Download The Squish and Joey Saga: A Tale of the Dotcom Boom and the Pursuit of Wealth and more Study notes Business Management and Analysis in PDF only on Docsity!
Circling the Drain
Frederick Moody
This work is produced by The Connexions Project and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License †
Abstract At long last, the author succumbs, thoroughly bewildered, to the siren call of Squish and Joey, agents of the dotcom boom.
By 1999, it was no longer possible to imagine the Weeklyor, for that matter, Seattlerecovering its equilibrium. And with each passing day, it was increasingly di cult for me to tell whether I wanted it to. The city was spinning glamourward, and while there had been times^1 when I regarded such a trend as the death of everything I treasured, now I found myself more often than not excited by it, convinced that the Squishes and Joeys of the world were Promethean purveyors of the technological re that would make gods of us all. I decided that the ow of wealth toward them for business models that made no apparent sense was proof that they knew something profound about the future that the rest of us could only dimly sense was there, and I came to believe, happily, that my destiny, and the city's, lay in the direction they were taking it. I became quite insuerable on the subject, dismissing my erstwhile coevals' alarm over the opening of retail outlet after retail outletPottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Tiany'sas Chicken-Little thinking, the panicked focus on risible side eects when Seattle's ascent into glory was the real story. We are not, I would insist, being transformed into Bellevue, Sausalito, LA; what is really happening is that Seattle is coming of age, leading the world into the 21st-century Technological Era, and being well compensated for it in the bargain. We were changing from backwater to bellwether. The dramatic transformations all around methe quickening of the pace of life, crowding on the freeways, the frenetic rush everywhere all the time, the heightened sense of urgency and excitement in the streetsall testi ed to Seattle's arrival at the cutting edge, and the mushrooming population here testi ed to the world's endorsement of The Seattle Way. We were arriving at a point relative to the rest of the world that back in 1990during the hype and heyday of the Goodwill Gameshad been mere pretension. Rushing headlong into the New Technology and the New Economy, following the Squish-and-Joey generation, we were realizing that long-held vision of the Greater Seattleites of yore: Seattle had nally arrived among the trend-setting cities of the world. New-York-Pretty-Soon had grown into More-than-New-York-Right-Now. Yet I fell prey at the same time to an unacknowledged unease. I lapsed into a careful, steady schedule of drinking through the workday, editing and writing Weekly stories in an anesthetized haze, downing pints of sanity-pickling local microbrews^2 at lunch and dinner, and employing massive doses of coee to get me
∗Version 1.2: Oct 20, 2009 6:38 pm GMT- †http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ (^1) A year ago, a few months ago, last week, yesterday, a minute ago, a few minutes hence... (^2) Mac and Jack's African Amber, whenever possible.
through the mornings. I couldn't see that I was in mourning. While my dismayed family watched me grow fat, glum and comatose, Squish and Joey chose to be enormously entertained by this regimen, and came down to my o ce nearly every day to take me to lunch and watch me drink while they sat there regaling me with insults, tales of their travails and battles with the Wee Little Man, and visions of the world after F5 went public and made them multimillionaires. They insisted constantly that I didn't really work for a living, and that my enterprisethe Weeklywas an outmoded, no longer useful artifact from a bygone age. Hence my depression. When they hit it rich, they were going to give me a real job with a real salary. I was going to be half employee, half biographer, writing business plans and product documentation for them while gathering material for a new masterpieceabout them. Squish and I aren't getting' enough lovin' ! Joey would complain. You gotta get started on another book! Until I did, I was essentially useless. Joey's greeting whenever he popped up in my o ce was always the same: You're not workin'! You're slackin'! Let's go to lunch! With each of them at an elbow like guards escorting a condemned man to the Chamber, we would head o to a nearby tavern, Joey calling me slacker, bum, derelict, loser, and other endearments along the way, pointing out the occasional drunk slumped against a wall or lying on the sidewalk, saying, That's you in ve years, while Squish would be acting out what he saw as my life's quest: the search for the Magic Beer. Growling, twisting o an imaginary bottle cap, pantomiming a drunken draining and tossing away of a bottle, repeating the cycle again