by
Po Bronson
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[...] 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 about. It's about getting the respect of one's peers. It's about a valley full of superachievers trying to climb up that highest rung on the ladder. [...]
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 card, for instance, causes them to burst out screaming with laughter; apparently Nico can't use his credit card because he maxxed out the credit limit. Why that's so hilarious I don't know. Another inside joke is that whenever they say aloud the number "three," they hold up four finders on one hand. [...]
this is weirdly charming
[...] "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 value, the employee doesn't lose anything, since the options were a gift. To paraphrase: the East Coasters prefer to see some Fear as well as Greed. But West Coasters know that having upside without downside is what stimulates entrepreneurs to take the wild risks on new ventures. Without options, there wouldn't be a Silicon Valley.
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 Gaudreau, who has just heard from his brother about his mother's condition, which hasn't improved. Have you accepted that you have no control over your fate, Nico Nierenberg? Have you accepted that being a public company means having a crack-addled manic tyrant as a business partner? Have you accepted, Nico Nierenberg, your utter puniness?
kinda like this
For me, more than any other sign of how smooth the IPO transaction has become is the culture clash that didn't happen between high tech and high finance. It used to be that these scruffy-bearded, sandal-wearing engineers would ride in their VW vans up to San Francisco, where they would take the elevator up into the world of summer-worsted pinstripes and gel-slicked hair.
Now the engineers follow the stock market closely, and half of them hold puts and calls on tech indexes. Every third sentence out of an engineer's mouth these days uses the phrase "value proposition." The investment bankers rarely wear anything fancier than polo shirts over khakis, and they can talk for hours about developing object-oriented software on the Solaris 2.4 platform versus Windows NT 3.51. The subcultures are gone.
I walk into a conference room and I cannot tell which are the bankers, which are the lawyers, and which are the entrepreneurs. High tech and high finance haven't met halfway, it's more that they've both gone all the way. It's not a culture clash, it's a culture mash.
[...] Their laid-back appearance is mirrored in their dialect; their favorite adjectives are "foo," "large-N," and "blah." They can add a "y" to the end of just about any word that passes over their tongue, and for added emphasis throw in as a prefix "super-", "turbo-," or "giga-". So while Steve and John throw out market-savvy terms like "viral marketing," "CPMs," and "weight-average ratchet clauses," Kevin and Max get a dismissive laugh out of that "turbobusinessy" talk. Kevin calls the whole Internet startup-thing "the lottery wheel."
what does that even mean
Kevin had taught me about the second key overview concept of Java programming, "Not Caring." The less a building block of code has to care about what other blocks of code are up to, the less likely the bubble-gum bubble will burst. Code that "slopped" was code that was too interdependent, code that made the mistake of caring.
interesting interpersonal metaphor
[...] Max said that writing such a program was "a piece of cheese." When Arie heard that, he didn't know what Max meant. Did "a piece of cheese" mean it was easy, like the phrase "a piece of cake," or did it mean something stinky, meaning the simulation would be a rotten program?
lol. pano inspo - esl character
[...] They're all business development VPs for one Web site or another or marketing directors or PR flakes or CEOs -- and they all have graduate degrees and come from good schools and used to work in management consulting. They're not all blond and blue-eyed but that's the dominant strain. They all have firm handshakes and can look you in the eye and have big plans to go away on the weekend and aren't absent-minded and know to come out with a laugh when the conversational gambit is mean to provoke one. It's like the Valley crowed was given an en masse Cosmo makeover, given "that MBA look," gentrified just in time for the big Silicon Valley dramatizations and book deals. I looked at the scene, and I thought about how NBC bought into the company, and then it hit me: the party looked like a scene from Friends. As if every actor who hadn't made the cut had been given a job in the Internet division.
This is the cultural scene of late 1998. Programming used to be the bread and butter of high tech, but the in crowd now prefers chapati to bread and creme fraiche to butter. It's all about synergy deals and branding and national advertising.
Max confided how he had been confronting his issues about commitment. He had thought that his freelance status was a way of keeping his priorities straight and protecting himself. He had outrageous fun and brain-candy work, what more could a young guy want? But now he was reseeing it as a lack of attachment in every direction: no job, no kids, no marriage, no love. Did owning a portion of a house and volunteering for a San Mateo Big Brother program count as commitment? His freelance contracts explicitly stated, "Either party may terminate this relationship at any time." "I consider these things and wonder, have I found new and valid lifestyle alternatives, or am I simply a coward?"