All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in the Dot-Com Apocalypse

created by humbabba

(idea) by humbabba (1.6 wk) (print) ? 2 C!s I like it! Mon Feb 12 2001 at 14:25:25

Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in the glory days of the late `90s.

Wisdom was not at the top of a sound business model, but there in the VC playpen of a new industry.

These are the things I learned:

Spend everything. Work like there's no tomorrow. Hire more people than you need. Create things now, let someone else worry about maintaining them. We're all in this mess together.

Acquire what is not yet yours. Say you're sorry when you lay somebody off. Venture capital is for burning. Spend. Buzzwords are good for you. Penetrate a vertical.

Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day for around twelve hours. Beer is for lunch.

When you go for your IPO, watch for suckers' money, hold your breath and stick it to `em.

Be aware of stock prices. Remember the little seed in the plastic cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but somebody funded it.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the plastic cup--they all get acquired or file Chapter 11. So do we.

And then remember the made-for-television movie about Gates and Jobs and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: license.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The market and greed and basic deception. Economy and office politics and the insane squandering of wealth.

Think of what a better world it would be if we all--the whole world--had venture capital to burn and no sense of commercial responsibility whatsoever.

Or if we had a basic policy in our companies to always skin our investors and spread their remains all over the internet. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the market, it is better do it with someone else's money.

printable version
chaos

The male libido - or - How I was castrated by the 90's	Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country	The dot-com drink special	Report from an office that is sinking
golden handcuffs	EDB Has a Posse	A message from your .com CEO	Chapter 11
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten	office politics	Denver, Colorado	Things that a fetus would say if it could speak
System Dynamics	If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal	Signs of compulsive debting	Nortel Networks
Well Manicured Man	werewolf	TRS-80 Model 100	venture capital
mess	Robert Tappan Morris	Buzzword Bingo	old economy

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