Expedition · 06 stops
Riders of the Wave
The founders who read each internet wave early, and the plate that separates riding from recognizing.
Every technology wave mints a class of founders who insist they were just in the right place. The record says otherwise. The specimens on this route saw their waves coming years out, positioned deliberately, and did it again on the next one, which is the part luck cannot explain. The expedition runs from the plate that names the pattern through four founders who repeated it on three continents, with a side passage into the adjacent plate for the founders who recognize waves without surfing every crest.
The route
archetype
Serial Internet Wave Rider
The pattern. Reading a wave the better part of a decade early and building the infrastructure layer beneath the applications that have not arrived yet.
founder
Jeremy Allaire
The anchor specimen. Four waves and one method, from ColdFusion through Brightcove to Circle's stablecoin network, without ever being the person writing the code.
founder
Marc Andreessen
The wave read from inside the browser, then read a second time from the other side of the table.
founder
Kim Beom-su
The same instinct run in Korea. In 2007, before the iPhone was for sale there, he bought four of them for his family and concluded the device was not a computer but a means of communication.
archetype
Wave Recognizer
The adjacent plate, and the distinction that matters. Recognizing the one wave your existing skills exactly fit, rather than committing to ride every crest.
founder
Marcos Galperin
The wave carried to Latin America and held for twenty years. Driving an investor to the airport in 1999, he missed his highway exit on purpose to buy twenty more minutes of pitch, and closed the commitment on that drive.