Teaming Up in Portugal

The original players in the Living PlanIT story joined up for reasons as varied as the individuals themselves. What inspired them to leave their jobs, often their homes, and even more often their predictable paychecks to pursue an outlandish vision? Let's take a look.

In 2009 Steve Lewis was 44, a dreamer, a visionary, a driven entrepreneur in an age of entrepreneurs. He hoped to make money, certainly, yet Lewis seemed more driven by the thrill of innovation. He had already had his share of wins and losses, mostly wins. Win or lose, most of these activities were far less in the public eye than this one would be. This one would be his legacy.

People are drawn to Steve Lewis. He is one of those people whose energy and presence you remember more than the details of his appearance: medium height, medium build, graying hair, dark blue eyes. He doesn't usually look directly at the person he is speaking with, which tends to be a good thing. If he looks directly at you, it means he is going to tunnel into something you've said. Few statements can actually withstand Lewis's scrutiny. If you're lucky, he'll build on your idea. If you're not lucky, you'll be back at the starting gate in no time. In these moments Lewis's accent shifts perceptibly to the cockney intonations of his Hertfordshire childhood. As a result, perhaps a fear of his own intensity, he tends to look out and under his eyebrows, as if his head were tilted too far forward.

Perpetually casual, Silicon Valley–startup in his dress—black button-down shirts, jeans (the predominance of black, he claims, comes from being color-blind)—Lewis is almost never seen without his iPhone, which he uses frequently to describe his vision for the company. "It's a platform," he'll say, holding the phone flat in his palm, as if it could support the weight of his ideas, "a city of apps."

The Shaping of a Technology Futurist

Lewis was born on September 3, 1965, in London, the son of a carpenter. "My father was very creative," he recalls, "always making things. He worked in construction. As a kid I went to a lot of his job sites. When he moved to Saudi Arabia with the Army Corps of Engineers to do some civil construction, I went with him. He was involved with an American lady." This left young Steve with time on his hands. To amuse himself he would tinker with technology: "As far back as I can remember, I've been curious. In a masochistic way, I liked problems. I'm quite happy in the gray areas. . . . I always read a lot. I also break everything I touch. I loved to take things apart—appliances, for instance. I got my first electronics kit when I was six and a half. Then a chemistry kit. Anything that exploded. Then I got a home computer kit and locked myself away, working on juvenile software."

Lewis returned to the United Kingdom when he was 12. He remembers hanging out in the teachers' lounge: "My physics teacher had this great caustic humor. And my math teacher was one of the oddest people I've ever met." One day in school, his math teacher brought in an early-model personal computer. "It just sat there," Lewis says. "No one knew how to use it." Soon Lewis had befriended the Commodore 64 and started creating software. "Software was then, and still is, an art form," he says, like a painter talking about cadmium pigments. "It's one of the most malleable art forms—you need very little infrastructure to do an enormous number of things."

One day a representative from Hatfield Polytechnic in Hertfordshire, now a university renowned for its aerospace engineering and computer science, as well as for its focus on green technology, visited the school. Lewis, then 13, showed him what he was working on. Soon, in exchange for access to a computer, Lewis started coaching some of the staff at Hatfield on how to use it and how to create the software as well.

After high school, Lewis explains, he was on his way to playing professional soccer when he was diagnosed with leukemia. Instead of kicking a ball across a field, he spent 10 months in the hospital. Lewis is not by any stretch of the imagination an introverted guy. He thinks aloud. He thrives on debate. The mere presence of others seems to get him going and keep him going—late into the night, sometimes into the early-morning hours. Yet in those 10 months, the patient refused visits from members of his family. He recalls thinking that if they were there, he would feel their doubt and concern. Their doubt about his ability to beat the cancer would demoralize him and lessen his chances of getting better. "I didn't feel it was my time," he said in one of our first meetings.

This tells you a lot about Steve Lewis. He believes—and believes he has evidence to support it—that if your will and vision are strong enough, you can do anything. Beat leukemia. Build a city. What you must not do is let the naysayers get in your way, no matter how well meaning, no matter how much evidence they throw in your path. "My mother and stepfather were recently ill," Lewis said almost two years after our first meeting, "and they just got each other all upset about it. It's better to deal with it alone."

This way of thinking about the world—about problem solving and crisis management—became particularly interesting as we watched Lewis build the team to build the city, or perhaps just to change the way other new cities were built. Sometimes this inclination to focus on the future meant that Lewis simply refused to focus on near-term realities, such as paychecks. Keeping an eye on the ball, for Lewis, meant building on good news. The future would cantilever out on a positive meeting or a long-awaited MOU. This positive energy was and is a compelling part of Lewis's charisma, but it would also prove increasingly frustrating to several members of the team.

Just 18 and having successfully dodged death, Lewis got a job in the statistical research unit of Roussel Laboratories. To this day when he describes his most pivotal moments, his true discoveries, it is with great respect for serendipity—the chance meeting, the barroom revelation—respect for "fooling around" with machines, ideas, and possibilities to see what happens next. It was one thing to write software and another thing altogether to learn how to use the massive computing capability that was doubling itself every day. "I was just a snot-nosed kid, surrounded by doctors and surgeons." As Lewis tells it, having tinkered with machines and appliances since he was seven, his work at Roussel was fun. "I did have a strong work ethic," he says. "At night I'd work with the mainframe operators. This was tantamount to a formal education in large-scale computing."

