The Rise and Fall of RockWater Cyber Cafe

Part I of my series from my interview with Marcus Nelson

Marcus and Angus Nelson in the RockWater Cyber Cafe days

Many of you probably have seen it even if you didn’t pay much attention to it. Found on many websites is a little tab that reads “feedback.”

You may or may not have noticed it. But even if you did, you probably didn’t know it was designed by a guy from Wausau.

Earlier this year, I sat down for an interview with Marcus Nelson. I had heard he was back in town, and the main reason I wanted to interview him was because he and his brother started RockWater Cyber Cafe back in 1999. RockWater was an internet cafe in Wausau back when the internet was still a bit novel and mysterious.

Back then I played in a band and RockWater was a great local option for original music at a time when there weren’t too many options for that type of thing in Wausau.

But RockWater is only a small part of the Marcus Nelson story, I found out. Nelson appeared on the Wausau Business Show, and it turned out he had quite the career, much of it in the Silicon Valley scene.

He was involved in VidIQ, a platform aimed at helping people grow their YouTube channels. He worked at Salesforce. He’s worked with Meta (Facebook). And he’s started and sold a number of companies.

He’s also heavily involved in AI, and trying to keep up with the companies he is starting in this space tends to make your head spin. It’s a lot.

I once read an interview with a journalist who made a career profiling people, and he said he felt a really good profiler could write an interesting profile about just about anyone. Even if someone seems fairly uninteresting on the surface, the more you dig, the more things of interest you’ll find.

But what happens when the opposite is true? I hadn’t been prepared for that. Because even that above intro left out about a dozen interesting things you could say about Nelson. There are easily a dozen anecdotes that could make for an interesting lede to this story.

One of the very best books on writing I have ever read — the book that nearly 30 years ago got me writing again, in fact — is Bird by Bird, written by Anne Lamott. The title story is about her brother needing to write a report about 20 birds. The weight of it hit him and he just stared at the blank page. Their father told the boy “just take it bird by bird.”

It’s a lesson I’ve applied to much more than my writing. Just about any large task can be broken into much smaller tasks. Focus on that one task, get it done, then start the next. Eventually you realize you made a lot of progress.

Another important thing I’ve learned is that often the structure of a story will start to emerge as you get words on paper, in a way it just doesn’t come to you otherwise.

As I started, it occurred to me this story is at least two parts - how the Nelsons came to start RockWater Cyber Cafe, and Nelson’s ventures into Silicon Valley and how he is building on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence in Wausau as part II.

But this first one is the story of RockWater Cafe.