A Founder of Twitter Goes Long

Mr. Williams is a contemplative 41-year-old Nebraskan turned billionaire, at least on paper, as of Thursday when Twitter went public. If Twitter redefined the frontier of communications, Medium is trying to reclaim some of the lost territory.

Broadly speaking, Medium is a blogging platform, meaning it’s a place for people to write and read posts. And Mr. Williams, as its C.E.O., hopes that it will allow thoughtful, longer-form writing to flourish. Mr. Williams frankly acknowledges that the medium of Medium is not new. In fact, he says he’s reaching back to the once-du jour notion of blogging because, in the frenzy to build social communications tools, something has been left behind: rationality.

“In the early days, I bought into the idea that the Internet would lead to a better world, that the truth was out there and that we didn’t need gatekeepers,” he said. The idea that he and many others embraced was that an unfiltered Internet would create a democratic information utopia. “Now,” he continued, “I think it’s more complicated than that.”

Medium is Mr. Williams’s version of a gatekeeper, albeit one that relies heavily on technology rather than human expertise or taste. While it has some editors soliciting and promoting some content, the bigger idea is to use algorithms to help identify blog posts that readers consider valuable and to bubble them to the surface.

He’s carrying out ideas he toyed with in his first big commercial venture, which was called, simply, Blogger. He sold that to Google a decade ago, begetting his first millions. Now, he is joining the mini-movement to celebrate long-form expression at sites and apps like Longform, Longreads and the Verge. The oddity is that Mr. Williams helped found Twitter, which is to long form what snacks are to dinner: sometimes a prelude, often an appetite killer.

The short-burst culture has eaten away at the very definition of “long form.” Many articles in Medium, for instance, are hundreds of characters longer than a tweet but tens of thousands fewer than something you’d find in, say, The New Yorker.

And some see little evidence that people want to consume anything that takes much time. “I see a diminishing audience for long form of anything,” said James Katz, director of the division of emerging media studies at Boston University. “The riptide of society is heading the other direction.”

For his part, Mr. Williams said he was disturbed by the swelling cacophony of information that makes it easy to be overwhelmed and hard to know what to trust. Good information, he said, can lose out, and, as he described his new mission, “I want to give rationality a fighting chance.”

“I’m an eternal optimist,” Mr. Williams told me over lunch last week, wearing skinny jeans and long-sleeve black T-shirt. “But I’m a more realistic optimist than I used to be.”

He traced the evolution of his thinking by describing an “epiphany that bothered” him this year. In preparing a speech, he revisited his career’s early days. The exercise made him realize that the Internet wasn’t changing the world as he had once idealized, but that, far less romantically, it had come to be little more than a “convenience.”

If this sort of revelation rationalizes Mr. Williams’s new business, he is not alone in believing it. Nor is he the only mogul seeking to use a technology-borne fortune to finance serious journalism. (See: Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post or Pierre Omidyar finances Glenn Greenwald in an investigative journalism venture.)

But you have to give credit to Mr. Williams for having the courage of his convictions. He’s been doing his own thing since he embraced his inner nerd, rejected the football-obsessed culture of his native Nebraska (becoming a vegan there, he said, “was tough”), and moved west. He can also afford to do what he wants, given that his already considerable net worth has jumped nearly $2.5 billion, owing to his 10.4 percent stake in Twitter.

He’s backing Medium along with two business partners, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, both formerly of Twitter. Medium, which started in 2012, has around 40 employees and, last month, started letting anyone write for it. A few writers are paid, with their work solicited by a small editing team, but most are not. Much ballyhooed by Medium is software that allows “collaboration” among writers by letting them share posts privately before publication, in pursuit of suggestions or edits. Posts then appear in collections, or channels, like “Adventures in Consumer Technology,” or “Best Thing I Found Online Today.”

DealBook: Long Battle for Dell Ends in Victory for Founder

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Amazon’s Founder to Buy The Washington Post

Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto AgencyJeffrey P. Bezos, left, the founder of Amazon.com, and Donald Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, at the Allen & Company media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, last month.

The Washington Post, the newspaper whose reporting helped topple a president and inspired a generation of journalists, is being sold for $250 million to the founder of Amazon.com, Jeffrey P. Bezos, in a deal that has shocked the industry.

Who Just Bought The Washington Post? The entrance of The Washington Post building on Monday.

Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, and the third generation of the Graham family to lead the paper, told the staff about the sale late Monday afternoon. They had gathered together in the newspaper’s auditorium at the behest of the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, his niece.

“I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post (after a transaction that would be in the best interest of our shareholders),” Mr. Graham said in a written statement.

In the auditorium, he closed his remarks by saying that nobody in the room should be sad — except, he said, “for me.”

The announcement was greeted by what many staff members described as “shock,” a reaction shared in newsrooms across the country as one of the crown jewels of newspapers was surrendered by one of the industry’s royal families.

In Mr. Bezos, The Post will have a very different owner, a technologist whose fortunes have risen in the last dozen years even as those of The Post and most newspapers have struggled. Through Amazon, the retailing giant, he has helped revolutionize the way people around the world consume — first books, then expanding to all kinds of goods and more recently in online storage, electronic books and online video, including a recent spate of original programming.

In the meeting, Mr. Graham stressed that Mr. Bezos would purchase The Post in a personal capacity and not on behalf of Amazon the company. The $250 million deal includes all of the publishing businesses owned by The Washington Post Company, including the Express newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing.

The Washington Post company plans to hold on to Slate magazine, The Root.com and Foreign Policy. According to the release, Mr. Bezos has asked Ms. Weymouth to remain at The Post along with Stephen P. Hills, president and general manager; Martin Baron, executive editor; and Fred Hiatt, editor of the editorial page.

Mr. Bezos, who did not attend the meeting at The Post on Monday, said in a statement that he had known Mr. Graham for the past decade and said about Mr. Graham that “I do not know a finer man.” Ms. Weymouth said that in negotiating this deal, Mr. Bezos made it clear he was not purely focused on profits.

The sale, at a price that would have been unthinkably low even a few years ago, represents the end of eight decades of ownership by the Graham family of The Post since Eugene Meyer bought The Post at auction on June 1, 1933. His son-in-law Phillip L. Graham served as president of the paper from 1947 until his death in 1963. Then Graham’s widow, Katharine Graham, oversaw the paper through the publication of the Pentagon Papers alongside The New York Times and its coverage of Watergate, the political scandal that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon and also a starring role for the newspaper in the film, “All The President’s Men.”

The Post’s daily circulation peaked in 1993 with 832,332 average daily subscribers, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. But like most newspapers, it has suffered greatly from circulation and advertising declines. By March, the newspaper’s daily circulation had dropped to 474,767.

The company became pressed enough for cash that Ms. Weymouth announced in February that it was looking to sell its flagship headquarters. According to a regulatory filing associated with the sale, Mr. Bezos will pay rent to The Post Company on the space for up to three years.

Michael D. Shear, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the middle initial of the founder of Amazon.com. He is Jeffrey P. Bezos, not Jeffrey K.

DealBook: Dell Founder Raises Takeover Bid, With Conditions

Founder of File-Sharing Site Sentenced in Sweden

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was extradited to Sweden last year from Cambodia to begin a one-year jail sentence after being convicted in 2009 of internet piracy. He was then charged by authorities as part of the separate hacking investigation.

"The hacking has been very extensive and technically advanced," the Nacka district court said in a statement. "The attacker has affected very sensitive systems."

He had denied the charges.

Prosecution documents say Warg, a 28-year-old Swede, managed to transfer 24,200 Danish crowns ($4,300) online, but also attempted, in several different transactions, to transfer a total of around 683,000 euros ($915,500).

The investigation was into data infringement involving outsourcing firm Logica.

Swedish authorities have said the hackers gained access to information on several people with protected identities.

In the 2009 trial, a court in Sweden - where The Pirate Bay was founded in 2003 - fined and sentenced to jail Warg and two co-founders then behind the site for breaching copyright in a case brought by firms including Sony Universal Music and EMI.

Swedish prosecutors in May launched a new attempt to close down Pirate Bay, which provides links to music and movie files stored on other users' computers.

The site is now run by an unknown group and uses a domain name registered in Sint Maarten, a Dutch territory in the Caribbean.

($1 = 5.5648 Danish crowns) ($1 = 0.7461 euros)

(Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Patrick Lannin)

DealBook: In Venture Capital Deals, Not Every Founder Will Be a Zuckerberg

Harry Campbell

It’s the dream of entrepreneurs to sell their company for millions of dollars. But the dirty secret of venture capital is that the dream can be dashed as the venture capitalists make millions in a sale, leaving the founders with nothing.

