What I Saw at the Meltdown (Working for a Dot-Com)

The American Prowler ^ | /21/2005 | Paul Beston

[PBRSTREETGANG]

"We need to talk about your TPS reports."

[beaver fever]

You rock!

Although I think my Hawaiian parrots are going to be jealous of the eagle.

Oh well I guess they'll just have to get over it.

[RippleFire]

"I think she was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen," an old colleague told me recently. "What did she do, though? Was she in marketing?"

LOL

[expat_panama]

 "the stock market bubble finally began to burst...  ...Nasdaq hit its all-time high...  ... then began a steady plunge that marked the birth of a long bear market."

Where's the 'barf alert'. 

This article is just the kind of stuff that most people just lap up like kittens.   Everyone likes to talk about the clowns that got swept up in the fad and nobody sees the majority that moved their money out of tech stocks into large caps (in 2000) then into small caps ('01 to present).

Mar. '00 was a shift out of tech stocks.  The "market crash" (drop in prices of all kinds of stocks) happened right after 9/11--followed by a recovery.  Right now we're getting a shift out of housing stocks.  Big deal.

Back in '91 I was in a bank listening to a manager brag about how his fund had bailed out safely in mid '87.   After I pressed him he admitted that they'd also missed out on prices surpassing '87 peaks just two years later.

[kevkrom]

I don't have horror stories this bad, but I worked at a small contracting firm that sold a lot of services to these clueless dot-coms ("selling shovels to gold-diggers", as my boss called it). The worst case I deal with was a company with no busienss plan and no revenue model getting $10 million in venture capital. The investor's first request: develop a business plan. Shouldn't that have been done before the investment?

These guys were also kiting checks to us while trying to secure funds...

[stacytec]

This company sounded doomed from the getgo. I would have been sending out my resume the second I sat in one of those meetings.

[ItsOurTimeNow]

I was just about to say the same thing. It's eerily familiar to the "Web Site Development, Marketing, and Strategy" firm that I worked for in 2000.

The entire sales staff was laid off - because the company wasn't making enough money. So, to the President, who had just purchased an Audi A6, it made sense to lay off the only people who bring in new business.

[clee1]

Oh yeah....

People running businesses just because they received venture capital to do so; regardless of the facts that they a) had no business management experience, and b) had no reasonable expectation of earning a profit.

Silly, in retrospect.

[T-Bird45]

The culture is gone, and good riddance. Or, as one of my colleagues used to say at the end of every vaporous marketing meeting: "Whatever, dude."

His colleague's saying reminds me of the saying over 20 years ago after oil prices collapsed and caused the speculation house of cards to come down with it, taking banks down.

"God, please send us another oil boom -- we promise not to piss it away."

[ItsOurTimeNow]

Exactly.

We had a "Chief People Officer" - much like the title of Chief Executive Officer, it was a very well-paid position.

The CPO, as she preferred to be called, was a battle-axe feminist with a degree in Psychology. Her "job" was to mediate between personnel disputes. That's it. $90 grand a year to sit in an office, play solitaire, and occasionally get involved in the personal lives of co-workers.

A vastly over-paid busybody, yet her position outlasted those in both the sales and marketing departments.

[ReagansShinyHair]

Investors can be greedy, greedy, greedy. I briefly did investgative work for investors, such as background checks on CEOs of companies they wanted to inveset in. Even when I reported that the CEO had previously defrauded people of boatloads of money, the investors would look at me and say, "But this deal sounds really good!" If you're so blinded by greed that you'll hand your money over to a known white-collar criminal, you get what you deserve.

[redgolum]

I remember in 2000 my boss, a recent grad of a prestigious MBA school, telling me, a farm boy that wandered into the engineering field, that there was no reason the boom couldn't last forever.

I stopped putting money in my 401 k at that point. All the options were for tech stocks, and I had figured out that the Internet boom was all vapor.

[clee1]

Uh huh. Me too.

I pulled all my money out of the tech sector about 6 months before the crash. People said I was crazy.

However, while they all lost tons of money, I made out like a bandit!

[JudgemAll]

Something I dont understand. Most people have money being hoarded somewhere and ready to be poured out at a tempted sin's notice. What made all these people with all this money throw it at the Dotcoms and not some other project?

Of course Clinton largess and issuance of taxpayer dollars to banks and what not must have helped.

[bert]

.....I wondered why I'd ever left the nonprofits....

His writing implies he never did and still hasn't.

[kb2614]

I saw the memo.

;-)

[KevinDavis]

I had a job interview with a dot-com company that had it's own programming language.

[groanup]

This says it all:

I couldn't help but find pleasure in seeing the guilty punished.

"The fault lies not in the starts, Cassius. It lies with us."

Those weren't real jobs.

[clarissaexplainsitall]

Whatever, dude.

[engrpat]

During that period I worked with a group of guys that had the market all figured out, at leas they thought they did. They were day trading the dot com market, taking out second mortgages, draining all savings just to put in the market. They couldn't understand why I wouldn't join them..well besides being cheap...I just couldn't figure how a stockholder could make money when the company didn't the response was, "you don't understand the new economy." Long story short, I retired 4 years ago at age 60, they are my age and older and are still working to payoff debts from the bust. They were right, I didn't understand the new economy.