Word of the day: download (doun'lod) v. To transfer information
digitally from one data source to another.
"I've got to run to a meeting. Can we download at lunch
so I can tell you why I've been ignoring you?"
I had buckets of reasons for leaving Stanford Law School
after one year, but a big one was that I hated the grind,
the plodding predictability and repetitiveness of the law.
It was a stamina game--every day the same set of problems,
the same rote methods of solving them. Nothing seemed more
terrifying to me than knowing what the rest of my
working years would be like. It was jump ship now or sign
on for good.
But opting not to return to Palo Alto left me dangling.
What was I qualified to do? What did I have to show
for myself, other than a motley handful of short-term jobs,
an MFA in writing--by all accounts the most useless of graduate
degrees--and some vain pretensions of being a "creative"
person?
Clearly, I was ripe for an Internet job.
NetXposure is a Portland Web development company of about
20 employees--it builds Web sites for dreamers who want
to start new companies to get in on the frenzy, and it develops
a "presence" on the Internet for established businesses
terrified of falling behind.
I drove over to the digs on Front Avenue and walked into
the first-floor office, a drafty, too-empty expanse of wall-to-wall
carpet strewn with cables, papers and black vinyl beanbags.
NetXposure's three officers--Devin Donnelly, Jason Wehling
and Kris Nolan, all in their late 20s--sat me down at the
conference table. Kris, togged in a suit and high heels,
tried to be professional. Devin, president, and Jason, lead
programmer, fussed with the hems of their T-shirts.
They needed a receptionist, and here I was, the only advanced
degree-holder in the room. They talked about "growing the
company" and "lots of opportunity for the right person,"
etc., etc.
That night, I had dinner with my parents to tell them about
my new job. They were sanguine. "See what happens. This
Internet stuff could turn into something. Give it 60 days,"
said my father.
"Thirty," said my mother.
DAY 1
Microsoft (MSFT) 118
Yahoo (YHOO) 114 5/8
Devin dumps a stack of magazines and books on the reception
desk and says, "We need to get you up to speed--start reading."
These are the kind of publications I'm accustomed to ignoring
in airport newsstands, books with arresting captains-of-industry
titles: The One-to-One Future, Secrets of Software
Success, Bill Gates' Business @ the Speed of Thought.
Bill's glossy, somewhat simian face menaces me. I bury him
beneath Wired, Industry Standard, Fast
Company. Wired has coy little giveaways hot-glued
to its covers--I settle on it as the most promising.
Today, I answer phones and e-mails, organize files. It
dawns on me that the phone extension list is out of date,
and I make a new one, photocopy it and distribute it. Devin,
not a talkative guy, gives me a grateful look. I find myself
watching the clock.
DAY 10
MSFT 109 3/8
YHOO 120 1/2
Word of the day: bandwidth (band'width). n. The
range of frequencies within a radiation band required to
transmit a signal.
"Jane just doesn't have the bandwidth to do database administration
and have meaningful relationships with her loved ones."
Devin takes me to the Korean/ Mexican deli across the street
for lunch. He orders nachos--no lettuce, tomato, nothing
vegetable. I have juice. I am terribly bored at this job.
After only a few days I realize I don't really care about
the Internet. I wonder how long it will take the company
to tank. Every client meeting, every proposal, has the futile
anguish of reinventing the wheel. No one seems to know what
they're doing. But Devin, visionary and optimistic as a
company president should be, forges ahead.
"There are three holes to fill at NetX," he says. "Salesperson,
designer, and someone kind of manager-esque to handle human-resources
stuff."
He pauses, looks at me. Suddenly I realize we are negotiating
my promotion. I say (weakly), "I've always thought of myself
as a creative person..."
He nods and chews. "You can be a designer. We've had good
luck taking people with no Web design experience and retooling
them. But I can tell you now that will pay much less than
the other two."
It is just before Christmas. My student loans go into repayment
on Jan. 1. After some stalling, I say (more forcefully),
"I don't want to be a salesperson. I am not a salesperson."
DAY 15
Creative or not, I agree to take one for the team and sell
stuff.
In the early morning, I follow meandering Wilsonville farm
roads to a massive, bunkerlike complex in the middle of
the dripping woods. The parking lot, a minefield of loose
gravel and potholes, is marked with two mossy signs. One
is a "don't" circle and slash over the silhouette of a squatting
dog. The other proclaims my target--a New Age meeting center.
The center, I've been told, is a church with an astonishingly
large and affluent, if somewhat low-profile, congregation.