A recent Delaware court case arising from the 2011 sale of Bloodhound Technologies illustrates how this happens.

Bloodhound was founded in the mid-1990s by Joseph A. Carsanaro to create fraud-monitoring software for health care claims. After several years of going it alone with a handful of colleagues, Mr. Carsanaro was able to raise Bloodhound’s first venture capital round for $1.9 million in 1999, followed by a second $3.1 million round in 2000.

When the Internet bubble burst, the company underwent rocky times. It was then that the venture capitalists seized control. Mr. Carsanaro was pushed out as chief executive. By 2000, he was gone from the company, as were four other members of his founding team.

For the next decade, Bloodhound recovered and slowly grew, raising seven more rounds of financing. In April 2011, the company was sold for $82.5 million. It was a time for Mr. Carsanaro and his founding team to celebrate their millionaire status.

But venture capital investments are structured to ensure that the venture capitalists are paid before founders and employees. When venture capitalists invest, they typically demand preferred shares that accrue a yearly dividend of about 8 percent. The dividend goes unpaid until the company is sold. In a sale, the original amount and the interest all come due. It must be paid out before the common shares, which are typically held by the founders and other employees.

The requirement that the venture capitalist be paid first, and with interest, can sometimes hit founders and employees in a brutal manner, as Mr. Carsanaro and his colleagues discovered.

The venture capitalists took almost all of the sale price. Bloodhound also paid a $15 million bonus to its current management team. The five founders of Bloodhound were paid in total less than $36,000. One received all of $99.

There is not much information on payouts to founders and employees when a company backed by venture capital is sold. But from the few studies on the subject, it appears that the situation involving Bloodhound is all too common.

The most recent study, by Profs. Brian J. Broughman and Jesse M. Fried, found that among a sample of venture capital deals, the common investors in roughly half the cases were entitled to nothing when the company was sold, even when the sale was for tens of millions. And in all but one instance, the majority of the sale proceeds went to the venture capitalists and other holders of preferred shares.

An unpublished study by Shikhar Ghosh at the Harvard Business School found that three out of four companies backed by venture capital did not return the investment. Again, it is in these cases where the founders and employees typically are entitled to receive no payment.

For those entrepreneurs who think they will be the next Mark Zuckerberg and ride their company to riches, think again. A number of studies have found that most chief executives of companies that take venture capital investments end up being replaced.

These are the successful businesses. The rule of thumb among venture capitalists is that some 20 percent to 30 percent of companies fail, returning nothing to any investor, including the venture capitalists.

The Bloodhound case is a reminder that the founders of start-ups backed by venture capital often end up nothing like Mr. Zuckerberg. Instead, they find themselves thrown out and without significant profits even if their company is sold.

Venture capitalists will argue that this is the price to pay to get their money and services. Cash is king, and in order to survive, venture capitalists will demand a high price and return.

Yet entrepreneurs can protect themselves. Professors Broughman and Fried found in their study that founders who negotiated greater control rights ended up receiving on average $3.7 million more. They did this even when the common shareholders were not entitled to a dime. By negotiating board seats or other representation, the founders were able to ensure that a sale happened only with their approval and a demand for some payment in return.

In other words, the rights negotiated by entrepreneurs when taking venture capital money really matter. Many entrepreneurs are so excited to get money that they don’t push for such rights or just don’t know to ask. Yet those who negotiate to keep a say in their company have a future, while those who don’t are more likely to be tossed aside. And it can be that this happens even in lucrative situations. Remember that Mr. Zuckerberg would have been forced by his venture capital investors to sell Facebook had he not kept control.

In the case of Bloodhound, its founders were pushed out of the company about eight years before the sale. During that time, they lacked control or ability to stop the venture capitalists from financing the company on the venture capitalists’ terms. The only substantial communication the founders had after they left was when they found out that the company had been sold for a huge price and that they would receive almost nothing.

The five founders sued in Delaware court, claiming that Bloodhound’s board and the venture capitalists had structured later rounds to favor themselves and dilute the payout of the founders. In a motion, the defendants countered that they acted fairly and that the plaintiffs’ claims were untimely because they were brought years later.

