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He takes a stroll. The long walk around the sales floor. His face hangs with gloom, he tries to give a pursed smile but it just shows hurt. He paces back and forth, his hands on his hips. His steps are ponderous, searching. He looks like he has been stretched like a Gumby. He is worried about Dan G…

[...] "Options are really a West Coast thing," said Dan Gaudreau, who spent eighteen years in management at General Electric. "On the East Coast, they don't consider options as having any real skin in the game. Only if employees really buy the stock does it count as skin." If options collapse in va…

Riding the limo down to Wall Street, Dan and Nico are blowing off steam. This involves cracking a series of inside jokes with embedded references to road-show misadventures. D&N are like junior high girls at the water fountain, giggling over details only they find funny. Any reference to a credit c…

[...] I wanted to know what fills their daydreams as they drive along the 280 every evening. Nobody daydreams about "liquidity." These guys don't even really daydream about money, since they already have nice houses in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Prestige. That's what this is abou…

I'm having drinks at the Stanford Park Hotel with a group of all-around earnest guys in the twenty-five-to-thirty-five demographic. This is an organisation called "Round Zero," a nifty euphemism for the mill grist and sweat equity that goes on before the venture capitalists swoop in with rounds one…