and again, he would mutter, Where's the Magic Beer? Where's the Magic Beer? Are you the Magic Beer? Then suddenly he would be brought up short when a beer bleated, Don't drink me! Don't drink me! I'm the Magic Beer! I have the secret to eternal wealth! Eternal happiness! All you have to do is not drink me, and you will be happy forever! Pause. Ba ed look. Sudden guzzle. Growl: I don't care! I can't help it! It's worth it! Safely in the bar, pint in my st, I would listen to their tales of impending glory. F5 would go public, their stock would make them insanely rich, and they would then build what they were calling their Empire: a two-company communications conglomerate that would realize their worldwide system of networked human- computer dyads. One company would be an Internet backbone company, deploying a worldwide ber- optic network with Squish-designed hardware throughout. Built with state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment, and enhanced by Squish's magic boxes, the network would be by far the world's fastest, allowing for true, real-time, multimedia communication in immersive environments. The other company would be an applications company that would market the conferencing product allowing up to eight people to meet in a virtual environment for face-to-face conversation and collaboration. The evolution of the Internet, the rise in consumer expectation, the wiring of the world, and the development of Squish and Joey's products all were converging at exactly the right time for their long-held dream to be realized. And I was going to be there with them! They were going to take over the world, and I'd be there to tell the storyfrom the inside! No more editing lame fashion supplements! No more writing stupid lifestyle stories for a dying alternative newspaper! No more books about that boring Bill Gates! Think of it! Joey would say. The day we're on the cover of Business Week, your book about us will be in every bookstore in the country! You'll nally write a book that sells! There were days when they made me feel like Jesus in the desert with Satan whispering in his ear, sweeping his arm out over the expanse before them, insisting, Someday this can all be yours.. .just turn these stones to bread.. .work a pointless miracle.. .. Get thee behind me, Squish and Joey! (Drunkenness and apostasy had me mixing my Bible stories.) The better I got to know them, the harder it was to believe that any of their dreams were realizable. Sometimes, in the dim tavern light, hunched over their massive meals, eating and talking at speeds ordinary humans can only imagine, spraying food and words all over the bar, Joey looked like Bill Murray in Cad- dyshack and Squish looked like the gopher. How could creatures like this possibly mastermind the birth and sustained performance of a multimillion-dollar corporation? I also doubted that F5's IPO would ever come o. Without Squish, and with the mercurial Wee Little Man at the helm, it didn't seem possible to me that the company could get itself into IPO-marketable shape. How could they possibly be making progress on BIG/ip if its inventor had been thrown overboard? I knew that the company had a new VP of sales and marketing, and that the board had taken enough control of
trying to get me to dissuade Squish from visiting, and Joey came down with Bell's Palsya paralysis of one side of his face that was caused, his physician assured him, by massive stress. Not exactly a series of developments presaging riches and fame. Things percolated along in this fashion for some months. I stopped thinking about the IPO, having decided that it would never come o. Even Squish and Joey stopped talking about it, Squish's talk being mostly about Sumi's disappearing act and his heartbreak, and Joey's talk being mostly about his and Squish's declining health. On those infrequent occasions when they brought up the IPO, I tended to tune them out the way you do to people who can't let go of a fantasy that's over, over, over. Then one day F5 dropped its lawsuit against Joey, and a few weeks laterJune 3, 1999, to be exact Squish called to say that the next day F5 would be going public. When I got to work that morning, I logged on to Nasdaq and saw that F5 was indeed trading. It would close the day at $14.87 per sharea price that set Squish's worth at nearly $20 million. Suddenly, Squish and Sumi were reconciled and Sumi was on her way to getting bejeweled, married and pregnant before the year was out. And a few weeks after the IPO, shortly after a visit by Squish to New Orleans, a cartoon by Walt Handelsman appeared in The New Orleans Times-Picayune. It depicted two chubby little boys, ten years old or so, wearing T-shirts and shorts, standing outdoors. They were holding bananas to their ears as if they were telephones, and talking to one another. I gotta go, Joey, one was saying. Someone just oered me $200 million for my banana. Days passed. I kept trying to relieve my post-IPO