J. Travis Laster, vice chancellor of the Delaware Chancery Court, found that the claims that the venture capitalist had favored themselves to the detriment of the founders could be a viable claim claim if the facts they stated were true.

If Bloodhound’s founders are successful in their lawsuit, the case could change practices. It might require boards that take venture capital money to consider the founders and their interests before taking the next round. This could force boards to lean against diluting the payout of the founders and employees to avoid litigation.

Yet even if Bloodhound’s founders prevail, other entrepreneurs will sometimes find that their company is sold with nothing going to them. The sad reality is that there are times when the price demanded by the venture capitalists for the company to survive means that the founders will lose. Let’s face it, sometimes the company survives only because of that money and the skill and effort that the venture capitalists put in. This may have been the case in Bloodhound.

But the Bloodhound case publicizes this practice and will perhaps push boards to think harder before the founders are discarded. This may foster caution among venture capitalists, but the only thing that will truly save entrepreneurs is negotiating harder in the beginning. They may otherwise find themselves like the Bloodhound founders, left with nothing.

Corner Office: Liquidnet’s Founder, on Saying Goodbye to Titles

Q. Tell me about some of the values of your culture.

A. One is personal responsibility. I tell this to our new people during orientation, but if you see something that we’re not doing right and you don’t say something, then it’s on you. If you think that everyone on the leadership team is taking into account everything that could possibly go wrong, you’re wrong. It’s everybody’s responsibility to help us run this company better than we can do it by ourselves.

One of our philosophies is that I would much rather have everyone assume that everything we do here is wrong and that it’s your responsibility to help us fix it. That eliminates all the ego, or it should eliminate all the ego. Since we’re trying to constantly improve ourselves, you’re helping us by giving us some suggestions about what we can do better.

Q. Some people must be a bit skeptical at first. It’s one of those policies that sounds good in theory, but how do they know you mean it?

A. Well, first of all, we don’t have any titles. And the reason is that I do not want a junior vice president to be at a meeting and not say anything because they have a senior vice president in the room, which I believe happens quite often. Having no titles is symbolic, but it really works. Just to give you one example: we had an intern, 19 years old, and there were a bunch of us in a meeting. I was giving everyone my latest and greatest idea and he took me on and he disagreed with me. It turned out he was right, and I told him he was right at the meeting. So we have to practice it at the top.

Q. And what made you decide to do away with titles?

A. We eliminated them early on because we started getting all this title creep. Someone came to me once and said we had 15 titles or something, and I said: “That’s it. We’re done. No more.” I don’t want people to aspire to get a higher title. I want people to aspire to take on more responsibility. More responsibility gets them more recognition.

Q. How did people react when you told them you were eliminating titles?

A. It was very divided. A lot of people felt that it would be very difficult to attract people if we couldn’t give them a title, because that’s what goes on their résumé. Quite frankly, that really was not my concern. We found it turned out to be a good differentiator for us, and it helps us attract the right people. If somebody wants to come here but is determined to have a managing director title, then go to a place that has a managing director title.

Another thing I did from Day 1 was to set a no-suits-and-no-ties mandate. That, too, is a measure of informality. When we’re sitting around in jeans, or whatever people want to wear, that’s the kind of interaction I want. I want to have a casual interaction. I want to be able to say whatever I want to say and have them do the same.

Q. But you must have some hierarchy.

A. Everyone has managers, but the elimination of titles means that everyone has a right to state their opinion. We define levels by the responsibility you have in the company. So I am a “shape.” Most of the folks on the leadership team are shapes. We help shape the direction of the company. The people next level down are “guides.” The level below that are “drives,” and below that are “solves” and then there are “creates.” A working group came up with those levels. I just think they nailed it.

Q. What else about your culture?

A. We have something that I call a very efficient organ-rejection mechanism. If somebody comes in and just does not fit the culture, we reject them. Firing is a very big and an important part of who we are, as well. I think firing is much harder than hiring but it’s every bit as important. If you make a mistake, try to fix the mistake as quickly as you possibly can.

Q. Where did you get these specific ideas about culture? Were there experiences early in your career that affected your thinking?

A. I hated one of my bosses when I was in my early 20s. He was just nasty. There was nothing that anyone in the firm could do right. If you came up with a new idea, he would just beat it out of you.

