The Party That Belonged in a Museum

It was just weeks after we went public, our shares hitting the market in the low 80s. We were merged with a few other web properties and brought under the umbrella of the peacock, the sure-fire can’t miss brand of NBC. I remember calling a taxi (yeah, a yellow cab, because that’s all there was then) in order to make it in time to the office to watch with everyone else our grand opening on NASDAQ.

Shares hit triple-digits, I think as much as $110. I had a few hundred stock option at a very low price. I was going to make a decent chunk of change, but wouldn’t be able to retire or anything.

But the COO could have, which is why he sent a company-wide e-mail asking employees not to flood the market by selling our options all at once. The dip had begun, with the price now in the low 90s. One of the stupidest mistakes I’ve made was to hold onto my shares day after day, week after week, until they were in the low 50s. What was I waiting for? When the company eventually shut down, the stock was worth less than two dollars.

It was December. The company at that point was still optimistic, and it showed in our holiday party, held at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. We were celebrating the holidays, the IPO, the merger of all the dot-coms that had been glued together to from one sprawling, incoherent somewhat illogical piece of web property that had a colorful peacock stamped on it.

I have many memories from that evening: the countless open bars, one each, it seemed, in every room of the museum. The multiple bands, so that when one band took a break, the music would never stop. Lots of really good food. But what stands out the most to me from that night were the ice-sculptures.

There were three of them: one each with the logo of the two largest dot-coms that had merged, and one with the new NBCi peacock logo. I can only assume that by the end of the night they all had melted, gone, as if they never existed at all.

The metaphor is so thick it seems almost too obvious. Who, I’ve often wondered, came up with the idea to have those ice sculptures? Who, I’ve wondered more, approved their expense?

Just a few days after the holiday party someone pointed out, because it was public information, that the COO had sold hundreds of thousands of his shares. He walked away, before taxes, with a few million dollars. I don’t blame him — it was the right decision at the right time.

But his admonition, like those ice sculptures, were gone with the wind. Within a year everyone on my team would have left the company or been downsized. Some people got theirs, the rest of us just went on our merry way.

. . .

I remember one time having a debate with the guy who sat next to me, something sports-related. I don’t know, maybe it was about who won an MVP a certain year, or how many home runs did a certain player have.

Then it dawned on us: why were we arguing? The answer was literally in front of our faces. We looked it up and the questions was settled. It was satisfying, I guess, wondrous that we now had so much information at our disposal.

But then we stopped talking and went back to work. It felt like less fun. That was the first time when I simultaneously appreciated all the Internet could do for us, while wondering what exactly it would do to us.

As the Internet and web sites took off, most of us realized the folly of what we were doing at work each day. Building a search engine, manually, “as big as the web itself” (as one of our commercials boasted) might have at one point seemed like a good idea, but could we keep up?

And wasn’t there a way a better way to do this? A mechanical way, a way using, you know, computers?

I can still remember someone on my team emailing us a link to this new site called Google.com. Try it out, he said. It seems pretty cool.

I was in one of the manager’s offices when he tried Google for the first time. “We’re in trouble,” he said, after about all of 30 seconds of searching.

From that point forward, maybe sometime between six months and a year to that holiday party, we weren’t competing against Google so much as racing against the market.

How soon could our executives take us public? By then it was clear this ride couldn’t last, not for us, not for most of us. We all had friends at other dot-coms and the numerous job openings were rapidly turning into layoffs.

The fall was faster than the rise, which isn’t unusual, although in this case the rise was pretty fast, too.

I had hints of success there, getting content promoted on our home page during major news events like the deaths of Princess Di and JFK, Jr. I was assigned to a high-profile project to create a package of web content that was promoted on-air during an NBC broadcast.

The potential for exciting, time-sensitive content on demand was there, but it wasn’t flushed out enough.

It couldn’t stand the pressure to be tried and tested while there was gold to be made.

. . .

We were an interesting collection of individuals. Most of us had moved to San Francisco because of the city itself, not because of the Internet, because the Internet was still too new. We had various backgrounds, we were all mostly young, in our 20s and 30s, and were paid salaries that were low but generous, probably more than we deserved.

But who could tell? It was all so new. It was all so much being made up on the spot. And if you didn’t like this dot-com, you could just as easily go to another. Until you couldn’t. One day I showed up at the office wearing a tie. Someone e-mailed me, asking me where I was interviewing. I felt bad when I told her the truth: nowhere. I was going to a memorial service instead.

It’s been fascinating watching where we wound up, what we wound up doing. I suppose all workplaces are somewhat random collections of people, but usually they draw from a collection of individuals with shared talents, interests, or backgrounds. With this group? The only thing we had in common was living in San Francisco in the late ‘90s.

One of us is now a senior vice president at an information services company. Another is a senior VP at a venture capital firm. There’s also a senior director running online services at a financial company, and a somewhat to be expected but still impressive VP at Salesforce. Also not a surprise: a social media manager.

It’s not all tech. One returned to his job at FedEx, another is a senior writer at Rolling Stone, I’m working in online fundraising at a non-profit. I see, from searching LinkedIn, a high school teacher in Berkley, a sportswriter and author of baseball books, a founder of a design firm in Paris.

There is also sadness. Joe was a member of our team; he moved back to his native Michigan after the dot-com implosion. We were friends on Facebook. He died, which I get reminded of on Facebook each year when his birthday comes around. I don’t know how or what happened to him, and it had been years since I last had contact with him in person when I found out he died. At night he was a sommelier at a trendy downtown restaurant, and I know from his stories he ran with a fun crowd. He’s missed by many.

. . .

There was a lot of talk in those days about how what we were doing would change the world. I never really believed that. I’m not sure if the Internet changed the world, but it certainly changed how we experience and navigate through it. Did we have a hand in that? I have my doubts.

You can still hear that kind of lofty language emanating from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It’s hype, either for new customers or new funding. Some companies will make it, most will fail. People will move from one software company to another, chasing high-tech salaries, stock options, the chance, maybe, of getting your foot in the door and timing it right so you too, can strike gold.

You don’t even have to be in Silicon Valley for that anymore. New York, LA, Seattle, even Austin…high-tech holds out a lot of promise, a lot of talk, but the truth is, those on the inside know. The software industry is somewhere in between a beacon of hope, a driver and creator of tools that will go in and out of fashion, or perhaps even linger forever, and a scam. So, too, really, are most industries.

Those days were a lot of fun. It felt good and exciting to be at the right place at that time. It was an intoxicating feeling. That’s the feeling that drives Silicon Valley dreams.

We all went our separate ways, some staying by the Bay, others, like me, finding and landing in other locales.

When I left the museum that night I didn’t notice the ice sculptures. I wonder how long it took them to melt. When I picture them, they are still solid and in form, dripping ever so slightly from the spotlights shining on them.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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