Mr. Sorkin (flickr.com/politicalpulse)

One Steve Jobs biopic isn't cool. You know what's cool? TWO Steve Jobs biopics. At least according to Hollywood.

Though it's been widely-rumored since late last year, a press release issued by Sony Pictures yesterday confirmed what is either your worst nightmare or dream come true, depending on how pearl-clutchy you are about the tech industry: Aaron Sorkin will be adapting Walter Isaacson's bestselling biography of Steve Jobs for Sony Pictures. We're positive it will be every bit as packed with heavy-handed dramatic irony and "so bad it's good" euphoria as The Social Network is.

Unfortunately, Mr. Sorkin's movie may have a competitor in the already-announced JOBS Movie, starring Ashton Kutcher. But that's an indie biopic with an official Twitter so terribly rendered that we originally thought it was fake. Additionally, the working title for that film--Steve Jobs: Get Inspired--may be one of the most terrible movie titles we have ever heard.

If casting for Mr. Sorkin's film can find an actor who bears a resemblance to Mr. Jobs as strong as Mr. Kutcher's, we're sure they'll have nothing to worry about.

The usual suspect.

Randi Zuckerberg isn't the only enterprising producer trying to bring Startupland to the small screen. Over the weekend, Deadline Hollywood reported that Kevin Spacey will be executive producing a new drama on E! Entertainment Television called "Upstarts" about "Silicon Valley's digital gold rush." Michael De Luca, the Oscar-nominated executive producer behind The Social Network will also be executive producing the show. Considering that film was Patient Zero for startup fever, we expect a similar outbreak from the TV version.

But before area bloggers start wagging their fingers--warning! entrepreneurial life may be more dramatized than it appears--"Upstarts" isn't trying to fan the flames of "whether we're currently in a tech bubble" by calling it a gold rush. Rather, the go-go billion dollar valuations "Upstarts" will be covering are set in the late nineties dotcom bubble. "Fueled by power, money, sex and politics, these three will stop at nothing to earn a spot atop the digital food chain," goes the pitch. Hmm, we sense some subversive tactics a foot. They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world it was in a bubble by televising the last one.

UPSTARTS – Two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey and Oscar-nominated producer Michael De Luca (The Social Network) are Executive Producers through their respective production companies, Trigger Street Prods. and Michael De Luca Prods., of this sprawling drama in which three big dreamers seek to grab their share of wealth and glory amidst Silicon Valley’s digital gold rush of the late 1990s.  Fueled by power, money, sex and politics, these three will stop at nothing to earn a spot atop the digital food chain.  Written by Joey Falco, who will also be a co-executive producer. Dana Brunetti and Ben Younger will also Executive Produce with Younger set to direct, if ordered to pilot.  Brian Haas is also set to co-executive produce.  From Universal Cable Prods.

Why? A quick look at Sorkin's most famous characters shows a writer in love with intellectual rogues (such as the guy who sold the film rights to A Few Good Men when he was 27). For example:

• Every protagonist on The West Wing—whether they're Harvard grads or former Hollywood flacks who found themselves in a White House job—are always winning an argument from the underdog positioning. Their methods are unorthodox, and when they lose, it's because the world doesn't rise to their brilliance.
• The titular Charlie Wilson of Charlie Wilson's War, who—strippers in bathtubs aside—transcends political red tape to bring American guns to Afghanistan's freedom fighters. His methods are unorthodox, and when America fails to follow up after the Russians are exiled, it's because the government doesn't understand the situation at hand. He's punished for doing the right thing.
• In A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise is an unorthodox military attorney who pushes court-marshal protocol to the brink. When certain characters don't receive a just outcome, the system has doomed them, and they're punished for following orders.
• Most recently, in Moneyball, Oakland A's manager Billy Beane uses sabermetrics to put together an squad of baseball players who appear doomed to fail but succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams.  His methods are unorthodox. Whenever Beane is defeated, it's Major League Baseball's fault (too much money elsewhere). He's punished for not playing the way everyone else plays.
• In his play about the invention of television, The Farnsworth Invention, a brilliant (unorthodox) innovator is undercut by people who exploit the moral high ground. The system defeats his claim to the invention of television, because he's a good guy.
• In the teleplay for his forthcoming television drama centered around a Keith Olbermann-like character—More as This Story Develops—a newsman too brilliant for many people to work, a man who fights The Good Fight, is publicly reviled for his volatile temperament by underlings while quietly praised for his hidden qualities of compassion (we've read it in two drafts, it's pretty great).

There's one exception to this rule:

• In The Social Network, a brilliant rogue who invents the ultimate friend-connecting machine finds himself more often than not an ostensibly misunderstood genius, yet, is a loathsome creature whose failure to meaningfully interact with a world outside of the internet makes him a creep.

