Silicon Valley's power lunch place: Bucks

So who are you? Jamis McNiven. I've been here 19 years at Buck's.

You're the owner of this restaurant?

I am.

You know, which is a goofy restaurant. We got to go to the bathrooms because there's a lot of interesting stuff back there.

Someone's actually doing a coffee table book of my stuff. He's cataloged 400 items. But, you know, I guess my greatest achievement so far is that Andy Sermer and Fortune once called me the Zsa Zsa Gabor of Silicon Valley, famous for no apparent reason. Yeah, it's true. There's no reason at all.

We're sitting at the. What is this table?

This little table here is where Steve Jurgen and Sabir Bahatia sat. And Sabeer said to Steve, free email. And that's really how Hotmail was founded. And they sold it for 400 million when that was a lot of money. You know, it's a chump change now for some of these companies.

Were you here at the table or were you still.

No, I wasn't.

No.

Steve told me after. And the reason I know specifically is a few months later, they wanted to do a recreation for cnn. So they sit here and they got CNN filming, and they're chatting and they. So in fact, that was, I guess, then when the dot com collapse happened, there was. Many TV crews have come in here, like almost 200. We mark them on the wall over here. So this Japanese TV crew came in and said, oh, we want to beat venture capitalists. I said, well, they're not going to talk to you. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they've all gone to ground, man. It's not going to happen. Oh, you must have something for me. Okay, we. We got a still picture of CNN filming the creation of Hotmail. Okay. So they shoot a video of a still of a recreation of this founding. And then later they sent me the video of them shooting the still, of CNN shooting the recreate. There were so many layers in there, it was just absolutely hilarious. So that's really what I collect. It's just irony.

So I think you're the first guy I know who's physically been on top of Steve Jobs, trying to get him to pay for something.

Basically, I was on top of him. All right.

Tell me, because you used to be.

I was a contractor. My second job ever was for Steve Jobs. And we did battle. I mean, I put this doorknob in for him and it rattled. And he didn't like the fact it rattled. And I said, just learn to live with it, Steve. It's just a rattling doorknob, you know. Well, we had a lot of fights like that. The designer designed his sauna too short to lie down in. I want to lie down in my sauna. We said, just sit up. What's the big problem? So every time we ran into a corner, we'd say, steve, just learn to live with it. So I think that invariably I did. You probably are somewhat responsible for making him so persnickety today. But, you know, the boy's a genius. He's done okay.

He's done all right.

I even use Apple products now. I can't keep the Outlook stuff going anywhere.

I give up.

PC.

So can you give us a little quick tour of this place? You got the weirdest stuff in Silicon Valley.

This here is a race car. We used to have this race called the Sandhill Challenge. So I had this idea that we could create this race and have venture capitalists and design wackos and attorneys build expensive cars and race for charity down Sand Hill Road. We could close the state highway. And damned if we didn't. We ran it for years. This is the trophy. Hard to get in the light here, but this is the coveted perpetual trophy of Toast and Moore. David all just kicked the pants out of Kleiner Perkins. There was some bad blood, you know, but Kleiner was very good about it.

Let's go back to the harmonica, because I want to get that.

Look, he's being interviewed.

So what's this?

What are we looking at here?

The picture.

Oh, this. This picture here of Warren Buffett giving me his wallet. Whenever you meet the world's richest man, ask him first.

I asked. I asked Bill Gates for some money.

He worked it over, so it was a problem. We were thinking of calling the place Triggers Orig, after Roy's horse, you know. But the Western theme quickly morphed into just wacky stuff. Dirigible. We got a copper surfboard up here. I went to Russia and got that spacesuit. And I built a lot of the stuff, too. I built the dirigible. I built the woman in the shell over here. I commissioned this Bengal hammerhead.

It's good to see you, Phil.

Oh, I'm so glad you spotted us.

Thank you.

