Afterword

End of an Era

At SolidData I was eager to scout for new opportunities, new markets and customers for our memory hardware to accelerate applications in this race for speed. I added “Turbo-charging Transactions” to my business card, much as I had added an explanation for Itochu prospects five years earlier. Soon the phrase began to appear in our company communications.

Declining an acquisition offer from SUN Microsystems, we prepared for an Initial Public Offering. Yet the overwhelming forces of 2000 and 2001 saw the dot-boom turn to dot-bust as the industry consolidated and investment withered. The need for speed was replaced, seemingly overnight, by the more existential need for survival. My pitches for turbo-charging applications fell on ears deafened by the turmoil of market chaos. The front line of consumer-facing companies suffered heavy losses first. SolidData and other providers behind them fell second. Companies and their stock options vanished; investors fled; dreams disappeared.

Nonetheless, changes were set: a new world had opened. We’d tasted the caffeine high of instantly available news, entertainment, personal and professional messaging. Networks now connected people around the world at large and in neighborhoods small. We were wired, and soon to be tied together wirelessly.

Fundamental shifts had transpired in the new economic infrastructure. The tasks of company formation had been expedited. Public markets had shown their enthusiasm through IPOs. Service providers allowed companies to offload operational chores from human resources, marketing, sales and accounting. Drawing on those advances, young companies could stay lean and responsive.

Some of the start-ups from the 1990s survived, many by retaining their key people and core technologies to reinvent themselves. Part salesperson, part motivational speaker, part magician, they leveraged their creativity to address new markets, offering new solutions.

Had eXcite grown too rapidly, extending too far from search to portal to broadband entertainer? Had Google, the company eXcite did not acquire, been fortunate to have lain low, stayed lean, and emerged stronger amidst the chaos? What looked like the end of an era was a difficult transition to the next, with the survivors gathering the scattered resources of engineering, marketing, operations, and sales on the cheap. The drifting kelp, torn from the rocks on the ocean floor, was mixing in that dynamic plasma of necessary nutrients, the cycle of life and business turning once again.

Personal Networking

After the collapse of SolidData, I attempted to leverage my network of a thousand names. Those still employed feared they soon might not be. I joined a group of business people with Japanese connections who met on the Stanford campus, rallying around Professor Feigenbaum’s book with the unlikely title, “The Japanese Entrepreneur: Making the Desert Bloom.” All for naught, here and in Japan.

With little else to pursue, my interest in teaching – formerly prohibited due to low pay – became a backup vocation. Without big gains from the boom times to tide us over, I drained my 401k to pay two mortgages and Cobra insurance. Pings into the industry came back with 404 errors as I networked my way to nowhere.

One evening at a Stanford event, probing for opportunities, I talked with Gary Reischel of Softbank. “From what I hear,” he confided, “this could be a long dry spell. You should look for something really secure.” Good advice is often hard to follow. I had the image of Gary cruising by on a scaled down yacht – from Titanic-sized freighter to a luxury liner – while I shouted and waived from a lifeboat rolling in his wake.

Yet the forces that spurred the networking of the world continued on. More people signed up for email accounts and used search engines, finding information more freely than ever. Developers gave birth to applications that offered entirely new avenues for connecting – socially, economically, and politically. Google took the lead, expanding rapidly through acquisitions and in-house development into video sharing, social media, and the original “killer app” of email.

Companies from the ’90s that survived did so by adapting, often morphing into something new as they responded to the changing currents. Fascinated by young entrepreneurs pursuing monetization strategies, I listened as one described ad-auctioning exchanges. In millisecond transactions, client ad campaigns would bid on ad space to be served up instantly to on-line visitors. Another explained how he made money on a free compression app that minimized the data transfer from phones to the net. “Of course, while the data travels through our compression system, we take a look at it.” Companies were willing to pay for insights into that flow of information.

San Francisco buzzed with activity – from the Small Business Administration seminars to informal gatherings at local watering holes. Some hosted specific entrepreneurial topics while others offered social mixers serving beer and commiseration to the unemployed. After a few months with a job placement service in the City, I gave up pursuit of professional work and picked up my carpenter’s belt. It was honest work with the reward of a tangible outcome at the end of each day.

After facebook entered the scene, we speculated about revenue sources and potential competitors. Some thought social media could survive with advertising. A few viewed it as an emerging marketing tool that could challenge the search engines. However it evolved, there was no stopping this momentum.

Even the recession of 2008 could not quell the advance of tech. By that time, I had purchased a map publishing business as a turnaround opportunity in the Real Estate market – a market that failed to recover. One can trim the sails and tune the masts, but if there’s no wind … . Sooner than anticipated, Google’s mapping products added parcel information. I was surprised at how quickly a 3 ½ inch screen could compete with the visibility and detail of an atlas-sized print product. Opportunity closed; my window to it boarded up.

