The scheme was a complete bust, but after firing most of the employees, Butterfield, a former philosophy student whose
hippie parents named him Dharma, found himself pondering the internal messaging tool the team had created to replace the confusing nested strings of emails such projects generate.
A professional actor since the age of 15, Fox became a household
name in the early 1980's for his Emmy and Golden Globe Awards winning role as Alex P. Keaton in the NBC comedy series Family Ties in which he starred as the young Republican son of
hippie parents.