Part F15. Oh, this car here is kind of fun. This is from the nineteen teens. They built a car that children were supposed to drive. It cost $200, and a Model T cost 300. So it didn't sell well, there's only 14 of those left, and one, ironically, is right next door. Nice car collection. A lot of great car collections in Woodside. In fact, Woodside is an extraordinary town. There's a lot of amazing creative people here. It's just a sleepy little village, but, you know, we have a lot of interesting people going on here. You know, we've been relatively undamaged by the recession here because still the venture guys are in here in the morning, the entrepreneurs. And they got all their laptops spread out. We were the first wireless hotspot here. We're the first place you can go for free WI fi. Really Airwave put in this big thing. They brought us a T1 line and big hoopla. They put 6 million into this company and they only signed up about 100 accounts, including some gas stations. This is real early on. And then there was this debate in the press. Shouldn't we be charging for it? I go charge. Who cares? You know, come on in and use it. Then we put this laptop over on a pile of encyclopedias.

Let's go see it.

No one ever notices. You know, I love this installation here. And it's. I mean, who uses encyclopedias? So we had this early free kiosk here so people could go online and they still use it. Most of the kids use it because everyone has his own device now. But for a while, adults would line up here and check their email frantically. We used to have truck drivers come in to suck down the wi fi. So we saw that thing just explode. It was so exciting. And, you know, different technologies.

You wrote a book, right?

I did write a book, yeah.

What was the book on?

Just the Pancake Guy, which was my memoir from about seven, eight years ago. I'm writing a new book now.

What are you writing about?

Well, I'm writing about the California coastline. The history of the California coastline as visualized from 500ft in my friend's dirigibles. They have this new airship over here and the Eureka. And we've been flying up and down the coast, taking pictures and just goofing around because it's like a private jet that goes 40 miles an hour. Yeah, it's really great. It's like the new Slough, you know, it's like when Larry built his latest yacht, he didn't put a helicopter deck on because we're too cool. We don't need to go that fast, Chris. You can land on the tennis court, you know, on the ship. I am serious too, because what. Paul Allen built a ship so big, there's a helicopter port at either end of the yacht. Because it's really a challenge to walk half A mile to the other end.

That's how you know you're really rich, right? I don't want to walk to the other side of my boat.

You can always get out of submarine and take it up to the other end.

So what's. Where did you get this?

Oh, the Statue of Liberty.

Statue of Liberty given to me by.

The people of France. This is the original one. The one in New York's a copy. A lot of people don't know that.

Yeah, I could tell. You have a sense of humor already. What about the flea circus? My son always loves the flea circus.

That's a real flea circus in there. Those vehicles in there. And that was run by my great uncle Wilhelm Frick, during the nineteen teens. And the little vehicles are in there. And I have all this paraphernalia, all this flea training equipment. Flea circuses were real. You had little fleas harnessed with a wire to the little wagons. And they'd run around, then you'd do the talk. You know, you'd bring all the imagination to it. And then you'd see them moving. And so it was a real circus. Little tabletop, one man operation. Yeah, but we've been collecting paraphernalia here for a long time. Oh, this is kind of fun. Here I collect books with things in them, books that have things applied to them. This not a remarkable book in itself from the 1930s. A German book of cigarette cards. You collect them all and you put them in here. And I have several of these complete. The remarkable thing about this is these are the original tempera paintings that they used to photograph to actually make the cigarette cards. These are little, tiny. This is a kind of art. I don't even know the name of it. Each window dotted in. And those are the full size, actual originals. So that's kind of fun.

Very cool.

Other books I collect, for instance, I got whole books of these. These are the pages from the Wharton intake book. This one being. What is this? Is this Quentin? I can't remember. No, this is Folsom. They're all coming from court. They've all got hats. I've got several of these books. Sorry for the noise. So these books are the warden's intake books. And they, you know, grand larceny, sodomy. You see a lot of sailors coming from Mare island and going to San Quentin for different sadonical practices.

Pimping.

