The dot-com collapse is not funny for everyone


May 22, 2001

I went to school in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as a result of this experience, I learned several important things. First, I learned that it is completely idiotic to complain about housing prices in a place like Reno, because compared to housing prices in the Bay Area, housing prices here are lower than the average rating of a UPN sitcom. Second, I learned that stock options are very cool things.

Until all hell breaks loose.

I graduated from college in 1997 and worked for The Associated Press in San Francisco for five months before deciding that I'd rather see a strip-tease dance-off between Bruce Breslow and Tony Armstrong than live in the Bay Area any longer. Yeah, I was making good money, but all of that good money was going toward rent for a divey apartment next to the train tracks that I shared with two others. I was also commuting 35 miles each day into San Francisco, which unilaterally blew major chunks. These problems fried whatever brains I had left after college, and therefore, I decided to move back to Northern Nevada, where I eventually got a job with This Fine Newspaper.

Meanwhile, a great many of my friends stayed in California and went on to work for dot-coms after college. They were accepting exorbitant salaries and impressive-sounding titles with companies that had not been around for very long -- but for miraculously still had enough money to buy advertising during the Super Bowl. Oh, and most importantly, these friends of mine were being offered the Holy Grail of late-late-20th-century commerce.

Stock options.

Ah, stock options. I was working for the non-mainstream (in the financial game, strike one!) media (strike two!) in Northern Nevada (strike three, yer out!), with a second job on the side to pay off student loans, and my friends were getting stock options. And people who had gotten stock options a year or two before my friends did were driving Beemers and investing and spending even more exorbitant sums on rent (now that they could afford apartments that didn't have weird odors permeating every nook and cranny).

I was happy for my friends. They were making it, and making it in a big way. They never criticized me for moving back home, to give journalism a shot in my hometown -- they are good friends. I must admit, however, that I was a bit envious of them.

Then, well, you know what happened. All hell broke loose.

The money that was supposed to pour out of the Internet, thanks to advertising and subscriptions and God knows what, never came. After these Internet companies posted financial loss after loss after loss, investors stopped giving them money. And these companies had no money with which to keep going, at least at the breakneck paces they were going at. Closures and layoffs hit, and they hit hard. The hardest hit: The newbies who were just a couple years out of college.

And those stock options? The things that were going to make all my friends Silicon Valley multimillionaires before 30? Worthless.

Four of my best friends have lost their jobs in the last couple of years. Three worked for new dot-coms; a fourth worked for a computer company that is in the process that are going under. A fifth has managed to hold on to his dot-com job -- his cubicle mate wasn't so lucky -- but is nervous about the future and is having to move to a cheaper place because his landlord is jacking up his rent in the ridiculously expensive San Jose area.

It turns out that most UPN sitcoms ended up lasting much longer than these dot-com companies. Meanwhile, those of us who stayed in non-Web-based media are doing pretty well comparatively, even those of us with the non-mainstream media in Northern Nevada trifecta. Go figure.

Some people laugh at the plight of these dot-coms, but I don't. Yeah, a lot of stupid, overly optimistic millionaires lost some money. I can see how some, in a sick sort of way, could find that to be amusing.

But they weren't the only ones who lost out. I have a lot of friends who can vouch for that.

Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan who promises to stop being so damn serious and to be funnier again next week. His column appears here Tuesdays, and he can be reached via e-mail at jiboegle@stanfordalumni.org.

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