Q. What are some things you do to spur innovation at your company?

A. We have a “skunk works.” Once every six months, we ask everyone to come up with ideas. It could be anything — a new app, a new process, whatever. And we have a committee that vets them and reduces them down to a specific few, and then we give people some time and resources to go and develop them.

Q. What advice do you give aspiring entrepreneurs?

A. First, find something you’re passionate about. Don’t do some kind of “furniture.com” business just because the furniture industry is big. Pick something you’re passionate about and define a very large problem. And if I were you, I’d define a very large problem that people know is a problem.

So take on a large problem, and see what you can do to fix it. Most people have not spent the time to figure out what is going to be their company’s value proposition. How do you win? If you don’t, it’s like going into a marriage knowing that there are problems but hoping that somehow, some way, it’s going to resolve itself. That doesn’t happen. So if you don’t spend the time to figure it out, why would you spend your money doing it, or somebody else’s?

I think that’s a common pitfall. Somebody creates a new app and puts it out there on a wing and a prayer. The true personality of an entrepreneur is not of a gambler. It’s somebody who goes for a sure thing. You have to figure there’s going to be a whole bunch of things that are going to come at you that you never expected. You’ve got to try to control as much as you possibly can control by anticipating that stuff up front. Those are the basics I leave people with.

DealBook: Best Buy’s Talks With Its Founder Said to Have Ended

Richard Sennott/The Star Tribune, via Associated PressRichard Schulze, the founder of Best Buy, at a store in April 2000.

Richard Schulze’s efforts to take over Best Buy, the struggling electronics retailer he founded nearly 47 years ago, have ended.

Talks between Best Buy and a group comprising Mr. Schulze and three private equity firms have ended, people briefed on the matter told DealBook on Thursday. Discussions could resume at some point, one of these people cautioned.

By the end, Mr. Schulze and the firms — Cerberus Capital Management, Leonard Green & Partners and TPG Capital — had been negotiating to buy a bigger stake in Best Buy that would have added to his roughly 20 percent stake, these people said.

Any prospect of a full takeover of Best Buy had disappeared several weeks ago, they added, after the investor consortium discovered little appetite for the debt that would have been involved in a leveraged buyout.

Shares in Best Buy had already fallen earlier on Thursday, after The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported that the company’s founder had moved on to trying for a minority stake in the retailer. They closed at $16.41, leading to a market value of just $5.6 billion.

By comparison, when Mr. Schulze first disclosed his potential interest in buying all of the electronics chain, a takeover offer would have been worth in excess of $8.8 billion.

Shares in Best Buy have fallen over 11 percent since word of Mr. Schulze’s interest in a potential takeover first emerged last June.

Best Buy is expected to give a final update on its discussions when it reports quarterly earnings on Friday.

Jon Rimmerman, the Garagiste Founder and Wild Raconteur of Wine

Emily Shur for The New York TimesJon Rimmerman, the founder of Garagiste, samples a red.

Standing in the low-ceilinged basement of a rundown Seattle bungalow, among the shiny steel vats and plastic tubing that constitute Animale winery, the wine merchant Jon Rimmerman swirled his glass, sniffed its bouquet, took a sip and moved his mouth around as if chewing. A fair-skinned, dapper and somewhat elfin man, Rimmerman wore Kelly green jeans, a lavender sweater and a black-and-white plaid sportcoat. Salt-and-pepper curls bushed out from under his Greek fisherman’s cap as he bent over a white plastic bucket. Spitting out a great purple jet of wine, Rimmerman signaled to the winemaker Matt Gubitosa that he could taste exactly one more vintage before leaving.

The vineyards of the Savoie, in the French Alps.

From the outside, Animale — named for Gubitosa’s dead but still-beloved cat, whose image has appeared on many Animale bottles — looked more like a methamphetamine lab than a winery, with an overgrown lawn, a faded gnome statue and reflective insulation covering all the basement windows. On the inside, Animale was clean and well lighted, with all proper licensing, classic R. & B. on the radio — “a little bit louder now!” — and a sleepy kitten.

“That’s the Dolcetto?” Rimmerman asked, as Gubitosa poured.

“Two thousand ten, yes. You need some pizza with that. I use cultivated yeast, but no mechanical anything.”

