Louis Rossetto is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 journalist and "radical libertarian

Libertarianism

Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...

." He is best known as the founder and former publisher of Wired magazine.

Early life and career

Rossetto was born and grew up on Long Island

Long Island

Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...

, New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

.
He went to Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 as an undergraduate and later returned for an MBA. In the early 1970s, he wrote a novel called Takeover. Several years later, he ghostwrote a book about the making of the film Caligula

Caligula (film)

Caligula is a 1979 American-produced Italian biographical film directed by Tinto Brass, with additional scenes filmed by Giancarlo Lui and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione. The film concerns the rise and fall of Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar Germanicus, better known as Caligula...

called Ultimate Porno. In 1971, he appeared on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

In 1985, Rossetto joined the staff of a translation company in Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

, INK Taalservice. INK launched an English-language magazine in 1987 with Rossetto as editor called Language Technology which covered the technologies used to process language. The magazine was later sold to a small Dutch media company and renamed Electric Word

Electric Word

Electric Word was a bimonthly, English-language magazine published in Amsterdam between 1987 and 1990 that offered eclectic reporting on the translation industry, linguistic technology, and computer culture.Its editor was Louis Rossetto....

. It was terminated in 1990 due to insufficient revenue.

Wired

In 1991, Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe

Jane Metcalfe

Jane Metcalfe is the co-founder, with Louis Rossetto, and former president of Wired Ventures, creator and original publisher of Wired Magazine...

 resettled in the US to raise capital for Wired. They launched the magazine on a shoestring budget in January 1993.

Wired was greatly admired for its bold design and its coverage of "digital culture". The magazine exuded a counterculture

Counterculture

Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...

 ethos—and was even compared to Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...

as a barometer of the zeitgeist of the era. Its often deliberately provocative editorial reflected Rossetto's beliefs in a far-reaching "digital revolution" based on global consciousness and networked markets. Under Rossetto's five years as editor, the magazine won two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, and one National Magazine Award for Design.

In October 1994, Wired Ventures became an Internet pioneer when it launched the first Web site with original content and Fortune 500 advertising called HotWired

HotWired

Hotwired was the first commercial web magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of Wired Ventures, Hotwired was a separate entity from Wired, the print magazine, and had original content....

. HotWired then proceeded to launch dozens of other Web sites, including Webmonkey

Webmonkey

Webmonkey is a popular online tutorial website composed of various articles on building webpages from backend to frontend. The site covers many aspects of developing on the web like programming, database, multimedia, and setting up web storefronts. The content presented is much like Wired magazine...

 and the search engine Hotbot

HotBot

HotBot is a web search engine launched in May 1996 by Wired Magazine. It is currently owned by Lycos. HotBot became a popular tool with search results served by the Inktomi database and directory results provided originally by LookSmart and then the Open Directory Project since mid-1999...

. Hotwired employees Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman

Carl Steadman

Carl Steadman is co-founder of suck.com, creator of several pieces of early web-savvy literature and current operator of plastic.com. He was also production director for HotWired....

 launched the first weblog Suck.com

Suck.com

Suck.com was one of the earliest ad-supported content sites on the Internet. It featured daily editorial content on a wide variety of topics, including politics and pop-culture and was targeted at Generation X...

.

After HotWired, Wired expanded into books with HardWired and television with Wired TV. By 1996, it had Japanese and British editions, and was actively planning a German edition, as well as new business and design magazines.

Wired Venture's rapid expansion forced it in 1996 to turn to an IPO

Initial public offering

An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...

 for financing. But after failing to take the company public as scheduled during what turned out to be a severe stock market downturn that summer, Rossetto and Metcalfe were forced to accept Providence Equity as financial partners in early 1997. By the summer of 1997, four years after launch, Wired magazine was solidly profitable. Its three-year-old online business, now renamed Wired Digital, was not. It was Wired Digital's cash needs which Providence used to wrest control of the company from Rossetto and Metcalfe in April 1997.

Despite Wired Ventures becoming cash-flow positive in May 1998, Providence sold off its assets. The company that Rossetto and Metcalfe began in 1991 with $30,000 was sold in pieces for $380 million. Condé Nast

Condé Nast Publications

Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a magazine publisher. In the U.S., it produces 18 consumer magazines, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 50 apps...

 bought the now 500,000-circulation Wired magazine, and Lycos

Lycos

Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...

 bought Wired Digital.

Post-Wired

Since Wired, Rossetto has mostly avoided the public eye, although he assisted with a 2001 redesign of Reason Magazine and defended the invasion of Iraq in its pages. He pursued individual projects through his and Metcalfe's Força da Imaginaçao holding company.

Currently, Rossetto is CEO and CCO of the chocolate company, TCHO

TCHO

TCHO is a start-up chocolate maker based in San Francisco, California.-History:TCHO was co-founded by Timothy Childs and Karl Bittong. Its CEO and President are Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, respectively, co-founders of Wired magazine. The company maps cocoa beans to their flavors on a...

.

Rossetto and Metcalfe are the parents of Zoe Metcalfe and Orson Rossetto.

Further reading

• Wired - A Romance (2003) by Gary Wolf
  Gary Wolf (journalist)
  This article refers to the journalist and contributing editor for Wired magazine. For the novelist and creator of the Roger Rabbit universe, see Gary K. Wolf.Gary Wolf is a writer and contributing editor at Wired magazine...
  
  ISBN 0-375-50290-4.

External links

• "Digerati: The Buccaneer: Louis Rossetto" by John Brockman
• "The War for Wired" by Kevin Kelleher
• "The Coolest Magazine on the Planet" by David Carr
• Louis Rossetto: »Change is good«, Typo 2005, Berlin.
• The New Right Credo — Libertarianism by Stan Lehr and Louis Rossetto Jr.; New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1971