A Clearinghouse of Causes: WebActive Reflects Founder’s Progressive Vision

“While we’re all doing a million things, our mutual friend — the earth — is going to hell in a fur-lined, coal-powered, non-recyclable hand basket,” the actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus says in an Internet video message for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, who plays Elaine on the popular television show Seinfeld, goes on to encourage viewers to become e-mail activists for the group and to get in touch with members of Congress to express views on pressing legislation.

The announcement was posted for two weeks last year on WebActive, an Internet directory of about 2,000 non-profit groups (http://www.webactive.com) sponsored by Real Networks, a Seattle company that makes Real Audio and Real Video software, which allows video and audio signals to be transmitted over the Internet.

The video attracted about 100,000 hits per day for 10 consecutive days. And the message, the environmental group says, resulted in about 2,900 new e-mail activists, which represented a 60-per-cent increase.

“Real Networks is one of the few companies that is trying to bring advocacy to the Internet, and that makes them unique and important,” says William Roberts, a senior lawyer at the environmental group.

Real Networks, founded by Rob Glaser, a former top executive at Microsoft, has also pledged to give a substantial portion of its profits — 5 per cent — to charity if the company makes money. But because the company is a long way from being profitable, that commitment is somewhat hypothetical. At present, the most concrete evidence of the company’s social activism is WebActive.

Most of the charities featured on WebActive are located on the left of the political spectrum, al though some are centrist groups that espouse no particular political views, such as the American Red Cross, CARE, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. A few conservative organizations are also featured, such as the Christian Coalition and the Heritage Foundation. But the category under which they can be found — “The Wrong Side of the Web” — betrays the political leanings of WebActive.

In addition to providing brief descriptions of the charities it lists and links to their own Web sites, WebActive features daily transmissions from the left-leaning Pacifica Radio Network, as well as weekly presentations of Counterspin, a 30-minute radio show produced by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal watchdog group that criticizes mainstream news organizations for biased or inaccurate reporting.

At Real Networks, progressive values run deep. Indeed, until last fall, the company was called Progressive Networks. And the company’s founder, Rob Glaser — an intense, young software entrepreneur — has a personal history of concern for progressive values and social activism, at least in the years that he wasn’t busy earning millions of dollars at Microsoft.

Mr. Glaser is the embodiment of high bandwidth, packing a tremendous number of words and ideas into each sentence. Accustomed to operating in a fast-moving industry where clear and decisive communications are essential, the 36-year-old entrepreneur talks enthusiastically about his philanthropy, which he has made part and parcel of his new business.

Indeed, when he took his company public late last year, Mr. Glaser did something highly unusual: He told potential investors that he was committing a full 5 per cent of pre-tax profits to philanthropy. And although profits are so far non-existent, that level of giving would place Real Networks in rarefied company.

Nationwide, according to figures compiled by the Conference Board, companies gave less than 1 per cent of pre-tax profits away in 1996, on average. And although a socially active company like Ben and Jerry’s gives away 7.5 per cent, only a relative handful of companies give away as much as 5 per cent.

To underline the seriousness of his commit ment to giving, Mr. Glaser put 5 per cent of his own shares in the company — worth about $22.4-million today — into the Glaser Family Foundation. (The fund is not yet making grants because investors require corporations that issue large blocks of stock in a public offering to refrain from selling additional shares for a period of time.)

Despite the pledge to give away 5 per cent of earnings to charity, investors seemed confident that Mr. Glaser would be able to turn a nice profit. The entire stock offering, which opened at $12.50 per share, was quickly snapped up. As of last week, Real Networks stock was trading at about $32 per share, with Mr. Glaser’s stake worth roughly $430-million.

One reason the plan has met with such a favorable response, Mr. Glaser believes, is that he has a reputation for being a hard-charging competitor. Given his former role as a Microsoft vice-president in charge of multimedia and consumer services, he could never be accused of being soft on seeking profits, he says.

