Alter Ego

Take me back to the time between Infinite and The Slim Shady EP. What changed in [Marshall Mathers aka Eminem]?

We pressed up Infinite. We might have pressed up maybe five hundred, a thousand records tops. We couldn’t give them away. Nobody was feeling it. We don’t know why. Then Marshall, I think he was sitting on the toilet making a poop, and he came up with the alter ego. He came into the studio, talking about this alter ego that he has now. And all the boys in D12, they all had alter egos too. It was just a great thing to start the new project with. And he went with that.

via Q&A: Producer Jeff Bass on Discovering Young Eminem (grantland.com)

The story begins in 2002. My (Biz Stone) first startup, an online reviews site called Xanga, was struggling, and, tired of being broke in New York, I quit. My wife and I headed back to my hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt in tow. We moved into the basement of my mom’s house. I had no job… At one point, I even asked for my job back at the startup—and my former colleagues said no.

The only bright spot in my life was blogging. At the startup, we had used a web-based collaboration tool from a company called Pyra, and we got to be friendly with Pyra’s cofounder, a guy named Evan Williams. That’s why, in 1999, I was among the first to test-drive a new product Pyra put out: a web-logging tool called Blogger…

Now, I was an outsider to that revolution, living in my mom’s basement. But I still had my blog. Written in a spirit of total, almost hallucinogenic confidence, my blog was my alter ego. It was a fictional creation that began with the title, inspired by an old Bugs Bunny cartoon guest-starring Wile E. Coyote. In one scene, the perpetually clever coyote says, “Permit me to introduce myself,” then presents a business card to Bugs with a bit of pomp. It reads: “My name is Wile E. Coyote, Genius.”

…

So in the spirit of Wile E., I christened my blog “Biz Stone, Genius.” And in my posts I made sure to play the part. I claimed to be building inventions with infinite resources and a world-class team of scientists at my headquarters—naturally titled Genius Labs.

…

When Google acquired Blogger in early 2003, Evan Williams and I had started exchanging emails. In the four years it took for blogging to evolve from a pastime of a few geeks into a household word, Ev and I had never met or even talked on the phone. But now I worked up the confidence to email him and say that I thought I’d always been the missing piece of his team. And it turned out that Ev, though he was surrounded by some of the best engineers in the world, needed someone who really understood social media—who saw it was about people, not just technology.

He had to pull every string he could. Google had a reputation of hiring only people with computer science degrees, preferably PhDs; they certainly didn’t court college dropouts like me. I interviewed with Ev, but Larry and Sergey flat out said that he couldn’t hire me. Ev persisted. Finally, they begrudgingly agreed that Wayne Rosing—then Google’s senior VP of engineering—could talk to me on the phone. I waited nervously in my attic apartment. The phone rang, and as I reached for it something came over me. In that instant I decided to abandon all the failure I’d been carrying around. Instead, I would embody my alter ego: the guy who ran Genius Labs.

via Biz Stone: How I Faked My Way Into Google (wired.com)

If I could go back and change [my name], I probably would. I would be something cool like “DarkReign”, but as it is, I’m Wife, and I identify with it.

I wouldn’t say that I found myself in Smash, but I found a second self in Smash.