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Introduction

I won't bore you with my childhood stories. Here are the headlines:

• Born on August 11th in 1942 in the small town of Elgin, Illinois
• Graduated from Rochelle (Illinois) Township High School in 1960
• Graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1964
• Left law school in April of 1965 to serve as a crew member on a square-rigged sailing ship captained by Alan Villiers (my photos of this trip)
• Worked as a stunt man on the movie Hawaii, staring Julie Andrews, Max von Sydow, Richard Harris, and Gene Hackman (my photos of the filming) (Max vonSydow and young Lorenzo)
• Received an appointment as a U.S. Naval officer in 1966
• Served on the USS Hopewell (DD-681) off the coast of Viet Nam
• Served as Executive Officer and Navagator of the USS Apache (ATF-67) during the Scorpion Phase II Operation, during which we spent a year away from home while investigating the loss of the submarine USS Scorpion. The Apache towed the floating drydock USS Whitesands, which in turn served as the mother ship for the bathyscaphe USS Trieste. The Apache towed the Whitesands/ Trieste from San Diego, California, through the Panama Canal, to the Azores islands and back, the longest single towing operation in U.S. Navy history.
• Worked as an electrical engineer for ITE Circuit Breaker Co. and for Thermon Manufacturing Co. while attending law school at night in Houston, Texas
• Graduated cum laude from the University of Houston Law School in August 1972
• Passed the Texas State Bar Examination and was sworn into the Texas State Bar in September 1972
• Practiced law in Houston, Texas as a partner in the firm of McAninch & Hagerty

My Decision to Leave the Active Practice of Law

I am often asked why I left the active practice of law. (I still maintain my license before the Texas State Bar.) The answer is quite simple. I had come to the practice of law with ideas of changing the world, but I became disillusioned when I realized that everyone cannot afford the sometimes high price of justice. Although my practice dealt primarily with business and real estate matters, the time I spent working with clients who came from socially and economically disadvantaged situations convinced me that before people could change their lives, they first must change their attitudes about life. Thus began my search for ways to help people discover their own potential for personal and financial growth.

Success, Inc.

After leaving the practice of law, I became involved with several network marketing companies. I was the president of one of these companies, Success, Inc. This company was the vehicle my business partners and I used to market sales training and marketing courses to companies who used the network marketing sales model.

Under the Success, Inc. label, I wrote, recorded, and sold thousands of cassette tapes covering topics such as:

• Goal Setting
• How To Master Direct Sales
• Freedom Now!
• Introduction to Personal Computers
• Self Confidence
• The Art of Becoming an Entrepreneur

During my time with Success, Inc., I appeared before tens of thousands of people giving keynote speeches and workshops.

The National Speakers Association's most coveted award, "the Cavett," is named after its founder, Cavett Robert. Until his death in 1997, most people called him the dean of public speakers. Here is what he had to say about me when we worked together in the 1980s:

Larry Hagerty is one of the most outstanding speakers I have ever been
privileged to hear. Not only is he qualified by experience for his great message,
but he presents his ideas in a most enjoyable and attractive style.

Dynasty Computer Corporation

In late 1979, I founded Dynasty Computer Corporation. Dynasty was the first network marketing company to exclusively carry the then new home computers. This was a couple of years before IBM brought out their first PC.

Begun in my home with an investment of only a few thousand dollars, our gross sales in our first full calendar year exceeded one million dollars. Paltry by today's standards, this was big money in 1980 when few people had any reason to want a computer in their home. The big names in the world of micro computing back then were VisiCalc, IMSAI, WordStar, Compuserve and the like. The hot chip was the Z-80A, as Intel had only introduced the 8080 a few years earlier. If, as some say, the birth of the personal computer industry came about in 1980 with the introduction of the Intel chip, then it was an auspicious year indeed in which to begin a computer company. Unfortunately, Dynasty was on the Z-80/CPM bandwagon. None of us early pioneers in the industry could foresee what was about to happen the following year, when IBM introduced its first PC. Even though our company wasn't one of the survivors of the personal computer revolution, I would not trade that experience for anything. To have been there at the beginning of what has led us to today's Internet-connected world was worth more than any possible financial rewards that failed to materialize.

During its five years of life, Dynasty received a great deal of notoriety in the press. In addition to receiving a page one mention in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine had this to say about us in their May 23, 1983 edition:

[Hagerty] also ran a sales training company but wanted to get into the computer business, so he combined his interests and founded Dynasty, a company that emphasizes the "personal" in personal computers. Hagerty, 40, already has 3,000 salespeople selling his machines . . .

Dynasty is not to be taken lightly. Hagerty, who flies hot air balloons in his spare time "to get away from high technology," started the company in 1980. During his [sic] first year Dynasty did over $1 million in business, and he is expanding rapidly enough to require a sales force of 5,000 people in 17 states by year's end.

A few months later, Popular Computing had this to say about Dynasty Computer Corporation:

The company's tone is set by President Lawrence Hagerty, a mega-achiever who flies hot-air balloons for recreation and who, along with authors John Naisbitt (Megatrends) and Marilyn Ferguson (The Aquarian Conspiracy), airs his views about '80s culture and business trends in the prestigious Tarrytown Group. Hagerty's main achievement at Dynasty has been his aggressive assault on some of the Lone Star State's most powerful corporations: Texas Instruments, Radio Shack, and even Southwestern Bell.

I must admit, those were exciting times, but the year of that Forbes article, 1983, was to be Dynasty's final year. Like Osborn Computers, which at one time held the record as the fastest growing company in America, Dynasty succumbed to the tsunami of IBM's marketing machine.