Mr. Glaser’s Microsoft colleagues scoff at the idea that he would do anything that would jeopardize the profitability or competitiveness of his company. “Rob is soft on nothing,” says Min S. Yee, a retired Microsoft executive who worked alongside Mr. Glaser. Quite the contrary, says Mr. Yee: “He perfected the art of war.”

Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Software and a pioneer in the field of personal computing, says Mr. Glaser is a rare hybrid among high-technology entrepreneurs. “He is quite unusual in having a very highly developed set of broader concerns, broader than simply the profit and loss of the company,” says Mr. Kapor, a member of Real Networks’ Board of Directors and its first outside investor.

Still, says Mr. Kapor, “Rob is very competitive and committed to making the business successful.”

Mr. Glaser’s competitive nature is evident in other endeavors as well. An avid baseball fan, he owns a minority stake in the Seattle Mariners, the city’s money-losing professional baseball franchise.

The Mariners, he says, “is not officially a non-profit, it just works out that way.” He says he invested in the team as a way to keep the franchise from moving and to keep it as a community asset. “It’s not in the same moral category as feeding starving children or finding the cure to AIDS or ending global warming,” he says, “but it is a positive thing for the community.”

Doing good for the community has long been important to him.

As a third-grade student in Yonkers, N.Y., Mr. Glaser went on an outing to a city park that was cluttered with trash. Disgusted, the budding environmentalist and his classmates wrote letters to city officials. The parks commissioner wrote back promising action, and he quoted Mr. Glaser’s letter in his response.

The lesson was indelible. “You can have an impact,” says Mr. Glaser, recalling his youthful exploits.

Through high school and college, he became increasingly involved in political and social causes, organizing boycotts to support farm workers and demonstrating against the nuclear-arms buildup. In college, Mr. Glaser was editorial-page editor of the Yale Daily News, where he had a column called — “somewhat self-mockingly,” he notes — “What’s Left.”

At Yale, Mr. Glaser also volunteered at Dwight Hall, a charity that helps poor people in New Haven, where the university is located. “I was a little bit involved in some of the community activities, such as soup kitchens, but I was more interested in social activism,” he recalls. “I was interested in the connection between advocacy work and social services.”

After graduating in 1983 — with a double major in economics and computer sciences and a master’s degree in economics — Mr. Glaser considered taking a job as a union organizer. But in the end he chose to move to Seattle to join a fast-rising company called Microsoft.

During his 10-year stint at Microsoft, Mr. Glaser focused all of his energies on the company. “It certainly was not my expectation that I was going to sublimate my interest in activism,” he says. “But I found that I was so busy and I got into a rhythm where I didn’t have it integrated into anything else that I did.”

After leaving Microsoft in 1993, Mr. Glaser focused most of his efforts on the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a pioneering group that has tried to protect civil liberties on the Internet. He was attracted to it, he says, because “it was seminal in propagating a few ideas, the notion of cyberspace as a social place, where it was important to think about issues of freedom of speech, open communications, and social cohesion.”

At the foundation, which was started by Mr. Kapor, Mr. Glaser stood out as a particularly effective and hard-working member of the Board of Directors, says David Johnson, a former board member who is director of the Aspen Institute’s Internet Policy Project.

But Mr. Glaser’s work for the foundation may have benefited him as much as it did the organization. It was there that he first became deeply involved in the Internet. And it was through contacts he made at the non-profit group that he first encountered software that could transmit audio and video over the Internet.

Mr. Glaser believes that the greatest social influence his company will have may be neither the money it gives away nor the help it provides non-profit groups through WebActive. Like many high-technology entrepreneurs, Mr. Glaser has a missionary’s belief that the technology itself will have far-reaching benefits for society.

“Our view is the Internet is a very decentralist technology,” says Mr. Glaser. “And we want our technology to support and enhance that to the greatest extent possible.”