Lewis left Roussel after a year and went to SAS software and then to Soft-Switch, a small company based in Philadelphia, where he started working on larger projects with more moving parts—system integration projects for large companies ("another dogsbody job," he says, using British slang for "drudgework"). This is where he started managing people; he recalls managing a team of 200 at age 21. "So much was happening in this time," he muses. "We knew that the way computers talked to everything else was growing like crazy." From software to hardware had been one leap. His next education would be in networking. With a growing interest in customer expectations, Lewis needed new mentors. Allen Brain, vice president of international sales at Soft-Switch ("we called him Herr Brain") taught him about the commercial side of the computing business, understanding customer needs, and developing new products. "I came to feel," Lewis says, "that as long as I created value, others would take care of me."

Five years later, in 1994, Soft-Switch was acquired by Lotus, and in 1995 Lotus was acquired by IBM. Lewis went along for the adventure, playing varied roles in product strategy, marketing, and messaging. Lewis credits Cliff Reeves, then vice president of product management at Lotus, with teaching him much about product strategy and creating markets. It was here that his entrepreneurial side began to develop. He had spent years acquiring the skills. Now he began creating his own vision of a future made better, enabled by computing. "A large part of my work has always involved trying to remain humble enough to ask questions and to realize that 50 percent of the decisions I make are going to result in failure."

By 1998 Lewis felt that he had a good sense of the marketplace for innovative products. He was ready to develop some of his own. "I'd done what I wanted. Microsoft approached me a number of times." At the end of 1998, he left IBM to work with Double Decker Studios, a small Boston-based media company with 19 people specializing in brand development, web and product user interface design, and animation. "It was fun and interesting dealing with artists," Lewis says with a grim laugh.

In 2000 Lewis was recruited by Microsoft to be general manager of market development. Eventually, he recalls, he built his baby, "dot-Net," largely by creating an extensive partner and customer ecosystem: "There I was, in one of the most dynamic, exciting industries. Technology is all about continuous, unexpected change—never static. [You never know] which invention will become important. I began to realize that it was possible to make a difference in the world, to deliver real value."

But Lewis had another revelation at this point: "Corporations think that they're invincible. This blinds them to the potential of the work. They didn't see the Internet coming; they didn't see mobile phones coming . . . they're unable to predict the future."

In his early years at Microsoft, Lewis was struck by how forthright the executives were with employees and by how much access there was to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates and other senior executives. He remembers a leadership retreat in which some of the company's toughest problems were on the table. Have you really got the talent? Lewis remembers asking himself. Three business plans were discussed at that retreat. In Lewis's telling, the process of deciding to support or jettison the plans sounds something like The Hunger Games: "Someone would stand up to give a presentation, and Bill would interrupt with questions. Steve might argue about a fact. The guy or woman would be trembling." Lewis remembers sitting behind Ballmer and Gates: "'Was it you who hired this complete idiot?' Steve asked Bill. 'Not a single person in this room,' Steve said to the poor bloke, 'expects you to come in tomorrow morning.' . . . I've never been in a room," Lewis says, "with so much collective talent, and," he adds to his listeners' surprise, "so little ego. It was a really good education."

Glimpsing the Future of the Construction Industry

"Sometimes at Microsoft these deals would end up on your desk," Lewis recalls. "You'd be asked to look into something." In 2004 he was handed a folder containing a plan for a new development in Syracuse, New York, called DestiNY, a 1-million-square-foot technology park to house companies working on new building technologies and renewable energy, led by real estate developer Robert Congel. Congel was to become Lewis's next, and perhaps last, mentor.

Lewis's partnership with Congel on DestiNY sowed the seeds for Living PlanIT. Malcolm Hutchinson, an Australian IT entrepreneur whom Lewis had met when Hutchinson's Swiss company, WISeKey SA, became a Microsoft strategic partner in 2002, also teamed up with Congel and Lewis on DestiNY. WISeKey had two full-time staff members working solely on DestiNY, and Hutchinson made frequent trips from Geneva to Syracuse to give talks and assist with fundraising.

Born in Bacchus Marsh, Australia, the son of a schoolteacher, Hutchinson had worked as an IT specialist in the banking industry while attending college part-time. After graduation he served in several Australian government municipalities as a general manager, overseeing city employees. He then directed a national think tank studying the role of local governments. At age 40 Hutchinson changed careers, leaving the public sector to buy a partnership in an Australian IT company. Later he left Australia for Europe.

In 2006 the two men founded Living PlanIT, with a general idea of revolutionizing construction and a commitment to developing a business around it. Lewis's frustration with the construction industry, his disillusionment with large corporations, and his network from Microsoft led him, as fate would have it, to Maia, where he would encounter an unlikely cast of dreamers and visionaries.