Château Lafite Rothschild

We held our East Coast event in Boston that year — the same week as LinuxWorld.

It was March 17, 2003.

Monday for setup.

Tuesday through Friday for the show.

Four days inside the Boston Convention Center, with IDG’s LinuxWorld upstairs and our Web Services Edge conference running below.

But something felt wrong.

The air wasn’t competitive or energetic — it was uneasy.

Outside the building, the country was bracing for war.

Inside, everyone felt it.

Iraq was coming.

That year, we also did something no one else was doing.

We streamed live from the expo floor.

At the time, it was revolutionary. No conferences were broadcasting in real time — not audio, not video. We were doing it live, directly from the show floor, using Macromedia’s Flash Player.

We were a Macromedia partner, publishing five magazines for them. Because of that relationship, they shared an early beta version of their live-streaming technology with us — software very few people in the world had ever touched.

It ran on RTMP — Real-Time Messaging Protocol — designed to make low-latency live video possible over the internet.

For the first time, people who weren’t in the building could see what was happening inside it — as it happened.

That same technology would later shape the earliest era of online video and influence platforms that came years afterward.

At the time, we weren’t thinking about history.

We just knew we were doing something no one else was doing yet.

That breakthrough sparked another idea.

I told Robert that online gaming was about to explode — and when it did, it wouldn’t belong only to kids anymore. It would become a real industry.

We decided to be first.

That idea became CyberGamer — our first consumer magazine and our first step outside the enterprise technology world.

It was a risk.

But it worked.

Later, we expanded even further — launching International Yacht Vacations & Charters, distributed worldwide on newsstands, followed by Private Jet Charters.

Different audiences.
Different lifestyles.

But driven by the same instinct that had always guided me:

See what’s coming — and move before everyone else does.

By then, Roger Strukhoff — a close friend — was at the show.

Roger had spent years at IDG, and through him I suddenly found myself face-to-face with someone I never expected to meet.

Pat McGovern.

IDG’s founder.

I was standing at our live-streaming booth when I saw Roger walking toward me with him. We shook hands, took a few photos, and within seconds Pat began asking questions — not polite ones, but genuinely curious ones.

How does it work?

Who’s watching?

Where does the signal go?

Pat preferred to be called the Chairman.

That day, I met the Chairman.

McGovern was a rare combination — deeply intelligent, intensely curious, and entirely self-made. A Boston native and MIT graduate, he had launched Computerworld in 1964, long before most people even understood what a computer was.

That single newspaper grew into IDG.

At its peak, the company operated in more than one hundred countries, publishing titles like PC World, Macworld, and InfoWorld, while building IDC into one of the most influential technology research firms in the world.

He built it all from nothing.

A self-made billionaire.

And there we were — standing on a noisy expo floor — talking about live video streaming before almost anyone else believed it mattered.

* * *

What always fascinated me about Pat wasn’t his wealth — it was how little it seemed to change him.

He knew people throughout IDG by name. At the annual Christmas party, he personally handed out bonus checks, greeting employees one by one — always by their first names.

For a man worth billions, he was disarmingly unsophisticated about everyday life.

Once, needing help with a banking issue, he simply walked into a local branch and stood in line like everyone else. When he reached the teller window and explained what he needed, the staff froze.

They were staring at a man whose account balance approached a billion dollars — waiting patiently at the counter.

Pat was also famously frugal.

For years, his official residence was a modest rental townhouse near the New Hampshire border — Live Free or Die. On weekends, he would drive up, open his mail, pay his rent and utility bills, and then return to his Boston mansion.

It saved him a substantial amount in taxes.

To Pat, it wasn’t clever.

It was just practical.

* * *

By the time we met in Boston, Pat already knew our reputation.

Not long afterward, we licensed the LinuxWorld name from IDG and launched LinuxWorld Magazine.

But that Boston show itself turned into a disaster.

On the second day of the event, President George W. Bush launched the Iraq War.

The convention center emptied almost instantly — on a scale I wouldn’t see again until COVID.

I left Grisha behind to manage whatever remained of the final days. I took Carmen and her two sales managers, loaded everyone into my car, and drove straight back to our office in New Jersey.

Somewhere along the way, in Greenwich, Connecticut, I pulled off the highway.

I stopped at Valbella — one of my favorite Italian restaurants.

I asked to be seated in the wine cellar.

I ordered lunch.

And I ordered a $1,200 bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild.

Because sometimes, when the world collapses in real time,

you don’t panic.

You pause.

You drink something exceptional.

Then you figure out what comes next.