Inside, I meet the husband of a local, moderately popular
motivational speaker who has some vaguely executive role
at the center. He has the intense blue eyes and poised-to-spring
bulk of Brian Dennehy. A table next to his desk is a menagerie
of spiritual icons--Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Ganesh, Venus
of Willendorf.
Blue Eyes wants to build a religious portal for online
spiritual seminars, book sales and the like, using chats
with popular self-improvement authors to lure users. In
other words, he wants to sell church over the Internet.
I start talking about personalization, multilevel entitlement-based
access, modularity. My script is lifted verbatim off the
Web sites of big software companies who sell programs to
build this sort of thing, and from the pages of Wired.
I don't know what I'm selling, and I don't think Blue Eyes
does either, but it doesn't seem to matter.
Blue Eyes' pale irises gleam. His is a greedy manner I'm
beginning to recognize when I talk to people about putting
their business on the Internet. Jason calls it the "build
me a dream" phenomenon. People are so eager to get on the
Web that they swat away specifics like blackflies. I'm not
talking about the geeks, who do want nuts and bolts and
can smell BS at 50 feet. No, the dreamers are the CEOs,
and they usually make the decisions. Which, from NetXposure's
perspective, is a good thing.
Blue Eyes says we can have the job if we come up with a
name for the company. I spend the rest of the day at Network
Solutions running domain name searches. God.com is taken.
DAY 20
Palm Inc. IPO Day
PALM 90 1/8
Word of the day: value-add (val'-yoo ad'). n.
"If we invite David to the beach, what's his value-add?"
Nick, a longtime friend who hears I've made my entrée
into the dot-com world, calls me at work to hear how I'm
doing. I've been having doubts, and I guess I've been whining.
He suggests I get in touch with one of his San Francisco
co-workers, Carla Duarte. Carla spent eight years at Oracle
and Silicon Graphics before going to DigitalThink, a startup
that makes online training courses, or "learning modules."
Companies can purchase these modules to teach their employees
new software, or topics, or systems, or whatever. So it's
a learning company. That sounds promising. At least they
make something.
"She's deep in it, and she hates it," he tells me. This
is novel--I have yet to meet anyone who hates it.
It's not cool to hate it. So I send Carla an e-mail, hoping
for a little insight about the startup environment.
To: carla@digitalthink.com
From: eliz@netx.net
Re: refuse
Hi Carla, I'm Nick's friend. Feeling a little disoriented
and weirded-out by this job. I'm still waiting to get a
wastebasket. What's it like down there?
To: eliz@netx.net
From: carla@digitalthink.com
Re: refuse
I've been here eight months, and I've never gotten a wastebasket.
I also have to lock up my pens.
DAY 30
DigitalThink (DTHK)
44 7/8
MSFT 111 1/2
YHOO 145 5/8
"Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable
of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely
useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of
even mundane problems."
--Neil Postman, Technopoly
Family funeral in the Bay Area. Cousin Sara corners me
when she hears I'm a dot-commer. She, a social-services
worker who counsels families whose children are scheduled
for surgery, has a startup idea of her own.
"It's called Sick-Kid-Dot-Com. It's a site where families
can log on and get information about how to prepare kids
for the trip to the hospital. Did you know that if a kid
has his own slippers to wear, it's a lot less scary to walk
into the ER? It's like, I'm OK, I'm still me, I'm wearing
my slippers." I wonder if a 10-year-old about to go under
the knife feels much like surfing the Web.
When I ask her if it's going to be a for-profit site, she
looks shocked.
"Why doesn't your generation
do anything, you know, political? For the good of society,
I mean? In the '60s, we..." I let her rattle on, suppressing
the remark on the tip
of my tongue--that baby boomers use the '60s as a hall pass
for having the most acquisitive American
adulthood on record.
DAY 40
AOL/Time Warner
merger announced
AOL 52 (-10 1/8)
YHOO 144
DTHK 48 3/8
Word of the day: brick-and-mortar (brik'-and-mort'er).
n. A traditional, somewhat brittle building material that
combines oblong blocks of fired clay with a cement plaster
of lime and water.
"I'm starting to get really pissed over all this techie
shit. I work my tuckus off for cab fare, while all the webbed
dorks haul it in. I'm now woefully out-of-date. My old-fashioned,
hands-on skills and my 'brick and fucking mortar' abilities
are considered quaint and obsolete."
The good news is that business is picking up for NetXposure.
Through a circuitous chain of contacts and alliances, the
sales leads have been trickling in. Everyone has been pulling
long hours. Talent and hustle emerge just when they're needed.
