Random Access - Tuesday, June 26, 2001The Big Choke
by Chris Gulker
' Nuclear winter for startups' is how one former CEO describes the current climate in Silicon Valley. Me, I call it The Big Choke. I use ' choke', BTW, in the American argot sense, meaning ' to fail'.
And, indeed, times have been tough lately here in Silicon Valley (and Silicon Alley, and Silicon Turnpike, and Silicon Prairie and every other Silicon Nook and Silicon Cranny.)
Mind you,' tough', around here, means people have to forego catered lunches and afternoon neck massages. Unemployment in the U.S. is low by European standards, and still nearly non-existent in Silicon Valley. True, companies no longer have to offer a free BMW roadster as an incentive to lure employees. Salaries have retreated a bit from the levels of wretched excess that characterized much of the last decade.
Some of us even find that there is downtime between jobs: we're not getting snapped up as quickly as we once did. Used to be, if the body was still warm, a headhunter could get it a job.
But, employment is one thing. The bigger issue is psychological: a palpable doubt now hovers over the Valley, born of the first crash many hereabouts have ever known. Even us old timers had begun to believe our rocket had escaped gravity: but then April 2000 arrived, and, well, the ground started to come up pretty fast.
You see, we're the nerds, the geeks, the dweebs: guys and gals who can spend 20 hours straight contemplating 600 bytes of obscure, arcane, impenetrable computer code, only to break for cola and a pizza before spending 40 hours contemplating yet another 600 bytes of obscure, arcane, impenetrable computer code.
And we have been living in a paradise of affirmation. In school, we were the meek, the shunned, the clueless, the kids with no hope of a social life or social status. We preserved our virginity long after our peers lost theirs, and not usually because we wanted to be pure.
But, in the last decade we emerged as the Drivers of the New Economy, an elite if often ill-dressed and sometimes unfragrant group. We've probably created more wealth out of thin air than just about anybody, in any epoch. Take your Carnegies, your Rockefellers: they were amateurs, mere atom hackers. The real geniuses are information workers, people who create things out of bits: and bits are nothing but order imposed by sheer will.
We got used to people making movies about us. We were used to our stock and options going only one way - up - and in hyperdrive at that. So the past 12 months have not been kind.
It's not that failure is unknown here. Most of us have worked for at least one failed startup. In fact, 9 out of 10 startups routinely fail to become the Next Big Thing even in the best of times. Creating successful new businesses is hard to do: it's a Darwinian process. Failure is the baseline for Darwinian selection: you try a lot of things, and the winners just kind of emerge as the also-rans drop away.
And anyway, we all are not, by and large, good at business. We're nerds, remember? We're good at figuring out very difficult things like operating systems and global networks. The business stuff is supposed to be handled by the VCs and their phalanxes of hired guns: CEOs, CFOs, lawyers and marketeers.
So the current setback is a painful reminder that the world works in its own mysterious ways. In geek parlance, complex systems demonstrate unexpected consequences, consequences that even 40 hours of unbroken scrutiny can't unravel.
And so The Big Choke has descended upon our Silicon realm, like a giant wet and gaggingly musty blanket. True, we may have been a little arrogant, a little over the top in the sheer joy of watching our former peers gape as our incomes soared past their puny stockbroker and lawyer and Fortune 500 wages.
And, also true, our detractors are having a field day watching as we cope with the New Big Thing. The local press is carrying stories about repo men cruising the parking lots at Cisco and Apple and a hundred crashed dot coms, looking for Porsches and BMWs whose owners are a bit behind in the payments.
Truth be told, most of us didn't want a ton of German iron anyway. And you're not likely to see the banks taking any computers back: we know what's really important in life, and it's not wheels.
So we're being reviled, sneered at and, people are staring to make fun of us again. It's almost like we're back where we started. Our nerdly backs are up against the judgment wall: and, funny thing, it's kind of a comfortable place to be.
We're the nerds, the geeks, the dweebs, remember? We've been here. We did a lot of our best work here. We never had to worry about the social spotlight: we were free to spend untold hours glued to computer monitors, delving deep into realms where only the initiates could soar.
In Silicon Garages, and Silicon Basements and even Silicon Mansions, we're back in front of those glowing screens. We're back on Usenet and IRC, mailing lists and peer networks. We're swapping ideas, and code, uninhibited by ship dates and investor mandates.
The Choke is on. The last time we were here, we changed the world.
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