Restaurant's spot in high-tech industry sealed in memoirs of Pancake Guy.
The Hollywood set might like to do lunch at fancy restaurants in Beverly Hills but Silicon Valley venture capitalists prefer to seal multimillion-dollar deals over a breakfast burrito at Buck’s of Woodside.
The 13-year-old restaurant is so revered as the spot where Netscape was founded, and HotJobs and PayPal got funded, that some 700 of the world’s journalists have traipsed through its door in the hopes of stumbling upon the next Google or snapping a picture of Larry Ellison chomping on a lobster.
Also: A one-on-one with the man behind Buck’s
It’s no wonder that Buck’s owner Jamis MacNiven had more than enough material to fill a new self-published memoir titled Breakfast at Buck’s: Tales from the Pancake Guy .
MacNiven recalls how Bill Gates once fought for the check with his guests and won, and describes how in 1999 CNBC commandeered the place for nine hours to broadcast “Power Lunch,” which featured interviews with Cisco Chief John Chambers and a host of other CEOs.
Then there’s MacNiven as an attraction himself.
“I’m always coupled [in articles] with Alan Greenspan as America’s pundits,” says MacNiven, who says he was born 55 years ago in a remote Japanese fishing village, and is the grandson of a strip tease artist and a con man.
Buck’s is unique in Woodside. It would be quite easy to miss the single-level eatery with its unassuming facade that stands below the steep canyons of nearby Huddart Park. But inside you feel like you’ve stumbled into a circus. An outfit worn by Uri Gagarin, the first man in space, hangs from the ceiling along with a flying unicorn.
Although the number of camera crews that film in Buck’s has plummeted along with tech stocks, venture capitalists still like to hang out there. Steve Jurvetson, a managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, last Tuesday said he’d already been to Buck’s three times that week and that during the dot-com boom, he used to eat at Buck’s more often than at home. In the mid-1990s, Jurvetson had one of his first meetings with Sabeer Bhatia about an idea Bhatia had called Hotmail.
“Venture capitalists go to Buck’s because it’s convenient to set up a breakfast meeting there and then drive to work at Sand Hill Road,” Jurvetson says, referring to a road that’s 5 miles from Buck’s and is to venture capitalists as Rodeo Drive is to fashion designers. “Then there’s the self-perpetuating network – the more people that go there the more popular the place is. You meet a network of loose contacts – other venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, CEOs – people who you haven’t set up a meeting with but you can shake their hand and say ‘hi’ as you walk past their table.”
MacNiven, hard to miss in his loud shirts, is always on hand to make introductions as well.
In 1996, MacNiven cooked up a big-time networking event dubbed the Sand Hill Challenge in which venture capitalists and others raced in homemade boxcars to benefit charities.
“One team of engineers and physicists built the most beautiful car imaginable out of parts scrounged from the Stanford Linear Accelerator,” MacNiven notes in his book. “It’s amazing what 30 engineers can do with $10 million worth of parts.”
By its fourth year the Challenge was generating, on average, $7,500 in charitable contributions per team. But the event succumbed to the dot-com downslide and was canceled in 2002 because of a lack of sponsors.
MacNiven says there is one Silicon Valley giant who has never stepped foot in Buck’s: Steve Jobs. As a contractor, MacNiven spent some time remodeling a house for Jobs, then 24 years old.
“Steve Jobs was an amateur customer, and I was an amateur builder,” MacNiven recalls. “He was very indecisive. He was on the cover of Time, but he couldn’t pick a couch. He was over-choiced.”
The partnership lasted a year and the parting was not friendly. “He was no picnic to work with,” MacNiven says.
As a result, Jobs has never been inside Buck’s to see a giant painting of Roy Rogers and Trigger, in keeping with the theme of the site’s previous restaurant, The Stagecoach. MacNiven wanted to keep the Wild West theme and hoped to name his restaurant Buffalo Dick’s, but his wife vetoed that (Buck’s is the abbreviation). However, some like to think he named the restaurant after the greenback.
Then there’s the signed letter from a Russian government official thanking MacNiven for his interest in buying the embalmed body of Lenin to display in his restaurant, but that it wasn’t for sale. Although Russia was interested in learning more about the “low six figures” that MacNiven and his friends were willing to drum up to buy the waxy body of the former Communist leader.
That letter, and a copy of the one MacNiven wrote that started the dialogue (“We have a history in the U.S. of reverently displaying obsolete national treasures, such as England’s London Bridge . . .”) is on proud display opposite the restrooms.
Thanks to its Wi-Fi service, Buck’s continues to attract venture capitalists and Silicon Valley types who like to drop in to catch up on e-mail before their next meeting. There might be fewer venture capitalists around and fewer deals being made over breakfast at Buck’s, but MacNiven is still selling plenty of pancakes and now maybe even a few books to boot.
