I picked up a copy of Wired magazine from work, dated July 20, 2000, and read it on the train ride home yesterday. What an incredible pile of shit the industry was selling us last year. On one hand, the amount of hubris, excitement, and technology was contagious and overwhelming. But on the other, you had to be an idiot not to see it was all going to implode.

I worked for a dot-com startup, chasing the dreams of big bucks myself, and it didn’t work out. I let my stock options lapse last Wednesday- 1,667 of them, at the ridiculous strike price of $1.25/share. I too figured I’d be able to get in, cash out, and get out before it all fell apart.

On one hand, my trying this on the East coast was bad, because it meant that everything blew up earlier than it did on the West coast. But on the other hand, I’m not living in a city awash in out-of-work web designers, millionaire developers, facing a rent based on the 1999 real-estate market. I am commuting to DC every day, which takes a 3-hour bite out of my day, but I was able to get a gig with a healthy, world-class design firm right before the layoffs started.

So this article made me wonder how we all could have believed it would last for so long- when our company was funded by venture capital for two years, when they were buying us laptops like they were parting gifts on the Newlywed Game, throwing parties at the beginning of each month, buying real estate, butstill trying to figure out exactly what it was we offered.

When they hired on the new VP of marketing, and he told me I needed to put up a brand-new website in 1 month with no content and no idea of how to market the company, I knew we were in trouble. This was in May. By September I knew my days were numbered, and I smelled blood in the water. This VP had just forced out our immediate boss, and was consolidating his power inside our building. I had to hire an outside firm to design the website, and they did a great job with nothing, but I was pissed off, bored, and amazed that a company with as much VC money as we did still couldn’t seem to figure out how to market our ‘service’. The Marketing gurus (and they hired a bunch of these) kept talking about switching our ‘play’ from ‘B-to-C to B-to-B’ and ‘Going after the Enterprise markets’.

I suppose there’s about 10,000 other folks in San Francisco who could write the end to this story, but I’m glad I was able to work there, live it for myself, make good money, and get out before they canned everyone.