The Firmage Story
US Web founder Joe Firmage was exactly the kind of person they were looking for to invest in the project through Paradox - combining savvy business sense with a desire to consider alternative, more sustainable models of development. Finally with Firmage that white knight much fantasized about in Arcosanti lore finally shows up...and we can only speculate what kept him from investing in Arcosanti. Most likely Soleri's terms for investing were quite restrictive - to see Arcosanti as an invention and thus Soleri is behaving much as an inventor who might not want to give up his rights to be sole proprietor and have sole control of business promoting the idea. While at the time of Paradox II, he was supposedly a billionaire and may have been the only billionaire to seriously consider investing in Arcosanti (based on the value of his stock) However, Firmage's company US Web went on to crash and burn in the dotcom bubble and this probably had an impact on his investment portfolio and future investments. Revelations of his alien encounters/visions in his bed - of which he wrote a book about - may have added to his downfall in the corporate world (CEOs just don't write books about their alien encounters/abductions).
After the implosion of US Web, Formage went on to other ventures - all which seemed very esoteric. He was able to raise several million dollars from investors to fund a variety of schemes. However he never was able to reinvent himself to return to reclaim those US Web glory-days - none of the ventures he was involved in really seemed to deliver any sustainable value including his most well known effort to create an alternative to Wikipedia called Digital Universe which seems to have gone nowhere.
Firmage obviously had some big ideas and the above picture shows him talking with Benyus and Fournier in the Amphitheater in a panel discussion, but I don't remember him making an impression with me during the event like the other two.