Anyone else who survived the dot-bust might be interested

[WSB]

This is a couple weeks old but we just found it

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/05/29/where-are-they-now

Remember Kozmo? DrKoop.com? Webvan? (well, around here it was more HomeGrocer) …

We have semi-fond memories of the dot-boom/dot-bust because we were in it … working for Disney’s GO.com portal, which ultimately folded after losing a whopping $1 billion. Layoffs revealed when we all got to work one day and discovered our keycards weren’t functioning … and we were wanted at “A Meeting.”

Ah, those were the days. Not. — TR

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[charlabob]

Thanks! I was part of what survived and thrived, but (hard to imagine now) we weren’t always sure it would. That would be amazon.com. :-) This is very interesting, if sometimes sad, history.

What’s the next big (ex) thing?

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[Aim]

Funny (hmmm, not ha-ha) thing: I was just thinking about this on Monday when we were both so darned sick and I had to find strength to get out of bed and go to QFC and get gatorade and the like. I was lamenting the loss of Kozmo.com as it was the perfect time for an order-in.

It’s one of the only dotcoms I really regularly miss. Had it been set up a little differently, I suspect it could have survived.

I was a tech burnout. Worked at MSoft during the boom, and then when the bust started I was burning out anyway and got out of the industry. I’m still glad I did. $80k a year means nothing if you have to spend every penny on stupid stuff like take-out, laundry service, and living in Redmond so that you can work 18 hour days 6 days a week. I have nothing to show for all that hard work, as every extra cent had to be blown on convenience items to support me working so much. Amazing how that works out.

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[JoB]

We too were part of the bust scenario… just slightly further down the food chain. Hubby’s employer just stopped paying him and still expected him to work when the microchip business fell in the dot.com bust.

We survived with a side trip to Minnesota.. but survival wiped out the gains from those 60 to 80 hour weeks.

Now he works “normal” hours… at least the hours seldom go over 60 hours now… and never as many as 80. He is learning moderation:)

Even ill, i am the support function that makes that kind of time and energy expenditure possible. When i am too ill to function, it gets very expensive.

I miss the energy and excitement from the dot.com days… but am glad to have him now working for a much tamed player in that game… even tho the work is no longer as stimulating.

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[JenV]

ha. I am not a techie, but I was on the periphery of the dot com boom and bust- I was working in the promotional industry- specifically screen printing and embroidery. During the boom we were inundated with orders for shirts, hats, and other promotional items daily from little dot coms. They wanted to spend all their money to get their image out there, and they wanted it put on EVERYTHING. The big guys, too- we had TONS of orders to fulfill for Real Networks & Microsoft. When the bust happened, it was like our orders just dried up overnight, and that’s when I left the promotional industry for the glamorous world of auto claims adjusting. The screen printing company I worked for went out of business shortly after the bust.

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[Ken]

I went down with the ship. We were a frugal company, locally owned and profitable until a regional ISP with delusions of grandeur acquired us (along with 25 NOT profitable start-ups) in a shopping spree with their dot com bubble gains from going public (as well as the remittance cash Qwest paid to get rid of their idiot founder Doug Hanson) early in the game.

When the crash happened, the company had it’s financial pants down trying to emulate Enron and global crossing with incestuous trades of stock for “services” among acquisitions and a couple of other fly by night start-ups.

When they quit paying the bills, the regional VP, and a few of us long time employees, found homes for many of our long term customers and jobs for vulnerable older workers.

I am told the top officers peeled off a long distance phone company for themselves and sold the customer base to earthlink before dumping the rest into bankruptcy court and fleeing to the south of France.

I was on call 24/7 365 and could not go anywhere without a computer, two cell phones and a pager. I really didn’t know I was burned out until I decompressed for a month.

It was a year before I could stop carrying my cellphone every where around the house and sleeping with it near my ear as if it might go off at any moment.

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[beachdrivegirl]

Wow- to young to have actually lived through it but working in the sales industry (office equipment) many of my mentors have some great stories…pretty similar to JenV’s but they also include the fact the dot commers ruined lease rates for the regular down the street business for a couple of years…thanks for the read TR! :)

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[WSB]

I don’t know what Disney paid for space in Smith Tower but that will probably go down in my personal history as the nicest office (cube) space I ever had. When I joined Starwave in the process of being bought by Infoseek which in turn was in the process of being bought by Disney, they were in a nondescript Eastgate office building in Bellevue (awful commute), but moved to Smith Tower about 8 months later after extensively renovating more than a few floors. I had a desk on the 17th floor with an incredibly fabulous view of everything from the Kingdome (we watched the implosion from there during my “tenure”) to the bay. It was a weird situation because 95% of the people working on GO.com were in the old Infoseek HQ in Sunnyvale, completely nondescript building in an office park without so much as a shrubbery view – I had to fly down there once a week but very few of them ever got to come up here and enjoy the utter coolness of Seattle.

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[datamuse]

Amazon survived, but I didn’t–they laid me off in 2000. (I definitely don’t miss the 60-hour workweeks though!)

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