Devin prances through the office with a sheaf of envelopes--bonuses.
He's a decent guy, really. He believes in the company, he
works hard himself, and he's good to his employees. My situation
could be a lot worse.
Is that how it starts? I figure I have another 30 days
before my organization-man status cements.
DAY 50
Healtheon/
WebMD merger
WebMD (HLTH) 33
DTHK 51 1/2
Lunch at Rock Bottom with friend Jez, a programmer over
at WebMD. He's the closest thing to a dot-com success story
I know. I first met him in 1995, when we played music together
in college. He had been a scrawny, spastic kid then, a would-be
punk-rock photojournalist. He still has the same breathless
sarcasm but he looks tubercular. The croupy cough and bruisy
shadows under his eyes make him look older than he is, which
is 26. He is both hyped about and disgusted by his dot-com
success. "I usually work about 60 hours a week, but 80 or
a hundred hours happens pretty often, too," he says. There's
a strange smile on his face, as if these marathon workweeks
prove that he's still the same edgy, hardcore iconoclast
I remember. But then he starts talking about all the money
he's got in the bank, and the moment vanishes.
DAY 60
I stay late to pull together a Web site bid for a not very
sexy, but potentially well-paying, client. I can rip off
a lot of the who-is-NetXposure bullshit from the proposal
a onetime marketing consultant left behind, but I have no
clue what everything should cost. So first I itemize everything.
Concept development. Project management. Navigation and
site flow. Application architecting. Graphics production.
There, that looks real. I ask Devin, "How much for each
of these?" He screws up his face in thought, shifts his
gaze to the upper right. Price is a complex equation of
how much time the work will take, how cool the client looks
on the roster, how much of this kind of project is familiar
territory and how much we'll have to figure out as we go
along. "Six thousand?"
"That much?" I can't tell if that's high or low.
"Or less. I don't know, what do you think? Just make sure
there's a six in the total. Sixes are lucky."
DAY 70
YHOO 155 5/8
DTHK 48 3/4
"The American lives in a land of wonders. Everything
around him is in constant movement, and every movement seems
an advance. Consequently, in his mind the idea of newness
is closely linked with that of improvement."
--Alexis de Tocqueville
Today is a job-title brainstorming session. There's a turf
war brewing between Kris and Jason over the vice presidencies,
and the office atmosphere is tense. You see, Kris had
been VP of technology, but now that she's out of the office
more, and Jason does more of the geek-herding--well, in
small companies, the balance of power can shift overnight,
unless one is vigilant, ever vigilant.
Then again, there seems to be flexibility about just how
descriptive one's job title needs to be. Devin says I can
put "senior" or "director" in my title, but that I shouldn't
claim to be "vice president" of anything. After much hesitation
and crossings-out, I settle on "senior project strategist,"
vague yet enterprising, assertive without being definite,
kind of like the Internet business itself.
Still no word from the owners of God.com--despite an elaborate
domain search (softsoul.com? beginwithin.com? dreamsigh.com?),
it's the only name that stuck. I send Blue Eyes a chummy
e-mail to let him know he's on my mind. Kris sends him a
chocolate starfish and a card. I detest myself, but she's
worse, right?
DAY 75
NBCI 90 7/16
David, one of my law-school classmates, is in Portland
for family reasons. Over dinner he tells me that the San
Francisco law firm he begins working at this fall just raised
starting salaries to $150,000 a year, "to compete with dot-coms."
His three roommates are all Ivy-educated lawyers who have
recently bailed from firms to serve as in-house counsel
for the likes of NBCi and other big-ticket Internet ventures.
One of them received about $3 million in options as a signing
bonus.
"You're lucky. I feel like I've bet on the wrong team,"
David sighs, picking at his chicken.
"You have," I say. Still, it's hard to feel sorry for the
guy. He knows, and I know, that I am not getting rich at
NetXposure. (A waiter at a pricey restaurant can pull down
more in tips than what I make.) That doesn't seem to matter,
though. He's jealous because (to use his metaphor) even
if all I do on the dot-com team is warm the bench, I still
get to wear the jersey.
DAY 80
DTHK 30 1/2
Word of the day: deliverables (de-liv'er-a-bles).
n. Products or services that, upon completion and transfer
to the receiving party, trigger payment.
"Aren't the receptionist's twins the cutest deliverables
you ever did see?"
Carla calls to tell me she has quit DigitalThink just short
of her vesting date. The timing flabbergasts her co-workers.