Google had the ability to give away services while garnering profit from the advertising revenue streams of its related businesses. Email, GPS directions, maps: it’s hard to compete with such an overwhelming array offered at a price point of “free.” Ad profiles could be constructed from one’s website visits and searches. GPS data from routers and smart phones revealed location – beyond block level to individual aisles in a store. All could be bundled up and sold to the highest bidder.

Once again, it was time for my carpenter’s belt. To stay in the flow, I kept attending events in San Francisco as the tech wave continued its rise. One evening in the Financial District I joined others donning Oculus headsets. We walked around a basement trying to imagine what possible application would come of this. Shortly thereafter, Facebook bought the company for $2 billion, wagering that Virtual Reality would become the “next social platform.” I was reminded of the power inherent in shares of stock that had propelled the speculative acquisitions of the late 1990s.

Another event was Start-up Weekend. Along with a dozen twenty-somethings, I pitched a concept to an audience of fifty. A few garnered enough participants to move forward. Joining an educational group, I was reassured to find a couple who weren’t in their twenties. Age sometimes had its advantages, as I brought my grandson the next morning to test and video record our concept. After two intensive days and final presentations, everybody left with a t-shirt, a coffee mug, and an experience. I liked the quote on the mementos: “Craft Richer Stories.”

“Meet-ups” demonstrated a social power that churned, usually without specific direction. At one of these, I met an interesting Russian woman who was building a following in San Francisco through a series for entrepreneurs. We shared our pitches.

I expressed an idea for meeting people, not at a physical venue, but a virtual one. Why leave spontaneous introductions to a restaurant or bar, limited by both time and place? Why not be able to “see” interesting people at a website, into which they may have come and perhaps gone? If you both liked the same site – the virtual venue – you might have other things in common.

“So, you have sort of a virtual ‘check-in,’” she summarized in what was a better description than all my rambling. This night she was hosting a group competition. The winning team would celebrate over a pre-arranged dinner with a venture capitalist. Mine lost the game by one-eighth inch, amassing odds and ends to create a tower reaching the ceiling. The other group succeeded by inserting a final element into the seam between two ceiling tiles.

Yet in the discussion that followed, I noted many other solutions. “Here’s one, and we all missed it! By rising alongside of this fluorescent light bulb, we could get an extra 1 ½ inches – ten times the winning differential. And who’s to say their tower is really higher? These ceiling matrices are just hung by wires from the concrete floor above. Is it really level? And what about building a tower in the lobby on this floor with its cathedral ceiling? There was no rule against where we start!” I could keep up with the kids, but I no longer looked like them.

My interim roles as consultant, substitute teacher, newspaper writer, landscaping manager, and map publisher having settled back into carpenter and contractor, I received an invitation from Google to join the beta rollout of their new service, HelpOuts – an adjunct to their HangOuts social media offering. This was to be a videocall enabled marketplace for service providers of all shapes and sizes: experts, consultants, and tradepersons across the board.

At the GooglePlex, the show started late and the initial presenter was unable to answer questions. I was struck by the number of tech workers in this audience of service providers – former marketers from HP having become plumbers. The idea of job retraining in times of economic difficulty seemed to have turned upside down. To stay afloat, we all jumped in the water to offer what people needed, valued, and were willing to pay for.

When I finally met one of the initiators of the HelpOuts concept, I was reassured, finding our conversation about the possibilities to be informative and exciting. “You know, having the video to review a proposed project would be great for trade providers,” I suggested. “We could see what we’d need, bring the right tools and materials, and avoid the errands and return trips that cost so much time.”

Andrew smiled as he replied, “That was on the first slide!” He had thought this through. Interestingly, he was the only one I met that day older than I.

With an improving economy and active venture investors, business formation began to accelerate. “The Internet” renewed its image as a wild free-for-all. New companies popped up randomly, frequently – all grasping for the “eyeball” attention we chased in the 90s.

“I work at a start-up in San Francisco” became the most frequent reply when I asked young people what they did. I knew most of these enthusiasts would be working long hours for stock options they would never exercise. But a few might grasp the brass ring; and by trying, all were avoiding that dreaded regret of “what if.”

Domain Is Not Enough

“Hey Jim, I’ve got a possible opportunity for you – similar to the idea you pitched a few years ago.” My friend Darby referred to a start-up idea I had explored after my younger sister’s fall to ovarian cancer in 2012. I wanted her to stay with me, if only as a memory, but more tangibly, more present. We could all stay with those we loved, participating postmortem in their lives, cheering from our bleacher seats “in the cloud.” BeHereThen was a great concept; but it was a long play, and I couldn’t get VCs or other investors behind it. Ancestry liked the idea but was too consumed with consolidating historical data sources to pursue it. I’d let it go.

