O.K. So I stayed up till 8 a.m. this morning working on random stuff... I don't even quite remember what. It's now 7 p.m., and I've been working on and off since 3 p.m. Sent out a mass mailing to 400,000 customers. I'm not only the entire systems operations staff at this point, I'm also the customer service staff. I'm doing all the work that:

a VP
a National Support Manager
$25,000/mo. worth of Filipinos with college degrees @ $19/hour (8 agents?)

used to do, via email, without using our $40,000 customer support/service system or elaborate procedures

plus all the work that a Director of Systems Operations, a Senior Sysops, a Mid-Level Sysops, and a LAN tech. used to do.

Plus all my old responsibilities as a part of the product team. Plus, I'm only now free of a ton of crap associated with regaining control of our capital assets and determining what we actually own and had in use. Plus, I'm in sales, moving our surplus equipment.

Quite entertaining... I agree with my partner that we should have fired most of these people sooner, or never have hired them in the first place (of course, we had a tight hiring market, and were under pressure to move forward quickly)... when I look back at my first, very successful company, one of our prime strengths was hiring good people... our employees were superb.

O.K. So, I made a million. Then pissed it away in dribbles... a huge chunk of it on my current company and the failure that mutated into this one... a chunk in the stock market... a chunk on a house... a chunk on another house... a huge chunk on a stupid real estate development project that I didn't have time to pay attention to. Sigh - I didn't even have much fun with it... much wiser now. Too late. But I've still got a fighting chance with this company, and plenty of opportunities await me over the next twenty years, I'm sure. And money has never really meant much to me... as long as I can feed and house myself, and cover medical and car expenses, etc. I'm fine.

So, my dot.com - let me say it has been interesting. Like everyone else, we got caught up in the dot.com frenzy. Unlike many others, we are still around, because we still managed to be more conservative, react faster to failures and bad ideas, etc. than most others. This, despite having, how shall shall I say it... a cast of rouges and cutthroats, several of whom were quite capable of single handedly putting any company on life support. Like my partner, I agree, we should have moved faster and more ruthlessly - it would have been better for all parties involved (except, perhaps, the theives).

Lessons learned: a company requires someone to run it. To care about all it's parts in detail, and to make sure things happen (and don't happen). If that isn't there, you're bound to have problems.

Nevertheless, the myth of Silicon Valley is that iconoclasts, visionaries and non-conformists (read geeks) run the place and have free reign - nothing could be further from the truth... my observation is that the money people are the most conservative people imaginable (laughable though that may seem, given their recent excesses)... this is understandable - they have to trust the people they give their money to, but at the same time, the result is obvious: Silicon Valley culture is an oxymoron. FuckCompany.Com is the bitter undercurrent that always lay beneath the "irrational exhuberance". This is a vast barren wasteland populated by people whose priorities and personal values are just fucked, in my opinion... there is no beauty here, there is nothing but freeways and endless, utterly aethetically barren officeparks and strip malls... urban sprawl of the worst sort. Employee warehouses. People desperately struggling through traffic to escape to home, or to drag themselves to work.

I want, so desperately, to get the fuck out of the valley - back to Santa Cruz, where the air is clear, the weather is always perfect, you can step out of your office and be in walking distance of a ton of great places to eat, read, hang out, and see movies. There is *NOTHING* here within walking distance. Everything requires a drive... and there is no place around here that I feel any desire to eat at for anything more than fuel (with the exception of the house of Siam in downtown San Jose).

Anyway... more later.