That party was a huge milestone in retrospect. It was the day FOSS went mainstream. Shortly thereafter, the dot-com boom ended and the 90s tech parameters got upended and scrambled.
His blogs (LiveJournal, and later on, his own WordPress instance) and website has content going all the way back to 1993. I remember finding it as a teenager and reading all the stories and being enchanted by them.
At some point he did write why he bought the club, he was moaning about the state of night life in SF, and a friend said something like "Why don't you do something about it?"... so he did.
