The Washington Post has run a four-part series chronicling the rise and fall of Michael Saylor, a dotcom entrepreneur who founded a data-mining company called MicroStrategy whose stock went from $300/share to $4. Saylor's story is one of monumental hubris, excess and shady accounting — he was fond of telling his employees that they could "bend reality through strength of will."
It's funny, you keep hearing about these dotcom billionaires who were brung low by their own hubris and the crashing economy, but most of the dotcom entrepreneurs I know — yerstruly included — lived modest lives in small apartments, worked tirelessly to bring cool shit to the world, hired and nurtured oddball autodidactic wunderkinds with marvellous ideas and strange attitudes that would previously have relegated them to academe or non-technical work. They spent real money on stuff like comfortable chairs, shit-hot computers and bandwidth, not limos, blow and lavish parties. They drew modest salaries and put their personal lives, health, and families on hold while chasing the dream of changing the world — not of getting fantastically wealthy.
And along the way, the dotcoms made some great stuff happen. People who never would have joined the distributed conversation of the Internet have signed on in droves, lured by strange and often hyperinflated marketing campaigns; a generation of kids logged in and got skilled in the strange, packet-switching arts; my grandmother's boyfriend got a computer and learned to use it so that he could day-trade.
Yes, any number of these "revolutionary" startups crashed and burned, but three out of four new businesses have always failed in the first couple years. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people got a fast and thorough education in entrepreneurship, technology, and, most importantly, user-experience. To my mind, the thing that most characterized the dotcom boom was the shift in perception that held that when something's absence frustrates you, you should go out and build it; when something sucks, you should improve it.
Hurrah, then, for the dotcoms and their hubris. Hurrah for the notion that we can all of us learn to write the code that guides our culture and our lives. Hurrah for hard work and risk-taking. Hurrah for a willingness to change the world.LinkLinkLinkLinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jason!)