This is manslaughter. I love these guys. And then there's bits of forgotten technology. This is the lenticular lens system. This is something Kodak printed In Palo Alto. There's 25 images here. So it's a moving still picture. These would have been cut up. They're cigarette cars. This is Mickey Mantle's 500th home run. And a great piece of technology. As you rise and fall, you see the ball being hit into the sands. It was very expensive and never went anywhere. I don't know why. Elvis unveil. But everybody has one of those, right? Just. And there's. Let's see. Here's just miscellaneous stuff. The Pioneer 10 plaque. This is a copy of the pornography in space program. We were actually criticized. We, the people that were on the right side were criticized for sending pictures of naked people to other planets and also for telling them where we live. Just like, shut up and put some pants on. Here's another one of these books. This is a full one here of the intake book. Here's Geiger counter. I think Paul Saffo gave me that one. Their radiation kit here. The hot side of the Cold War. So I just like to put up whatever wacky stuff entertains me.

And hopefully you travel the world. Because every time I read, your menus change, what, once a month?

Every 90 days?

Every 90 days. Because they always have a funny story on the front of them.

Yeah. You know, I can then deduct my whole trip if I write something about it. So I'm a travel writer, buddy, you know. This is one of my finest possessions here. This is Rudolph Valentino carved on a block of Rinso soap. And this was found. I got this at auction. This was found under a woman's cot. Who did the greatest number of years of any woman in a federal prison for killing her fifth husband in 1924. She'd been in prison 51 years. This is an odd little piece. This is President Kennedy's assassination car. There's his wife in the pink pillbox hat. Who would make a thing like that? Get out of here. Wild, huh? I like to collect quack medical things. I have a whole lot at home. This is an electronic device here. I'm a particular foe of quack medicine that's being practiced as widely today as ever. Holistic medicine. It's not even medicine. Holistic practices that are based on casting chicken bones and all that. I had the great pleasure of meeting the Amazing Randy a couple weeks ago. James Randi, the great debunker. Yeah. Terrific guy. This is a fun piece here. This is just.

He spoke to Ted, didn't he? He did, yeah.

This is just a whimsical installation here showing a Wafer. And this is actually an ingot. This ingot would have been stolen off the production line when they were doing 2 inch ingots and it would have been worth as much as $10,000. It's like stealing a car off a production line. It came to me and the guy who gave it to me says, I don't know how it ended up not being sliced up because it was very valuable at the time. Now it's just an artifact. But then it was.

Yeah, they don't even make them that size anymore.

Exactly.

Much bigger.

So there are almost none that are this size that are uncut because it was so valuable.

Do you have any other Silicon Valley history?

Oh, sure, I have, I have. I got all kinds of wafers. But this is kind of a fun piece.

This is.

I'm not sure how you call this exactly, but I believe it's the first integrated circuit in a commercial device. It was just a demonstration piece, but that was what ran the inside of a television set. So it's before the microchip, using the series of transistors and diodes. So that was kind of fun. What else have we got? Silicon Valley. Yeah. Not a whole lot.

You got a Google license plate?

Oh, I got the Google license plate.

Right. What other companies have been incorporated here?

Well, Tesla was founded here. Netscape had a lot of their early meetings here. So years ago, several years ago, a Ted, John Doerr asked me, whatever happened to the payphone in the back hallway? And I said, well, we just threw it out. Nobody uses payphones anymore. He said, yeah, you know, I saw it down and I wanted to see if you had it, because that's where I took the call from Jim Clark. When Netscape opened, that had gone through the roof and it changed everything. It led to the Internet, stock market run up and he took the call on the phone or the. Damn, I wish I'd saved that fun too.

So.

A lot of traffic there over the years. You know, we still see the entrepreneurs and the VCs in here every morning during the week. I mean, we feel really privileged to be part of the whole scene. It's really, it's been a great privilege more than anything, a lot of kindness, a lot of caring here. It's so different than LA and New York is so multifaceted. But right here it's really about the future and the Internet and.

Well, we're happy you're here because this is, I write, this is an Internet or a treasure of Silicon Valley. This is usually where I take people on, on a tour through Silicon Valley because, you know, there's nothing to look at at Apple. Right. This has lots of fun iconographic.

Up here is where you know when somebody's actually doing an interview on camera. Motion picture. We, we put me. These are just me. I put a little mark here. Here's your mark.

Awesome.

Well, thanks.

Thanks. And you're on the Internet@buckswoodside.com buckside.com yeah.

My website changes once a year whether anything happens or not.

Well, thanks.

Change the menu.

Yeah.