Bubble anecdotes

"Here Comes Another Bubble," was a 15 minute period that is now (thankfully) over. Before I forget all this, though, I thought it would be worth recording the lyrics here and some background.

Verse 1

Got me a CS degree, honor roll, MIT
Moved to Palo Alto opportunity knocked

I actually got my CS degree from Washington University in St. Louis. Try and rhyme that.

Thought I had the perfect plan, took a job at Web Van,
Traded in my twenties for a worthless pile of tech stock

My dot com failure of choice was Takira.com, a wonderful manufactured brand created for the bubble-era price of $100,000 by an SF naming firm. (The alternative was "Promeo.com") Our motto was, "Because People are the Best Source." I bought my options for $200 and, improbably, got 50% back in the sale.

Suffered through the market crash, lost a giant wad of cash

I decided to get serious about investing in February of 2000.

(image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Pink slips, burger flips, would you like some fries?

Takira laid me off in 2001, and at that point the only companies hiring in the valley were eBay and Google. To collect unemployment insurance, I needed to attend "job retraining sessions" at the local employment center because, two years out of Stanford, the state of California classified my industry as displaced.

Happy days are here again, Larry Page, Sergey Brin
Time to write a business plan so I can be like those guys!

Larry Page and I were at Stanford's CS department during the same years; we had the same advisor, Terry Winograd. Larry decided to work on Google, while I decided to work on a CD for the Stanford Fleet Street Singers.

Ah, the choices you make.