by
Adam Fisher
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Marc Porat: Engineers do things because they want millions of people to touch it. That is the ultimate reward for a top-level engineer. And when millions of people do not touch it, where is your source? Where is your juice? Where is the passion coming from? Where does the juice come from to take it to the next level? You need some affirmation; companies need some affirmation to keep going.
it's true. i also think that given the choice, they would prefer to do something that was actually good for people
Lou Montulli: Jim got us superexcited. He is a very energetic, charismatic person when he wants to be, and he was giving us the full sell. He changed our perspective from “We just want to keep working on the web” to “We are going to go to Silicon Valley, we are going to change the fabric of the universe, and we are going to basically rule the planet.” To have somebody like that believe in us and want to work with us to go change the world is very exciting. We were excited. I was personally very excited.
ugh why is that even a fantasy
Brian Behlendorf: We did not want the web to be owned by anybody, and felt that at least at the layer of web protocols, getting pages to people, we felt like the web server is like the printing press. All of us were running our own printing operations—building interesting websites, building interesting stuff. We just did not want to wake up one morning and find out that we had to start paying a tax to do the things that we had been doing for free before. It was very much an idealism kind of thing. It was inherited from where a lot of internet technology had come from, which is this idea that tech should be public and distributed. It is not necessarily the same point of view as saying, “All software should be free.”
Jim Clark: I said, “You do not get it. The only way the internet is going to be is if it is financed by businesses and operated by businesses, because the government cannot continue to put money into it ad nauseam. It has to be a commercial medium.” The gnashing of teeth! The wailing! And I got so much hate mail and nasty e-mails that you just would not believe it.
and jim clark was right! that's how new spaces work under capitalism
Jamie Zawinski: And then, when the money came in, let’s just call it July ’94, the industry exploded. Suddenly, there’s another quarter-million people in this industry who are nineteen years old, twenty years old, and haven’t met these old hacker guys, and their experience with computing is completely different. These new people who got into the computer industry? If it was 1982, they would’ve been traders. They would’ve gone into finance because “Oh, that’s challenging work. And man, you can make a lot of money doing that if you get hired by the right firm.” It’s that attitude. Programming is the safe job. It’s the safe job for smart people.
silicon valley the ATM machine. and really, who can blame them? the desire to make a lot of money is not an individual aberration but rather culturally produced (dare i say hegemonic)
Chris Caen: So imagine there is more money than God, and it has no place to go, but there are a lot of cocktail napkins with things scribbled on them, and those are what are called start-ups. I’m being a little facetious but not by much. The joke used to be at the time, this being ’97 through 2000—the golden era—was basically all you had to do was stand at the corner with a cocktail napkin, and VCs would throw money at you from a passing car. I loved it.
aaahhh
Ev Williams: Every night there was a party to go to, where you could drink for free and eat for free and there would be lots of young people—half of whom were brand-new to town.
Patty Beron: The more extravagant the event was, the more publicity they’d get: the more write-ups, the more people talking about them, like, “I heard that blah blah blah had pig races at their party,” and “This or that party had ten-foot ice sculptures and vodka luges,” and things like that. It just became a thing to one-up the last party and get attention.
Ev Williams: I remember leaving some party with a bottle of champagne. It was like, “You’re leaving? Have a bottle of champagne!” In those days, it wasn’t a ridiculous gift…
as with the previous note: remember that this is the same money that fuels the rest of the world's economy. subsidised by the world's working poor
Po Bronson: There was always this high-low tension that was always trying to make you feel like you hadn’t totally sold out—like you add some funk and you get rid of the guilt. Like everybody would wear a tuxedo with sneakers, or serve Kobe beef on a cheap ol’ napkin. It was some form of apology or some sort of a desperate cry to not be just about the money.
reminds me of my vesting party idea lmao
Tiffany Shlain: There was so much talk about IPOs that we had an Initial Pumpkin Offering for Halloween. Everyone came out to South Park. I still have all the schwag from that; it was very funny. It was a ridiculous time.
reminds me of vesting party. character in panopticon (bryan?) who went?
Guy Bar-Nahum: We took all these code bases, and we just very hackily kind of threw them together with bubble gum and masking tape. We put them together in a very haphazard way, because if you have a finite amount of time, right, a finite amount of resources, you really lower the bar on the software, right? You bring it in.
and yet you get most of the $! it's nice to sit at the top of the value chain (<3 IP)
Douglas Edwards: And it wasn’t just advertising for lobsters. Ryan quickly understood the opportunity for arbitrage. Amazon had an affiliate program where if you sent someone to Amazon and they bought a book, Amazon would pay you. So Ryan began taking ads out on Google not just for lobsters, but for books that would link to his Amazon affiliate page, where he would collect commissions. And of course in the same way he was using Amazon to generate revenue, he began linking to adult sites that were paying for traffic.
Ryan Bartholomew: I just couldn’t make much money on the lobsters, so in 2001 I ended up selling that company and ended up focusing on porn basically. Google allowed you to bid on adult keywords and run traffic to the porn affiliate programs, which get people to give their credit card and sign up for a free trial and all that stuff. It was a really simple business model: I would bid on any sex-related keyword that I could get, traffic was cheap—especially for the obscure stuff—and I would send it to a page that was nothing but text links. It would break down whatever their interest was, any kind of fetish, and then they would click it and it would take them to a porn site targeted to that interest. At one point there must have been forty or fifty affiliate programs for everything under the sun.