Rimmerman is the founder and sole owner of Garagiste, the world’s largest e-mail-based wine business. With 136,000 subscribers, Rimmerman says that Garagiste does, on average, $30 million in annual sales offered exclusively through his long, florid, self-mythologizing daily e-mails. “Dear Friends, somewhere along the path to wine-related enlightenment” began a recent one, which later evoked “the incredulous 1970s chemical salesman, dumping buckets of toxic pesticides” onto the vineyards of poor Chambertin, Margaux, Latour. “At some point, the land gives up. It must be resuscitated over decades to fully escape the poison (similar to smoking — the body eventually cleans itself and regenerates, but a certain scarring remains).” He then conjured lovely Sardinia, Europe’s “truest untouched terra firma,” source of the obscure 2011 Rigaterri Mirau — “Djarum cigarette in your glass . . . massive pine forest, clove, resin,” a “once-in-a-blue-moon” steal at $18.61 a bottle.

Despite Animale’s admirable smallness, Rimmerman was skeptical going in: only months earlier, Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate gave Gubitosa’s 2009 Petit Verdot a stellar 92-point rating; Rimmerman has built his reputation by differentiating his tastes from those of other critics, favoring the austere, eccentric and putatively authentic over what you might call the merely delicious. But now Rimmerman spit out another purple mouthful and said, with evident surprise, “That’s the most unusual wine.” He looked Gubitosa in the eye. “I mean, not to say whether it’s good or bad, like or don’t like.”

Gubitosa, a burly, thin-haired 50-something who works for the United States Environmental Protection Agency when he’s not cranking tunes, petting kittens and making fine wine, nodded. Point taken.

“But it has a personality.”

“Yeah, it’s not for everybody,” Gubitosa conceded.

“The pepper, it’s incredibly crushed on the nose and through the palate, with those hard tannins,” Rimmerman said. “There’s nothing fun about that.” This was a backhanded compliment. Wines of integrity — wines of “character and terroir,” to use Rimmerman’s term — aim not to please but to express what Rimmerman calls, in all seriousness, “vinous truth,” meaning the honest expression of a particular grape varietal, grown in a particular place, in a particular year. “People have distilled my life down to, He’s in pursuit of the truth, more broadly, in all things,” Rimmerman says.

Bits Blog: A Home Page Reflects Apple’s Founder Again

A screenshot of the online slideshow that greeted Apple customers Friday.

On most days, Apple.com is like any other corporate home page — a billboard, a news hub for corporate goings-on and a launching pad for an online store where people can buy stuff. Every once in a while, though, it turns into something unlike any other big company’s home page.

Friday was one such day, when Apple’s home page featured a video tribute to Steven P. Jobs, the company’s co-founder and former chief executive who died a year ago to the day. The 105-second video consisted of still black-and-white images of Mr. Jobs with audio of him announcing Apple products like the iPhone and describing Apple’s corporate philosophy. The music on the soundtrack is Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in G Major for Cello, played by Yo-Yo Ma, who was a friend of Mr. Jobs.

The home page take-over made it modestly more difficult for Apple customers, most of whom were probably unaware that Friday was the anniversary of Mr. Jobs’s death, to buy Apple products. After the video finished playing and a letter from Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, appeared, regular links to Apple’s online store and product pages were displayed.

Apple isn’t alone in using the platinum online real estate of its home page to make a big statement with its customers. Amazon, for instance, periodically wipes all of the normal product pitches from its front door to replace them with letters from its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, including one in July about an education and training program to help Amazon workers improve their skills.

Under Mr. Jobs though, Apple’s home page occasionally became a showcase for events and people that had very little to do with Apple’s business.

In 2007, after Al Gore, the former vice president and an Apple board member, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work bringing attention to climate change, Apple devoted most of its home page to celebrating the event. “We are bursting with pride for Al and this historic recognition of his global contributions,” a message on the page said.

When people that Mr. Jobs admired died, Apple.com was made over in similar fashion. That happened when George Harrison of the Beatles and Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist who was featured in Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign, passed away, both in 2005.

All of the tributes bore the unmistakable imprint of Mr. Jobs, without whose approval such radical changes to the Apple home page would have been unthinkable. Even after his death, his influence on the site still shows.

Founder Institute’s Requirement: Create a Company

CAN you build a technology entrepreneur from scratch in four months flat?

