Whatever guilt I felt at my extended idleness (which was considerable; my mother worked until the last months of her life) was tempered by the admiration I received from the new paper millionaires the Internet boom was creating by the thousands all around me. Young people I met admired me—though they found me a bit slow, retired as I am at forty-eight, not thirty-three. It did no good to remind them that the companies I’d worked for had had to show a profit before they could even think of going public, two consecutive quarters in a row, actual revenues in excess of costs. It seemed so quaint to them, passé, the notion of having a product, paying customers, profits. They believed the public markets should finance their fantasies. “What is your business plan for revenues?” I asked a young man I met at a party who had founded a start-up. “Go IPO!” he said.