I met the CEO for lunch, listening as he described a simple concept of getting one’s affairs in order for a less burdensome departure. “After I Go” had a million dollars in seed money and Paul was assessing its potential. As I saw it, they were just barely coming up with the ante in a poker game. I ran him through my pitch deck, showing how BeHereThen would encourage people to record for their posterity: audio messages, video stories, lessons from their lives that could help the people coming after. I had an entire ecosystem designed around this to keep the person, not alive, but “present” in the lives of those most dear.

Financial partnerships to hold funds and execute transactions, escrow to provide security, merchants to offer products and services that would be meaningful, timely. Referrals to probate attorneys, tips for recording messages, suggestions for actions to take now, to take “then.” Send birthday cards to grandchildren, provide gifts for their graduations, contribute to educational funds for the children of those grandchildren – as far forward as one could imagine! Heartening stories and thoughts of love, of reassurance that loved ones could call up whenever, wherever they needed a pick-me-up, a virtual “hug.” We could be there for them.

Paul could see how much thought I’d given to this. We met again for a working session, flushing out ideas, potential partnerships, extending the concept, noting action items. He brought senior management experience. I wanted the Business Development spot. “That’s the part I don’t like to do,” he confessed. This was the most perfect fit I’d ever found in business, utilizing my creative vision and cross-functional perspective for a meaningful project that already had my commitment. Finally, I was going to join a rock-and-roll team of energetic professionals with a mission!

“I’ve hired IDEO for some brand development work. You should come to the meeting in San Francisco on Friday.” I did. I listened. I contributed with insight, originality, a deep and essential grasp of the opportunity ahead. I was psyched! Paul brought the meeting to a close, saying something about getting home to see “Game of Thrones.”

“I’ve got to go talk with investors on the East Coast. I’ll get back to you next week.” Finally, it seemed, I would get in on a start-up early, in a position of vision and impact that would fully engage my skills and experience. I thought of myself as a “co-founder,” though Darby cautioned me against that title. I mused about trading in my pickup truck for a used BMW.

I finally got the call. “Jim, we’re not able to bring you on board at this time,” said Paul. I was devastated. Not at this time? This was the very time I was needed, at inception and build-out! They needed me to grow this from their simple document vault to a thriving community – economy – delivering price-insensitive value to people now and those in their future. In disbelief, I asked why.

“The investors believe the first four or five hires need to be independently bankable.”

So that was it: no VP title; no prior entrepreneurial successes; no shiny list of accomplishments on my resume. If my domain knowledge and general experience were not valued, I had no chance of securing a key position with a growing team. This was the most devastating set-back in my professional career. I got over my depression after two weeks, picked up my carpenter’s belt once again, and went to the next job site.

“Move fast and break things”

There was energy in the disruption of established organizations, quickly democratizing processes that had been closed to most. Blogging offered an outlet for consumers to create and broadcast without big media. Videos on Youtube, photos on Instagram or Snapchat, categorized media on Pinterest, current events on Twitter — such uploading and posting created a new world of sharing, of more inclusive participation.

Publishing gatekeepers began to be circumvented by individuals bringing their own works directly to market with easily available tools for creation, editing, printing, distribution, and marketing. Self-published books may lack the reach and glamour of big industry names, but works that would never have seen the light of day could now be viewed anywhere in the glow of a tablet computer. The initial networking of Internet 1.0 evolved from basic connectivity to the deeper communication of Version 2.0.

Perhaps the greatest impact upon our lifestyles has been the rise of social media. We have moved from one-to-one messaging into group-oriented activities. We respond, comment, rate, and review in an open discussion – sometimes collaborative, often combative. Either way, we have fully embraced the power of our connection to a point somewhere between “like” and “addiction.”

My favorite, enduring quote through this tumult has been, “In the palm of our hands we hold the sum total of human knowledge and the ability to talk to anyone, anywhere on the planet. We use this to argue with each other and watch videos of cats!” The arguments have gotten out of hand and the videos more graphic, surfacing in partisan division on the one hand and civic outcry on the other. From the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, such movements would not have been possible without the technology of this millennium.

But here we find the dangers of such an addressable medium. Foreign hackers tilt the elections of independent societies; individuals concoct falsehoods to maximize their ad payments; political action groups post anything to gain advantage; fake news distorts our perception of reality. Can we control the genie once released from its bottle?