Yes, contends a global training program called the Founder Institute, which was started in 2009. For tuition of less than $1,000, students attend classes with one goal in mind: to create a fully operational company. In fact, they are required to incorporate before they can graduate.

To be accepted, students don’t need to have a fully baked idea, but they must take a test that the institute says can predict their entrepreneurial success. They can keep their day jobs while attending class, but that does not mean the program is easy. The workload is grueling, and 60 percent of the students fail to graduate.

But this for-profit institute, based in Mountain View, Calif., says it has helped start more than 500 companies. It has done so by going global, with chapters in 14 countries, in a total of 27 cities. It aims to make money partly through its equity stakes in the companies created by its graduates.

Boaz Fletcher, 44, a consultant to new companies in Israel, started the Tel Aviv branch this year. “As a country, Israel is amazing at technology, but not great at building sustainable businesses, and that is one of the things the Founder Institute teaches: how to build an enduring, stable company,” he said. The branch’s first class of nine students will graduate in September.

The institute is the brainchild of Adeo Ressi, 40, who has started eight companies of his own. Back in the mid-1990s, he was a co-founder of Total New York, an online regional city guide that was acquired by AOL.

Mr. Ressi saw a need for nurturing entrepreneurs even before the idea stage. He set out to create a vocational school of sorts to teach the nuts and bolts of entrepreneurship, setting it apart from highly selective programs that often support start-ups before the venture capital stage. One of the best known of these “accelerators,” TechStars, accepts only 1 percent of applicants.

Mr. Ressi says he wants to reduce the failure rate for new companies. For every Dropbox, the popular file storage service, there are hundreds of businesses that never make it, he said, adding: “Why is that the case? And can it be fixed?”

HE came up with the idea for the institute as C.E.O. of TheFunded.com, a Web site where entrepreneurs and chief executives rate venture capital firms and investors. Through the site, he has a community of founders at his fingertips, and he was able to ask them: What would they have done differently at the beginning?

From Tel Aviv to Chicago, the curriculum is partly based on answers to that question from 2,000 executives. Classes often consist of around 30 students, with a much smaller number making it to graduation. In 15 sessions, students learn about topics like revenue, costs and profits; marketing and sales; presentation and publicity; and fund-raising.

There are adjustments in the curriculum to address local markets. In Singapore, for example, there is an additional session on doing business in China. Sessions are taught by chapter leaders and by seasoned entrepreneurs who can also serve as mentors.

Fundamental to the institute is the belief that many aspects of entrepreneurship can be taught.

Jose Luis Senent, 43, had been a car broker in Paris for 20 years, but had no previous experience with technology or start-ups. He graduated from the Paris chapter in April 2011 and now runs Autoreduc, a group-buying site for cars that he says is profitable and will expand into Spain, Belgium and Switzerland this year.

“I cannot imagine starting a company without knowing what I learned at the institute — there is so much to know about marketing, business models and raising money,” Mr. Senent said. The institute connected him with mentors who challenged his ideas and set his company in the right direction, he said.

Mr. Ressi says he wants to help budding founders avoid rookie mistakes — like bad Web design and off-key marketing, or creating the wrong corporate structure.

Katherine Bicknell, 31, a graduate of the New York chapter and co-founder of Kindara, an app that helps women track their fertility, would still be calling her company “Moonlyght” if not for a session on naming and branding.

“The Founder Institute said that you had to be able to say it, spell it, read it easily, and the dot-com had to be available,” said Ms. Bicknell, whose company is based in Boulder, Colo. So far, she and her co-founder have raised $100,000 from friends and family.

The institute aims to democratize the access that up-and-coming entrepreneurs need, partly by opening up networks and opportunities to those on the outside of the tight-knit start-up world. It “helped me build my network — when I came from Turkey to the U.S. in 2008 to start my company, I didn’t know anyone,” said Eren Bali, 28, co-founder of Udemy, an online learning company that has raised $4 million from investors. “I was starting from scratch, ” said Mr. Bali, who graduated from the Silicon Valley chapter in 2009.

