwide, as the Chairman of its Board of Directors.