In Tech We Trust

The nascent industries of the 1990s that required delicate measures of protection, such as hands-off regulation and no sales taxation, have become singularly dominant in their fields. More currently, the DOJ and Congress are investigating anti-trust issues in Big Tech. Google has almost 90% of the search business and has aggressively acquired companies like YouTube (video sharing), Keyhole (Google Earth), Motorola (Pixel phones), DoubleClick (ad servers) – over 200 companies in total. Facebook has leveraged its early position to maintain the dominant share of the social media market. Once we establish our group of family and friends, it’s hard to change over to a new platform. Monetization of this favored position has given Facebook considerable opportunity for growth. The contest is still in play, with privacy and security added to anti-trust as concerns that must be addressed.

Nonetheless, there is a benefit in having so much ad money to fund new ventures through corporate development initiatives by the tech giants. Free navigation applications save us time and reduces pollution. Free email enhances communication. The competitive question remains as new tech fledglings try to launch.

In the networking frenzy of the 1990s, Cisco Systems did an excellent job of staying on top of the hill by playing both sides: investing heavily in development while acquiring technologies and the engineers that produced them. The giants of technology today are doing the same, acquiring dozens of emerging companies while funding internal development efforts. They gather what they need and discard the rest, all to defend multi-faceted businesses, or perhaps to pursue the next big thing.

Artificial Intelligence shows up in our lives as word completion while we type, speech recognition as we talk. AI systems can respond in real time to rapidly changing conditions, observing how traffic unfolds to play chess on the freeway. We have not arrived at George Jetson’s flying car, but more than a dozen self-driving car companies are vying for the biggest disruption in automotive history. In an exemplary move, Google “acqui-hired” early in the industry and continues its development in pole position.

Still, there is room for young, adroit newcomers to leverage energy and innovation, creating new solutions that rival the existing behemoths. Without legacy constraints in product or customer channel, upstarts can create advantage. Where they lack customers, channels, partners, and cash for useful acquisitions, there is now a well developed ecosystem of investors and providers to assist. Change and challenge will continue.

Innovation continues at an accelerated pace. It has been a hallmark of American industry, never so effervescently visible now that the digital network has set the stage. Creativity and boldness have flourished amid entrepreneurial successes – and many more failures, as the experimental ratio requires. Yet this churning is the stuff of progress, capitalism being nothing less than a process of trial and error, repeated until something workable emerges.

I often think of the workers displaced by the harsh and sudden disruption that has idled their industries. Much is said of retraining; yet an auto assembly worker replaced by AI-driven robotics or the global change in centers of manufacturing would have a hard time shifting to growth fields of a software engineer or online marketer. He is more likely to keep his skill in assembly and apply it to other trades that cannot be off-shored. Houses are not yet “Made in China,” and medical care is provided close to home. Resilience, learning, adapting, maintaining the momentum of spirit: these are necessary elements of fickle winds as we navigate uncertain seas.

Déja Vú

While generally slow to accept change, we have adapted surprisingly quickly to the pandemic of 2020. Technologies like video conferencing and remote access have been around since the 1990s. Ordering consumables over the Internet began slowly with eCommerce companies decades ago. Our recent and fervent embrace of these behaviors has left vendors scrambling to deliver to doorstep or curbside. Technology companies with digitally provisioned products and services have been rewarded as stock prices hit new highs.

Seven years after the bust of the year 2000, IPOs rebounded. Seven years later, they hit another relative high. In 2021, we are seeing the latest boom in the IPO cycle. Revenue models continue to be tested and refined while an element of faith still resides in business plans with billion dollar valuations and negative earnings. If we are to learn from the first wave, Internet 1.0, we may recognize that a boom precedes the next bust. Enthusiastic yet fearful of missing out, investors wonder how long to hold their bets.

Venture Capital investments show an increase not unlike that of 2000. Large funds of earlier days raising $100 million dollars now collect over a billion, though the bulk of capital goes to later stage portfolio companies. The gamblers have their chips at the ready; capital is looking to be placed. Funding alternatives have also expanded beyond conventional IPOs and acquisitions, as companies take in more private rounds, pursue direct-listing to circumvent the i-banks, or sell to investment funds rather than to public companies or the open market. Successful debutantes at the IPO ball can again use their equity as coin of the realm to expand, acquire, and perhaps even challenge the upstarts of an earlier generation – now the behemoths of our new world. We are left to wonder who will be the next David with innovative slingshot in hand and a bit of luck.

Capitalism in a digital age is betting heavily on resilience, on the death and rebirth of businesses, on the productive re-deployment of people to create new products, new services, new solutions. The transitions have seldom been smooth, yet the cycles are inevitable and endless. Innovation and disruption; creation and destruction; evolution of business, of society, of our lives. We are fortunate – and challenged – to live in such times, in the rotation of such seasons of change. And if we keep a curious and observant perspective, we’re in for another wild ride.