Sorkin generally portrays Zuckerberg's invention as the film's ultimate antagonist: this is why this guy is awful, it's why the people around him are alienated and fighting, and the biggest fight Zuckerberg will ever have won't be so much with his own nature as with his invention. It was pretty great, except: It prominently displayed a recurring theme of Sorkin's, which is an anti-technology (and especially: anti-internet bias). Previously:

Sorkin’s hatred of bloggers stems from an incident during his West Wing days, when he took to a Television Without Pity message board to defend himself against criticism, and was given a harsh shellacking on the board and in the press for doing so. He channeled this into a particularly wonderful episode of The West Wing. Since then, he’s taken every chance he can to sideswipe these pesky bloggers who blog things (it’s often argued that he wrote an entire film about his distaste for the democratizing nature of the internet, let alone the press he did for it), forgetting the fact that he still often takes to those same blogs to communicate with the hoi polloi whenever it’s called for.

That post went up after an interview with the New York Times' David Carr, in which Sorkin snidely undermines a technology-savvy Times reporter. You know who else hated bloggers?

Steve "What Have You Done That's So Great?" Jobs. Who is—in so many ways—a perfect Aaron Sorkin character:

• College dropout (a rebel).
• Inspired by acid (a miscreant; Sorkin, by the way, was once arrested for possession of psychedelic mushrooms and used to write The West Wing surrounded by potted plants, high on crack).
• Early computers were tossed aside as impractical alternatives to PCs (a heretic to conformity).
• Kicked out of his own company at one point (an outcast).
• Criticisms came from a uniform "system" unwilling to change (an underdog).
• Has a Christ-like rise to prominence in the third act (a genius).

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs was also:

• A resentful, absentee father.
• Psychotically competitive.
• Anti-organized labor, and not much of a proponent of the hoi polloi.
• Gossipy.
• Censorship-happy (he wanted to give the world "freedom from porn" and obsessively hunted down press leaks).
• An enabler of humanity-cracking work conditions.
• A bully.

All of these qualities have been portrayed as villainous at one point or another in Sorkin's work (even the daddy-issues, which both the president and one of his advisers have in The West Wing). And yet: genius is almost always the driving quality of a misunderstood protagonist in all but one of Sorkin's screenplays, The Social Network, where the invention is a manifestation of the great Sorkin villain: the tyranny of the masses. Jobs built something that enabled the masses, but not without being the complex—and some would argue, not-so-saintly—man we're continuing to learn he was.

In Sorkin's version of this story, which character do you think we'll meet, or at the very least, how many shades of him will we get to know?

End of the day, the book's always better than the movie. But more people see the film.

Steve Jobs might be the perfect Aaron Sorkin character. But, given his track record, he might not be given the most honest, fufilling treatment so much as the most entertaining one, or at least the one Sorkin relates to the most.

I'm obviously a Sorkin fan. If he does get the gig, here's hoping I'm proven wrong.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

What not to wear.

Former Harvard University president Larry Summers gave the audience at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference the real back story on a familiar scene from The Social Network. In Aaron Sorkin's version of events, Mr. Summers couldn't be bothered with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss' attempt to halt Mark Zuckerberg's world domination with Harvard's code of conduct. But what Mr. Summers was really thinking may have been worse. "Rarely, have I encountered such swagger, and I tried to respond in kind," he told the crowd, adding:

"One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case."

Another reason to keep the start-up dress code "business shabby."

“I can’t tell you the whole idea.” The Internet entrepreneur on the other end of the phone sounded panicky. “It’s going to sound ludicrous and ambitious, more ludicrous and ambitious than most.”

The voice belonged to a 27-year-old Stanford law student—“just about the oldest you can be where I cannot remember not having a computer”—who was in New York last week to talk to people about his new concept for a website.

He gave a few vague descriptors that could apply to half the start-ups in New York.

“I definitely don’t want it in the newspaper,” he said. “I’m worried that even little sign posts toward what I want to build are dangerous.”

When he had the idea in April, he talked about it to anyone who would listen. “I definitely went manic--which has never happened before--when it came into my head, for about 10 days, which were incredibly productive and I wound up talking to a senior engineer at Google and some very well respected people at Stanford,” he said. “I would not sleep. I’d get to bed at like 3:30 and wake up at 6:30 and the entire time I’m just thinking about how to build this thing that was in my head that I think would make the world a better place... I was pacing and talking to everyone I could about it.”

The mania lasted about ten days, followed by four days of crippling depression. His girlfriend seemed to be the only one who noticed. “The fact that I seemed to be taking along some very, very smart people with me was both exciting and in retrospect, a little bit disconcerting,” he said.

