Will Clemens seems like a wired guy. He is chief executive of an Internet company named Respond.com, a Web-shopping site in Silicon Valley. He is glued to his computer all day at work, owns a Motorola wireless phone and recently bought a BlackBerry pager.
But there’s one place where Clemens is decidedly unwired: at home.
Electricity doesn’t flow to most of the 29-year-old Web-head’s five-room house in this neighborhood overlooking Palo Alto and Mountain View. Clemens doesn’t own a working television set and doesn’t keep a stash of light bulbs. At night, he lives mostly by the light of several long-burning beeswax candles.
“It’s fine to come home and light a candle,” he says. “I can easily read in bed.”
Clemens is no Luddite, and he isn’t alone. A determined fringe of Silicon Valley executives and workers, immersed in technology by day, are pulling off their own personal little backlashes against their wired world.
“You have to be able to tune the Silicon Valley stuff out or you forget what’s going on in the rest of the world,” Clemens says. “And one way to do that is to eliminate things from your life.”
To distance themselves from the tech blitz, these part-time unwired ones are devising elaborate escape schemes.
Alay Desai, the 30-year-old chief technology officer of a Santa Clara, Calif., start-up called Stario.com, doesn’t have a computer or phone in his spartan apartment. The only objects are a small TV set and a sleeping bag. He refuses to buy a Palm organizer or a pager.
Desai’s one concession is a cell phone, which he acquired, he says, when “my business partners couldn’t get hold of me, so one of them went out and bought me one.”
His colleagues say they still can’t reach him because he turns the phone off at home or just doesn’t answer.
Moses Ma, chief executive of Bizbots.com, a San Francisco software startup, moved to ease his tech overload last year by holding conversation hours with his staff to discuss “Internet burnout.”
The gadget-free gatherings evolved into poetry-reading sessions every three months in a theater. “We drink wine, wear black, read our poems,” says Ma, “and nobody brings their cell phones.”
Other Silicon Valley executives are fleeing to the rural life. Louis Rosenberg, chief executive of tech start-up Immersion Corp., moved himself and his wife to an isolated ranch 30 miles outside bustling San Jose two years ago.
Eschewing the luxuries of their former suburban lifestyle, the couple decided to forgo running water. Instead, they rely on a well in their yard. They also raise sheep, goats and ducks at their new home.
The 31-year-old Rosenberg starts off every morning cleaning the small barn and feeding the animals.
“We wanted to live in a place that was very different from where we worked,” he says.
Carol Holst, the program director of Seeds of Simplicity, a national nonprofit organization, says that traditionally the simplicity movement is made up of environmentalists, activists and post-hippies, but “a large number of high-achievers are sick of the rat race,” and more people in high-tech jobs are attending simplicity conferences.
At a February confab in Silicon Valley, she says, half of the 400 attendees were dot-com executives.
For Clemens, the electricity-challenged CEO, being unwired at home is a relatively recent condition. Until late last year, the house he rents still had the basic utility. But unlike the area’s typically plush homes, Clemens’s ramshackle house was built 50 years ago, and things frequently went wrong.
The propane gas heating hasn’t worked for several years, and the phone lines are faulty.
In late December, the house took a turn for the worse. The incessant winter rains blew a fuse and the electricity went out, he says, followed quickly by the phone service. The house was plunged into an incommunicado darkness.
Clemens’s girlfriend of nearly three years, Jessica Parsley, urged him to restore the power. But swamped with running Respond.com, a 100-person startup that he co-founded in December 1998, Clemens put off the task.
“I was so busy with work,” says Clemens, a former investment banker who currently earns a salary in the high five figures and has an ownership interest in the company. “Plus, I don’t need more stimulation at home. I already get plenty of that at work.”
Parsley thought otherwise. One of the nights she visited with no lights, no heat and no phone service, she found herself shivering in three sweaters and a hat. Parsley, a project director at environmental group Rainforest Action Network, couldn’t work on the computer that lay dormant in the home office.
“This is not how people live,” she remembers saying to Clemens. “Get some heat and electricity back. You’re a CEO.”
She won the argument — sort of. An electrician arrived soon afterward to restore power to the bathroom and office. But the electricity stayed off in the rest of the house.
The half-plugged-in state “doesn’t bother me,” says Clemens.
It does sometimes get in the way of work in a dot-com arena that expects executives to be on call 24 hours a day.
Several months ago, as Respond.com was closing another round of venture-capital financing, the young CEO needed to join a 10 p.m. conference call with his directors. But without juice at home and with a nonworking phone line, making a connection was impossible.
Clemens ended up having to drive down the hills to Respond.com’s office, which at the time was 30 minutes away.
“It would’ve been nice to have a fully equipped home office at the time,” he admits.
Clemens’s mother, Sue Ann Connaughton, a librarian at the U.S. Department of Transportation in Salem, Mass., says that, at first, she thought her son was playing a practical joke on her when he told her he didn’t have power.
Now “I never call him at home,” she sighs. “I just send e-mail. Usually, I hear back from Will within a couple of days.”
