Louis Rossetto

"Louis lives and breathes the stuff. The guy must work 17 hours a day. He's even got ISDN straight to his home."
- John Battelle

Louis Rossetto has always been an independent thinker. At the ripe age of two, when Louis was living in a garden apartment in upstate New York, he would take off alone down the garden paths defying his mother's calls. But maverics, even young ones, must take the knocks that come along with such bold independance, and Mrs. Rossetto would give him a spanking once she finally caught up with him. Louis has a B.A. in political science and an M.B.A. from Columbia, concentrating in finance and marketing.

"After getting his M.B.A. from Columbia in 1973, he lay on the beach and smoked dope until the inspiration struck to write a novel about a President named Richard Nixon who avoids impeachment by fabricating a national security crisis - but "Takeover" was published just a week before Nixon resigned. Bummer. A few years later, he was hanging out in Rome working on the set of the raunchy sex flick "Caligula" when he realized to that those real, 200-person orgies would make a perfect metaphor for the sexual revolution - which was history by 1981, when the book he ghostwrote, "Ultimate Porno," finally came out."

- Excerpt from Paul Keegan's New York Times Magazine's cover story, May 1995

In 1983, Louis moved to Amsterdam to live with his Dutch girlfriend, who worked as a KLM flight attendant. While visiting Paris in 1984, Louis became acquinted with the American expatriate community and eventually found a job editing a local American newsletter. Using discounted passes on KLM, Louis was able to maintain his residence in Amsterdam and still work as a part-time editor by flying to Paris twice a month for 5-6 days at a time. It was during this time that Louis met Jane.

Living and working between two of Europe's most exciting cities must have brought out that transgressive streak of independence that was lying dormant in Louis. In 1985, just after Reagan had been reelected, Louis wrote an editorial about how Reagan was going to bankrupt the country. As editor-in-chief, Louis didn't have to clear the story with anyone. But once his publisher got a hold of it, Louis was fired.

After returning to Amsterdam, Louis began planning a trip to go cover the war in Afganistan as a journalist. He spent nearly five weeks traveling through the war-torn country, returning home with dysentery. Soon afterwards, Louis and his Dutch girlfriend parted ways, and he took his last KLM pass to South Africa. He spent three weeks traveling and relaxing. He bummed out at the beach on the Indian ocean, listened to reggae and enjoyed South African's `Turbin Devil Weed'. Louis somehow mustered the energy to return to cold Amsterdam in early 1986 to start a new job with Ink.

Ink was a translation firm based in Amsterdam that served high-technology companies wishing to localize their products for the European marketplace. Ink had become a technology innovator by using PCs and software to assist and expedite what had traditionally been a cottage-industry activity. Louis was hired as a technicial writer, but eventually was presented with the task of creating a magazine in which Ink could advertise its software translation products. The result was Language Technology, a magazine that initially focused on machine translation, voice recogition, speech synthesis, and other related areas. Louis eventually expanded coverage to include document production and preparation, desktop publishing, CD-ROM media, and archiving.
"The next three years were an amazing exploration into the frontiers of computing technology and also the commerial growth of these industries. It was a great job because it allowed me to explore something that I had known little about. I was able to travel and meet the people who were creating this technology. I went to MacWorld in Boston and saw the first desktop publishing program, `Ready Set Go'. In the fall, I got a chance to meet Paul Rainard, the creator of Pagemaker.....," reminisces Louis.


"Louis reads everything. We have gotten quite good at creating a magazine that he generally thinks is right. But yeah, he's the man. He's the editor-in-chief, no question... He has his hand in everything." - John Battelle


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