It’s late November 2000 and I’ve returned home from my first two week vacation maybe ever. These were the days when you were not always connected to work - no email on my phone, no work text messages. I had landed at SFO from Beijing on a Sunday to be ready for work Monday morning.
Work being Intraware’s Fremont office. The office was pretty new for us, having recently moved from our startup’s location after Intraware acquired us. Right after the acquisition, there were plans for an office that could grow with our ambitions. By the time we closed on the space, we had scaled back our plans and the space considerably. Times were a changing.
There was no one in the office when I arrived, which wasn’t that surprising as I was part of the early crew. I walked to my desk at the far end of the floor I noticed the office was messy, disheveled. A beer can here and there. I sat at my desk, a bit dumbfounded. I booted up my desktop and found it had no connectivity. I walked around some more and found no one. A pizza box and leftovers from some kind of party in our conference room. So, I got into my red 1999 Ford Escort and drove home.
Once home, I called the person Intraware hired to oversee our office. Intraware had acquired us for 40 million dollars. I had felt jazzed when I saw the stock shoot up and my options worth about 300K. Too bad, we were in the lockout window. But, hey, the stock would just keep going up, wouldn’t it?
In 1999, it was hard to find software engineers. Many of the best could take multiple jobs. Many of the worst could be paid as the best. A typical ploy was to join a company for a year, collect some options, and then move on to the next company. Our company was getting close to acquisition and somehow people knew this, so we started getting better candidates.
It was all about revenue growth, so when we landed a deal with HP we could spend 100% of the contract to make the project successful. I was at a meeting with an Oakland OEM when we told them we had an API they could integrate with. We had no such API, yet. We proceeded with deals with ADP and similar companies when the technical path was, let’s say, challenging.
That all changed in 2000. Money was no longer cheap and tech layoffs started. A blip on the radar, we were sure.
In retrospect, 2022 reminded me of 1999. Instead of the “network is the computer” run-up, it was the covid/remote work arms race. Differant reasons for the bubble both fueled by cheap money and a strong tech labor market. In 1999 the source of cheap money was the NASDAQ and in 2022 it was ZIRP. Stock market crash destroyed the optimism of 1999 and inflation/AI destroyed it in 2022.
But before that, our company, Internet Image had a 60 million offer fall through. Mystery to me as to why. There were rumors which I won’t repeat here. I was floored we were even in discussions. Maybe they had asked how many production customers we had? Then Intraware came in at 40 million. I was still floored. We completed the software distribution part of their portfolio. With the aquizisition was complete, we all got new offers. I got a 40% raise and in title I ran the engineering team since the original Internet Image engineers trusted me.
We hired a team of contract programmers, one of which, by observation, had never used a computer before. As long as money was cheap, we kept going. There was the lavish $1000/head company party at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. A long ways from our improvised startup.
Back home from the empty office, I got a hold of the manager at Intraware. “You didn’t get the package, you were supposed to get a package” or words to that effect. By package he meant a letter vis UPS of FedEx which I didn’t get. The bad news, was the office was closing and the entire team including myself was laid off. The good news was I had a month (or so) of severance and had another two weeks off. The hiring market was still strong, and along with another coworker I joined RightWorks by the end of the year.
The following weekend, I hosted a stock options buring party at our rented house in Fremont. It would be the last time all of us Internet Image folks would get together and I learned I really couldn’t play ping pong at all.