How I became a dot.com whore (and lived to tell about it)

On the surface, it looked like a frat house beach party reunion: 100 or so mostly white guys in their 30s, whooping it up against a background of flickering tiki torches and the vast nothingness that was the Pacific Ocean at night.

And what whooping it was. One guy, Bo Peabody, had sold his two-year-old Net business to search engine company Lycos for $58 million. Peabody was 28. Another, Jay Walker, took his company, Priceline.com, public months before and was worth $6 billion on paper at the end of that first day of trading.

The magazine I wrote for at the time, the Industry Standard, was throwing the party—we called it a conference—at the posh Ritz-Carlton hotel on the beach in Laguna Niguel. It was the summer of 1999 and the Internet bubble was about as big as it was going to get, and it was reflected in the party fare. There were belly dancers, an open bar and piles of jumbo shrimp ready for the taking.

The attendees—the frat boy look-alikes—were the stars of the show. Mostly the young rich of the Net business, they were hailed as the next ruling class—the digital revolutionaries who would soon storm the gates of corporate America in one collective takeover bid. And here they all were, at the “Tiki Party” on Salt Creek Beach, nestled against the steep beach cliffs below the Ritz.

It was rare in business journalism to get such unfettered access to the rich and powerful, but it didn’t sit well with me that I was to spend the evening on this gorgeous beach chatting up the male J. Crew catalogue.

The opulence of the scene notwithstanding, I couldn’t stomach another night where every conversation centered on someone’s IPO or latest round of venture financing. It was like schmoozing with a bunch of lottery winners. The only difference was that lottery winners’ new wealth is more stable.

Still, it would be almost two years before I would leave the Industry Standard. There were obviously some dollar signs in my own eyes.

In journalism school at San Francisco State University, I didn’t see myself as a business reporter. I applied to about 40 different papers across the country, but I only heard back from one: the tiny Cheboygan Daily Tribune in Michigan. They offered $16,500 a year, while a semiconductor trade magazine called Electronic Buyers’ News would give me $27,000. I took the cash.

On the very first day, even before I walked into the building, a hulking veteran reporter named Jim Forbes stopped me outside to say if I played my cards right I could end up at the Wall Street Journal, Business Week or even the New York Times business section.

“This job could lead right to the show,” was how he put it.

But from the start, business journalism seemed like a racket to me. I stayed in the best hotels, conducted interviews in expensive restaurants and hung around people who were worth millions. The only thing that was hard was writing authoritative articles on things that I knew little about. Before that first job, I had never even opened the business section of the newspaper and the only businessman I knew was my dad. But I got by easily, first at EBN and then at another tech business magazine called Upside.

It was hard not to get by easily. The Internet was growing into this monster that was inhaling anyone in the San Francisco area who had a pulse and could put two sentences together. Accordingly, the starting salaries for young, inexperienced reporters like me doubled and tripled almost overnight. A friend of mine got a job for $70,000. Another scored a gig in Japan for about the same. Both were in their 20s.

Still, the market hadn’t hit its peak.

I joined the Industry Standard in October 1998. The San Francisco magazine, which covered the Internet business, was only five months old then, still rough around the edges and only about 70 pages an issue. There were about 65 staffers when I signed on with the company. Two years later there would be over 400.

The Standard quickly became the center of the Internet world in San Francisco. Every Friday night, the company hosted an open bar on the roof of the building at 315 Pacific St. At first it was just a way for staff to blow off steam after the magazine went to press. Soon, it became a happening. Internet industry types lined up around the block, waiting to get in. Then on a roof considerably smaller than an average bar, they’d chat on their cell phones, flatter one another, drink, pitch business and network. It was a scene the staffers would come to avoid.

That feeling that the magazine was at the center of all things Internet contrasted to what I found about the people I would work with. Far from being actually interested in business or technology, the prototypical Standard staffer didn’t know how he or she ended up there. They had interests that were far outside the Standard’s coverage and weren’t afraid to voice it. Many of us openly ridiculed business. But the pay was good, which led to a kind of inertia that was compounded by the closeness of the staff. We were young, making good money and living in the big city. For us, it was a big party, on the house.

And it only got bigger. As the Internet bubble expanded, there was talk that we too would try to sell shares to the public. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. By the second half of 1999, the magazine became fat with ads from dot-coms, swelling over 200 pages. In early 2000, Time magazine came to profile us.

But soon the Standard started behaving like our advertisers, who were well known for their excesses. There were in-office massages. There were free daily snacks and sodas. There were massive party bills (our second anniversary party was at San Francisco City Hall).

Eventually, those bills came due. In March 2000, the stock market had what analysts call a “correction.” That sounds mild enough, but for many Net companies–our main advertisers–it was more like a depression. The bubble had burst. We said it ourselves on our April 17, 2000, cover: It was “The End of the Beginning.”

What came next–the mass closing of Net companies and the layoffs–has been well chronicled. And it happened at the Industry Standard as well. The magazine is still alive, but well over 100 people have been laid off, scattering our close team.

But mostly good has come out of the crash. Many people, both in and out of the Standard, are giving more careful thought to what they want to do with their lives. One close friend is about to go traveling for nine months. Another spends her days at thrift stores and going for long walks. Sometimes we call each other and reminisce about the old days, but mostly we’re glad they’re gone.

As for me, I came to feel that the business press was as much a part of Silicon Valley as the endless armies of bankers, venture capitalists and accountants. And that was a little too close for comfort. I would tell their stories. But ultimately, I found it hard to find any interesting ones. At the heart of it all was their thrill at the prospect of getting rich quick. And not only did that get boring, it wasn’t the story I got into journalism to tell.

So I’ve settled here in Sacramento, writing for the News & Review, which is where I wanted to be all along: A smaller town, friendly people, and a wealth of interesting stories to write that have nothing to do with dot-com craziness. A fish out of water? Maybe. But I know why I’m here, which is more than I could say at that Southern California beach party.