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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ray Sidney: I got burnt-out. I was not feeling very productive. I thought, You know what? I need to get away.

Charlie Ayers: A lot of the early-timers were looking at, like, How much does this island cost? There was a lot of distraction.

Ray Sidney: Originally I thought, You know what? I just need to take a month or two off, and then I’ll kind of get that fire back in my belly. And that never happened. I left in March of 2003.

Blaine Cook: Rabble was pretty bored of working at Odeo and distracted in all sorts of different ways.

Rabble: I’m an anarchist. I think we should have a revolution and we should restructure and we should have democratic control and decentralized worker cooperatives and everything else.

Ev Williams: It’s hard to manage anarchists.

Biz Stone: They wore shirts that said ANARCHY. And then they would ask questions to all of Odeo, like, “What’s a good hedge fund to invest in?”

Rabble: I was waiting around for my stock options and ready to move on and had enough of the dot-com thing. I felt like I wasn’t changing the world enough.

Biz Stone: Those guys were a pain in the ass. They would specifically sit down during a stand-up meeting—on purpose! There was one stand-up meeting where they were sitting down and Ev was like, “Guys, please, I need everyone here by ten a.m.” Because everyone was showing up at noon or whatever. And one of the guys raised his hands and said, “I have a question.” And Ev was like, “Yes?” And he said, “What’s our motivation?” And Ev just lost it. Ev just yelled out, “It’s your fucking job!!”

Scott Hassan: That same type of technology will be used in tele-operated robots; some people call them Waldos. Think of this device as a set of arms that rolls around, that’s able to do stuff—two hands that can be manipulated from afar. Let’s say it fits where your dishwasher used to be, and whenever you need it, it comes out of there and it unfolds and it’s operated by somebody else in another location that has expertise that you want at that time. You want dinner made? Well, it’s just remote-operated by a chef, in some type of rig, so that when they move their arms, the robot moves its arms, in the exact same way. And that person is wearing these gloves, so that whenever the robot touches something, they can feel that touch. So that that person can pick up things and chop things and go into the refrigerator, open the doors, as if they were there. Then that same Waldo, when that person is done with making dinner for you, instantly switches over to this other person who loves to clean up, and then they go and clean up the whole kitchen for you. It’s the service economy, but it’s in your own home, right? And so you basically have expertise on demand. So, well, something like that is going to be widespread in maybe ten years.