Carlos Rozo, 38, a graduate of the chapter in Bogotá, Colombia, said the institute steered him away from a potentially fatal mistake — starting something big and complicated — and toward something more narrow that would fill a niche. He abandoned plans for a content-sharing platform in favor of Thotz.net, a provider of software that companies can use to share information among employees. Mr. Rozo says he has received $50,000 in seed funding from Wayra, which is backed by the Telefónica Group.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 28, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the person who began Founder Institute chapters in Colombia. He is Alan Colmenares, not Colemenares. An earlier version also misidentified the company that Carlos Rozo started and contained an incorrect link for that company’s Web site. It is Thotz.net, not Thotz.com.

Megaupload Founder Goes From Arrest to Cult Hero

He asked whether “you guys just drive around in modified electric vehicles and pose for photos,” referring to an image Mr. Dotcom, 38, had just posted showing three of his associates with golf buggies and a Segway. “I could live like that,” Mr. Gracewood wrote.

Twenty minutes later he got a surprising response: “Come over now!” So he took a friend and went to the most expensive house in the country — a mansion worth 30 million New Zealand dollars, or $24 million, rented by Mr. Dotcom, a German citizen — for a swim and some cupcakes. Twitter users across New Zealand watched with fascination as the group posted updates and photos of the visit.

That evening, which was followed on Twitter under #swimatkims , was just the latest in a series of at times bizarre developments in a case that has turned Mr. Dotcom into something of a cult hero since his arrest.

In January, two police helicopters landed on his lawn to raid the property just north of Auckland. At that time, most of the country had never heard of Mr. Dotcom, despite his flamboyance and wealth. He had kept a low profile in the two years he had been living in this country of about 4.4 million people.

The police operation — carried out under New Zealand’s extradition treaty with the United States — seemed designed to attract attention. It was accompanied by uncharacteristically detailed news releases describing the operation, including how officers had cut their way into a panic room to arrest Mr. Dotcom, who, they said, was found sitting near a shotgun.

Mr. Dotcom — born Kim Schmitz and also known as Kimble and Kim Tim Jim Vestor — and three others connected with Megaupload were arrested in connection with U.S. indictments on charges involving copyright infringement and money laundering. At the time, the U.S. Department of Justice said that in all, seven people had been arrested around the world in connection with an investigation into online piracy of numerous copyrighted works, including music and films.

The Justice Department said the individuals and two companies — Megaupload and Vestor — had been charged with “engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.”

This month, Mr. Dotcom’s U.S. lawyers are set to appear before a Virginia judge in a bid to have the criminal case against the company dismissed. According to a document on his lawyers’ Web site, they will argue, among other points, that the indictments are invalid because they must be submitted to a company’s U.S. office, which Megaupload has never had.

Even if it is successful, the case against Mr. Dotcom and the other defendants would proceed.

The four men arrested in New Zealand are still free on bail, awaiting an extradition hearing, which is scheduled to begin Aug. 6.

Mr. Dotcom has had other brushes with the law. He was convicted of insider trading in Germany in 2002 in what was at the time the largest such case.

Among the items seized by the police in the January raids were 18 luxury vehicles worth 6 million dollars — including a Rolls Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe and a 1959 pink Cadillac — computers and as much as 11 million dollars in cash.

Mr. Dotcom said in an e-mail interview that he had been treated badly by the New Zealand police and the government, which he said he believed was simply kowtowing to U.S. requests.

“Two helicopters and 76 heavily armed officers to arrest a man alleged of copyright crimes — think about that,” he wrote. “Hollywood is importing their movie scripts into the real world and sends armed forces to protect their outdated business model.”

In February, the New Zealand police defended the operation, saying it had been in line with a risk assessment and there had been only “20 or 30” officers involved in the raid on the mansion.

After a month of prison, Mr. Dotcom was eventually granted bail, despite prosecutors’ arguments that he was a serious flight risk. Over the following months his lawyers won a series of hearings to loosen the bail conditions and free up some of his confiscated cash to cover expenses.

The biggest victory came last Thursday, when a High Court judge ruled the New Zealand police had used the wrong type of search warrant, so the entire raid had been illegal. Mr. Dotcom’s lawyers are due back in the Auckland High Court on Wednesday, seeking the return of seized assets and data.

Gavin Ellis, a senior political studies lecturer at the University of Auckland, said that over time the public had become less supportive of the police operation.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 3, 2012

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect value for the house that Kim Dotcom rents in New Zealand. It is $24 million, not $30.7 million.