Disc Drive
Forbes Magazine, Dec 13/1999
By Ann Marsh

ULTIMATE FRISBEE HAS BEEN VERY VERY GOOD to Steve T. Jurvetson. In 1995 Jurvetson, then a 28-year-old partner in the Palo Alto venture capital firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was wondering whether to fund a small e-mail directory outfit called Four11.com. It turned out that Jurvetson and two of Four11's founders shared a passion for ultimate frisbee, or "disc."

That's what devotees call the game of ultimate frisbee, and these fans are a devoted bunch indeed. If you plan to make your fortune in the dot.com world but you don't know a scoober from a blade, you'd better learn. Ultimate is the high-tech community's version of golf, but with a lot more heart-attack potential.

Jurvetson liked Four11's business plan just fine, but more important, he liked the style Michael Santullo and Larry Drebes displayed during the lunchtime pickup games the three played regularly. It wasn't just their skill, it was also their teamwork and the code of honor that count for as much as athleticism in the sport's New Agey ethos. Vince Lombardi has left the building.

Says Jurvetson, "If someone cheats or constantly criticizes, they may not be someone you want to hire."

After a particularly sweaty ultimate frisbee face-off, the Four11 founders and the Draper Fisher Jurvetson partners signed paperwork for $825,000 in seed funding on the hood of a car. Two years later Yahoo acquired Four11. Today DFJ's investment is worth around $345 million in Yahoo stock. As they say in discland, that's hot!

Ultimate hasn't quite reached golf's critical mass--yet. It's pretty hard to count noses, but supposedly there are at least 100,000 people nationwide who play it regularly. In the Bay Area are some of the country's busiest ultimate leagues--teams have names like Spastic Plastic, Saucy Jack and Feral Cows--but most of Silicon Valley can't commit to a regularly scheduled anything. Games tend to get arranged ad hoc, say, when everyone finishes inventing the latest Web browser. Browse over to www.upa.org for pickup game listings worldwide.

"Without sounding melodramatic, this is a game that mirrors a lot of the values of the Valley," says Peter Nieh, 33, a venture capitalist with Weiss, Peck & Greer in San Francisco. Nieh recently invested in Clip2.com after a referral from an angel investor he met on the field (if you happen to run into him there, just call him "Nee"). "It's fast-paced, intense, very dynamic. You never have time to set up. Unlike football, it just goes and goes and goes."

In fact, ultimate frisbee came about as an antidote to the oppressive, hierarchical vibes in sports like football. The first game was played in 1968 in Maplewood, N.J. Among the inventors: Joel Silver, who went on to produce such humongous Hollywood hits as the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series and The Matrix. "I moved in the student council that we investigate getting frisbee onto the high school curriculum," recalls Silver. Silver and his friends spent the next two years in the high school parking lot--the grass field was a later refinement--devising the rules. "At the end of my obit, they'll say, 'He also invented ultimate frisbee,'" Silver predicts proudly.

"Without sounding melodramatic, this is a game that mirrors a lot of the values of the Valley."

Today's game is played on a football-length field with two teams of seven players each. Players throw the disc past defenders to a teammate who scores by catching it in one of two end-zones at either end of the field. There are no "downs" or requirements for yardage gains, as in football. The team on offense keeps advancing until the defending team can wrest possession of the frisbee by knocking down or intercepting a pass. Play continues nonstop.

Players can score by throwing short, crisp passes up the field or by heaving long, dramatic "hucks" that are far more difficult to catch because of the frisbee's varying flight patterns in changing winds. The result is intense sprinting, leaping and volleyball-like "lay outs" for the disc. It's taxing, to put it mildly.

Just as important to its partisans is how ultimate departs from the underlying spirit of football, which is probably the reigning corporate sports metaphor. Unlike football, ultimate is the ideal flat-management sport. There are no fixed positions, no highly-specialized roles; everyone is a quarterback and everyone is a receiver. There are no men in gray flannel shoulder pads on an ultimate field.

The founding nerds also enshrined the spirit of tolerance for spazzes and other athletically challenged players. They had felt the sting of rejection often enough themselves. Silver recalls, "The jocks were a clique. In ultimate, everybody played. It was a nonpolarizing game that didn't hold to caste lines."

It's not unusual to attend a pickup game where talented athletes share the field with first-timers dropping the disc right and left. Sarah Anderson, 33, the new vice president of marketing at Egreetings.com in San Francisco, just started playing the sport this past summer. You can see her running around Golden Gate Park like a maniac on Saturdays with husband Dante Anderson, 37, a former captain of the Canadian national ultimate team.

Turnabout is fair play. In October Dante got a job as director of Web content at Everdream.com, which gives away free PCs while charging steep monthly service fees to technophobes. He went into his Everdream interview expecting to talk about his résumé. "They said, 'Yeah, yeah, but tell me more about frisbee,'" he recalls.

"Ultimate embraces the idea of people being many things instead of being a specialized cog in some moneymaking machine," says William (Willie) Herndon, a schoolteacher from Venice, Calif. who's been playing ultimate frisbee almost as long as Joel Silver has. Herndon recently finished his own worshipful documentary on the sport, called Spirit of the Game, which gets shown privately in ultimate circles.

Spirit of the Game takes its title from the game's revered code of sportsmanship, painstakingly written by the frisbee founding fathers in the early 1970s. This is a hallowed document; laugh only if don't give a hoot whether or not your startup gets funding.

According to Spirit "Highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of the bond of mutual respect between players. And never with an intention to abuse the agreed-upon rules of the game or destroy the pure joy of play." Bill Gates, you are hereby sentenced to remedial gym class.

Players resolve foul calls themselves on the field according to agreed-upon protocols and, ideally, they acknowledge their own transgressions. The sport is set to make its debut at the World Games in Japan in 2001. Without referees.