My Years With GTE . . . . . working undercover 

During the late 1980s and most of the 1990s I worked for what was then the nation's third largest local telephone company, GTE. The division in which I worked was the Data Services division in Tampa, Florida. At GTE Data Services I served in various positions including technical writer, multimedia software developer, Internet & Java "evangelist," and product manager for an Internet security product line. At the time I left GTE I held the position of Group Marketing Manager for a suite of data center and Internet product lines.

In 1996 I became a founding member of GTE's original Internet/Java Development Group. As this organization started up just months after Sun Microsystems' introduction of Java Technology (tm), one of our primary functions was to promote this new technology both within and outside of GTE. Over the next several years I spoke on GTE's behalf promoting the now commercial Internet and the Java programming language. These presentations were made at annual conferences in London, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and throughout the United States at conferences such as JavaOne and the Zona Research Zonathons.

In 1997, GTE acquired BBN, the company that built the first segment of the Internet, ARPANet, and I was privileged to work with some of the wizards who design and run the Internet's backbone segments. At this time I was promoted to group marketing manager and assumed responsibility for the marketing efforts of the following GTE commercial product lines:

• Data Center Outsourcing Services
  Processing nearly 10 million transactions a day with systems availability consistently exceeding 99.98 percent, the GTE data centers work around the clock to collect, process, distribute, and archive customer data. GTE's commercial data centers offer numerous state-of-the-art features, including:
  • Triple redundancy and satellite backup
  • 4,000+ MIPS of mainframe processing
  • 700 T1 and T3 circuits linking dozens of sites
  • 120+ mid-range computers (IBM, Digital, HP, Tandem, Sun, SGI, Compaq, Teradata)
  • Mainframe, mini, PC/LAN, and client/server platforms
  • 28 terabytes of data stored on 706 DASD
  • 57 StorageTek tape silos
  • Fault-tolerant facilities with full UPS and diesel generator backup
• QCare - Healthcare Administration
  This is a total healthcare management system comprised of 20 subsystems, each of which facilitates a healthcare processing need. The six processing categories are:
• Claims Processing
• Customer Service
• Group and Member Services
• Provider Relations
• User Assistance/Technical Support
• Utilization Management
• Help Desk Services
  Professional consultants support customers' IT environments with a first-touch resolution rate that approaches 75%. Three problems out of four are resolved without escalation. Help desk services include:
  • Single point of contact with end-to-end problem ownership
  • Call logging, tracking, follow-up and call pattern analysis and reporting
  • Optional toll-free service
  • Customized call answering
  • Rapid diagnosis and triage with immediate dispatch of critical calls
  • First-touch resolution capability
  • Expert systems and case-based reasoning tools
  • Hardware break/fix dispatch
  • Full-service LAN administration
• Network Management Services
  A totally integrated solution to provide the network, operation, administration, and monitoring of a data network. Network management consists of three services, which were provided through the coordination of offerings from GTE Data Services Incorporated (GTEDS), GTE Data Systems Services (DSS), and GTE Internetworking Powered by BBN. The solution set included the following:
  • Network Analysis & Design provided by GTE Internetworking
  • Network Implementation & Support provided by GTE Data Systems Services
  • Data Network Management provided by GTE Data Services
• Network Commerce Platform
  The Network Commerce Platform harnesses GTE's unrivaled Internet resources, world-class data centers, and 24x7 support operations to enable businesses, their technology providers, application developers, and systems integrators to rapidly develop and deploy electronic commerce and other network-based business applications. This was, in fact, one of the first instances of what is today called an Application Services Provider, or ASP.

  At the most basic level, the NCP is a value-added TCP/IP network bundled with common services to provide access to an array of Internet commerce solutions without the need for massive installations of hardware or the licensing and updating of software. The NCP's sophisticated infrastructure is transparent to the user and supports virtually any business application running on any popular operating system or application server.

  In the spring of 1998, I joined Dev Horn, David Gonzalez, and David Belson to form the core team that took our initial ideas and transformed them from concept to reality in less than a year. With the merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic into Verizon, this project was transferred to their Internet spin-off, Genuity, Inc., where it is known today as Black Rocket.

August 1999 - August 2002 . . . . no longer undercover

After Bell Atlantic announced its intent to acquire GTE (the merged companies are now know as Verizon), I took a leave of absence to finish writing The Spirit of the Internet. While I was writing that book and spending all my days and nights thinking "out of the box," I came to see what a precarious position many of today's companies are in. Not only has the Internet changed many of the rules for doing business, it has also begun to change the way people think about their connectivity with others and about how their individual actions are affecting the Earth.

It became apparent to me that individuals were expanding their awareness of the consequences of their actions much more rapidly than were the companies who are trying to sell them goods and services. As a result of my research, I decided to not return to GTE and instead spend my time consulting with companies that are intent on becoming agents for change in a world that is changing at an incredible pace. Practices that were considered business as usual just five years ago no longer work. The end users of products and services have begun making demands about quality, levels of service, and environmental and safety issues as well as other issues reflective of better informed consumers.

Theday has arrived for companies, large and small, to add a companion piece to their mission statements. In today's rapidly changing and highly competitive environment, it is the companies that make a clear statement of their "corporate consciousness" that will be the ones who make it in this new century.

August 31, 2002

Burning Man: On the night of the burn, Larry (Lawrence) went up with the man, and Lorenzo arrived.

January 2003 onward

The beginning of 2003 brought with it the birth of the Digital Space Commons. Along with several other founding members of the Commons, I am now devoting a significant amount of my time to the creation of a private voice communications network using TalkSpace, the voice of the people.

August 2003

Organizer of the Palenque Norte theme camp at Burning Man

June 2005

Started PodCasting the Psychedelic Salon

[Java Technology (tm) is is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.]