“But it is a big idea, and that’s the language of start-ups," he continued. "The language of start-ups is a sort of manic language, it’s, ‘I’m going to change the world,’ which for normal people is like, ‘Whoa, that sounds grandiose,’ and you sound a little bit crazy. In start-up world, it’s like, ‘Can I give you some money for that?’”

We hung up. He emailed immediately to scrub the record. “I know this is going to sound a little paranoid, but I'd appreciate it if you would not include the quote about ----------- being ----------- and wanting to develop a platform for ----------. Paranoia is also a symptom of start-up fever.”

Bankers Pull a Pivot - Read the Diaries of a Fledgling Founder

Start-up fever! Whether it’s due to The Social Network or the new wave of billion-dollar tech I.P.O.’s, lately it seems like everyone has a start-up. Betabeat first noticed it in our own neighborhood, the tech-tending East Village, home of Foursquare. On a recent weekend, we overheard an entrepreneur talking about pitching investors over brunch on St. Marks and glimpsed another demonstrating his website’s Twitter integration to a friend at Ninth Street Espresso. We tried to eavesdrop on a bearded, 40-ish fellow ranting about his start-up to a friend in Tompkins Square Park around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday and caught the words “convertible note.” The trend has invaded our building as well. The Goldman Sachs engineer on the second floor wants to join a start-up. He asked us about tech events.

The start-up mythology—build fast, get cash, save the world—and the low barrier to entry make it tough to resist. “An all-consuming start-up can be very difficult for a mom of young kids,” New York-based mommy blog mogul Philippa Smith said in an email, but “the lure of creating something that was potentially such a benefit to both local moms and the local business community was too great.” Her start-up, Juice in the City or “the Groupon for moms,” recently announced a $6 million round of funding.

“It’s Foursquare, it’s Etsy, it’s Tumblr,” said Zeb Dropkin, a digital media consultant-turned-start-up entrepreneur currently working on RentHackr.com, a website where New Yorkers admit how much rent they’re really paying. “New York City has real investment now, real cycles. This is the real leagues.”

Roger Wu, who organizes the Stamford Tech Meetup, recently raised money for one of his start-ups. The investors remembered him because of his red New Balances, he told Betabeat. “It’s like Hollywood, where everyone’s an actor,” he said. “Everyone with a little idea they had when they were drinking is going to start a company and be the next Facebook.”

(Betabeat got an email recently from a friend seeking cycling routes: “Is there a HopStop for bicycles? Because if there isn’t let’s start one and get riiiiichhh!”)

Cheryl Yeoh was working as a management consultant for KPMG, an 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. gig that kept her in Scotch tastings and Michelin stars, when she realized sometime in the middle of April that she needed to do an Internet start-up for something. Anything. The idea was secondary. What mattered was making something amazing that could reach not just hundreds of people or thousands, but millions. “I knew I could do something greater,” she told Betabeat. “Every time I met someone who told me, ‘Oh, I’m a founder of so-and-so,’ or whatever, I don’t care what company it was, every time they said that I thought, oh my gosh, why am I not doing this, I know I can start something, I know I can do something.

“I was obsessed. You can use the word ‘obsession.’”

Ms. Yeoh had a programmer friend. She took him out to lunch and pitched him a few ideas. He picked CityPockets, a website that imports a user’s coupons from daily deal sites like Groupon and sends friendly reminders when they’re about to expire. “We’d come home at 8:30 at night and right away from 9 p.m. I was writing, researching until like 2 a.m.,” she said. “Or I would spend time going to tech events. Some days I would go until 3 or 4 a.m. because I was talking to my mentor in San Francisco. Even though I was physically tired, I was mentally awake. Every morning I would jump out of bed because I was like, I wonder what new features I can think of next... Even my friends were like, ‘Wow, you’re sleeping so little but you look so much more alive!’” She left her job in August, two months after her 27th birthday. “I told my manager, I have to leave,” she said. “I have to do this thing because it’s consuming me.”

She went on. “I had a one-bedroom in Gramercy, lived the high life, had designer coats and bags, traveled multiple times a year. I quit all that. Moved into an apartment in the East Village—Alphabet City, actually—and slept in a living room on a futon kind of separated by curtains Velcroed up to the ceiling. For five months I did that... I wanted to prove that I can live just bare bones, live the life of a scrappy entrepreneur so that I can just fully focus on the product without any distractions whatever.

“I have enough savings in my bank, actually, to continue living in my Gramercy apartment,” she added. “It was more like I made an active choice to go with that lifestyle.” The day she put the curtains up, she recalled, she giggled until her eyes teared.