"Why not just stick it out?" they argue. "In two months
you can sell your options--well, some of them at least--and
it'll all have been worth it."
Carla's says that no stock option package, which she considers
pie-in-the-sky funny money anyway, makes working at DigitalThink
worth it. She describes it as a sweatshop, an open room
under constant surveillance by the founders--the people
in turtlenecks and wire-rimmed glasses who stroll around
and "motivate" people.
"They hung big numbers from the ceiling to track everyone's
progress, how many modules were on the conveyor belt. Every
time a course went live, we had to put on a blue and yellow
beanie, ring a cowbell and shout over the loudspeaker. It
was a factory. The quality of our work didn't matter. They
just wanted to see units, deliverables on an Excel spreadsheet."
No startup, not even DigitalThink, is a Sri Lankan garment
plant. But by comparison, NetXposure, notwithstanding the
wastebasket shortage, seems posh. I thank God my job does
not involve beanies.
DAY 85
HLTH 19 1/2
DTHK 24 7/16
Jez is filling in as bass player for a friend's band at
EJ's. He says it's the first time he's played music in over
a year. His girlfriend has threatened to leave him if he
doesn't get back in a band, because, she says, he's "a terrible
person to live with" otherwise. While the opening band plays,
we suck down beers and argue about technology. I ask the
unanswerable--is the Internet making life better?
He makes a sour face. "That's a trite question."
"Yeah, but it's the important one."
He ruffles his hair in irritation. He could use a shower.
"The answer is always yes, and always no. I don't know,
who cares? I don't care whether WebMD is helping or hurting
people, although I'd say not hurting is good enough."
When I ask whether he plans to stay there forever, he shakes
his head violently, and shouts over the music, "I feel like
a spy."
"Who are you spying for?"
"Real people."
He has worked there almost four years. I ask, "Doesn't
spying imply that you're eventually going to take the goods
and run? When does your mission end?"
He shrugs and swirls his glass. "When they stop throwing
money at me." Then he rethinks: "When I pay off my student
loans."
DAY 90
Microsoft Anti-
Trust Ruling Day
MSFT 90 1/2
DTHK 18 1/8
Carla is still out of work. She has rejected two lucrative
offers from software companies. I give her a call to ask
her what she's holding out for.
"Well, I'm taking this class called The Passion Class,
which is supposed to help me remember what my passions are.
I've been talking with my mom about what I loved as a child.
I'm having a really hard time with it. I have a background,
and lots of technology experience. But now I have to write
a list of 47 things I want to do before I die."
"Why 47?"
"I guess because that sounded like a lot. So far I have
five."
At first I'm shocked that Carla needs help to remember
her childhood ambitions. But neither could I reconcile my
wee dreams of being a ballet dancer or a firefighter with
the senior project strategist reality. That's the scary
consequence of working in dot-com--not that you sell out
your dreams, but that, in the alien ether of new technologies,
you totally forget them.
DAY 100
NASDAQ tanks
HLTH 17 5/8
MSFT 66 5/8
CMGI 52 1/2
PALM 29 7/16
DTHK 17
When I query my dot-com peers, they seem content, even
eager, to accept the unsteady and erratic "e-conomy" over
the monolithic stability of traditional corporate life.
Maybe we all end up living one cliché or another,
and this one at least involves Nerf guns.
Staying nimble delays confrontation with the mundane. Says
Jez, "The way to make money is to move on, hop from company
to company. As the company gets bigger and the work slows
down, it will get totally corporate and predictable like
any other job and I'll quit."
The Internet job only feels acceptable as a short-term
gig. To admit that you have real responsibilities, real
commitments, real furniture, is to grow up--grow old--with
all the compromise and defeat that implies.
The back-story of the dot-com world, if there is one, is
that the effervescent optimism surrounding the Internet
is the boom, a fragile architecture wired entirely
on faith. The dream is infectious--it overtakes the lowly
Web designer as well as the VC investor with a mil to burn.
Young turks educated to become independent minds submit
willingly to the groupthink--we will get rich, we will retire
at 30, we will be masters, not minions.
And if it's a big scam, a smoke-and-mirrors show, at least
we're on the wizard side of the curtain.
I'm not immune to this line of thinking. NetXposure is
cooking with gas these days and only rarely has to grovel
for Web work with auto-detailing shops and spooky religious
groups. The company could really take off, which would justify
my defection from the venerable legal profession and my
weeks as a receptionist, temper my skepticism about what
all this e-horseshit could possibly be for. This
industry doesn't lend itself to introspection.
Let's get rich.
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 10,
2000
|