“In the Bay Area you have more superstars and guys who have done a bunch of start-ups,” said Shai Goldman, a director at Silicon Valley Bank who moved to New York from the Bay Area in January. “The majority of entrepreneurs here, a lot of them are first-time entrepreneurs. It’s almost like a cohort. They’re kind of all learning at the same time, they’re going through the same missteps. It makes it a little more interesting here.

“Every entrepreneur has the opportunity to make a big mark in New York right now.”

The anonymous entrepreneur we spoke to by phone wants to drop out of Stanford and raise money in New York. “I think New York is kind of the Wild West frontier of investing right now. It’s a little bit unstable and it’s a little bit dirty,” he said. Silicon Valley is “this weird system that’s dominated by these monsters” like Facebook and Google, which are buying "crap companies to get the people."

“The mythology is a little tarnished out there,” he said. “The people I know in New York are really excited about the things that happen here in a way that people at Stanford and the Valley certainly aren’t. You know, it’s big business.”

Evidence of the city’s start-up fever can be seen on Meetup.com—the New York-based, dot-com-era start-up that became a hub for local techsters—where the number of recurring tech events has wildly accelerated: Startup Lunch, 104 members; Dumbo Tech Breakfast, 641 members; UWS Startup Meetup, 164 members; the NYC Startup Garage, 208 members; NYC Startup Weekend, 337 members; the NYC Lean Startup Machine, 1,553 members; the New York Technology Bathhouse Meetup, 25 members.

On a recent muggy evening, about 70 mostly 20-something, mostly male guests gathered in clusters on a rooftop in Chelsea for the summer’s first “Find a Cofounder” party, squinting at one another’s name tags as the sun set. Red name tags were for programmers; blue meant you were more of a business guy. The blue name tags ran out by the time Betabeat got a drink.

“So three years ago, there was the New York Tech Meetup, right?” Gary Sharma said, referring to the 18,545-member organization that draws about 800 attendees to its monthly demo nights. Mr. Sharma was a mild-mannered Wall Street marketing consultant before he became “The Guy with the Red Tie,” per his business card and neckwear. He has been attending tech start-up events and cataloguing them in his weekly newsletter, GarysGuide, for the better part of four years. “That was the start-up meetup, pretty much. I like to call it the mothership. As that gets bigger, I started seeing satellite meetups coming out of it. Video 2.0, Web 2.0. Then you started seeing even smaller ones. Travel 2.0, Fashion 2.0. Then more niche ones. Some people started the Hoboken Tech Meetup. You know where Hoboken is?” We did; we’ve been. The Hoboken Tech Meetup has 901 members. Its monthly Monday night meetings always have a wait list.

“I want to start a social-local-mobile meetup called SoLoMo!” Mr. Sharma said. “No, I’m just kidding,” he added quickly.

“I knew nothing about Internet start-ups,” Ben Wolff, a smiley personal stylist who lives in Corona, Queens, admitted to Betabeat as we sat cross-legged on a futon in a corner of the patio. “I knew I needed to make an electronic version of myself. That’s why I started.”

Last year, Mr. Wolff, whose business consists of going through client’s closets and refreshing their wardrobes, wrote out a set of “if this, then that” instructions in a spreadsheet to formalize his process. A few encouraging conversations with friends inspired him to turn it into a start-up. His dream is to make the “Faster Pants algorithm” part of every man’s shopping experience, he said, as soon as he can find someone to code for equity. “I equate this with a high school dance where there’s more girls than boys,” he said, mock-twiddling his thumbs. “I feel like I’m sitting on the wall going, ‘Oh, please dance with me!’”

“You’re a reporter? Reporters did a lot for me!” said Ray Schmitz. A former real-estate broker who made a small name for himself by passing out business cards at the revolving door of Bear Stearns the day the investment bank announced its sale to JPMorgan, he was also seeking dance partners. He had the idea for a website that lets brokers refer business to each other in 2009. “I remember reading a book by Clay Shirky,” he said. “He makes a wonderful point that the Internet may be the biggest change in society since the printing press. It may be even bigger. The start-ups in New York are forging the life of the future for everyone right now. The way we’ll live, work and play tomorrow is being created here today.”

On our way out, Betabeat ran into Aaron Price, the fastidious organizer of the Hoboken Tech Meetup, who was standing in the bathroom line. Things were going well, he said. He was recently named to the nebulous position of “entrepreneur at large” for the early-stage venture capital fund DFJ Gotham, opened a co-working space, and was working on his start-up, makeMania, a website where crafty people show off their D.I.Y. projects.

He exhorted us, as always, to come to the next Hoboken meetup. We promised to try.

Bankers Pull a Pivot - Read the Diaries of a Fledgling Founder