numbness with doses of beer. There was this weird way in which Squish and Joey's sudden wealth was an abstraction. They still hung around my o ce and hectored me about my worthlessness, just as they always had. They still talked in vague ways about my future with them. They still bought lunches and beer for mealthough now we went to fancier establishments. They still dressed and acted like aggressively crude slacker adolescents. And although much of their talk now was about brokers and nancial advisers and Goldman Sachs people and this whole new world they had been vaulted into nearly overnight, they didn't seem materially changedit was as if the money they had now was symbolic, or virtual, or in some way not entirely legal tender. And it grew more abstract in my imagination with each passing day as the stock price shot into the stratosphere. Perhaps it had to do with the unreal way they went about spending. Squish went out one day and bought a mansiona huge, turreted, old classic home on Queen Anne Hill, looking down at the Space Needle. It had four stories and more rooms than I could count. He moved his three pieces of furniture into it and rattled around like a ball bearing in a boxcar, emailing photos of it to Sumi as part of his campaign of persuasion to get her to marry him (Look at the house I bought us!) and calling me at home in the evening, oering me endless beer if I would just come over and keep him company. He would lie there alone at night wide awake and frightened by one noise after another, like a little kid alone in a haunted house. Another day, he and Joey drove across Lake Washington and bought three new Mercedes (two Kom- pressors, Joey's being silver and Squish's the color of a pumpkin, and a larger, black four-door E320the bigger car, Squish emailed Sumi, being their eventual family car), and came racing back across the lake in the Kompressors. A few days later, Joey drove his over the mountains to eastern Washington, where the highways are straight, and oored the accelerator. He was traveling at 160 miles per hour when the radiator hose burst. Night after night, Squish would come back to his mansion in his Kompressor after dark and crash into the pillar on one side of his garage door, the turn being too tight for him to make in the dark. Within weeks, he managed to make a $60,000 car look like a splendidly appointed piece of junk. Squish also decided to spread the love, as he put it, by doling out extravagant gifts. He started giving away F5 stockhe gave 100 shares each to everyone in my family, among many othersand told me he would buy me whatever I wanted for my next birthday. The rst thing that popped into my mind was a private Screaming Trees show at the Showboxa legendary music venue in Seattleand Squish told me he would write the check for it as soon as I made the arrangements.^5 Watching the vertical climb of F5's stock price, it occurred to me that the unreality of Squish and Joey's wealth might have something to do with the fact that no matter how fast and furiously they spent their
(^5) Ultimately, relative sanity and sobriety prevailing, I opted instead for a family trip to Korea.
money, the stock price was rising so much faster and more furiously that they could never catch up. Instead of depleting their stockpile, it was as if spending made it grow. One month after going public at $14.87, the stock was selling at $50.75; six months after F5 went public, the stock hit $160.00, and Joey had a net worth of $6.6 million, Squish a mind-numbing $200 million. $200 million is not a number that can be made to make sense. Obsessively, I would check the share price every day and multiply it by 1.3 million, give or take a few thousand shares, trying to nd a way to describe Squish's wealth and its metastatic growth in terms that could make it real for me. The raw number might as well have been in a foreign languageI couldn't picture what it was, really. I could not look at Squish and nd a way to see him as someone with $200 million in the bank, nor could I nd a way to look at the two years or so of F5 work he'd done and make it seem worth $200 million. In fact, I couldn't think of anything that was worth $200 million. Squish, though, grew less and less aware of the roles of luck and market mania in his enrichment, and more and more convinced that he had earned his $200 million the old-fashioned way. He noticed that whenever he was out in his Kompressor, people would shout insults at him and ip him oan indication that not everyone was thrilled with the Seattle technoboom and its overnight millionaires. I feel like screaming, `Fuck you! I worked hard for this! ' he told me, as if his millions were an appropriate re ection of the quality and quantity of his work at F5. And while Joey, with his relatively modest $6.6 million, began selling his F5 stock o in pre-planned, scheduled installments, Squish decided the stock would rise to at least $300 per share, so he sold as little as possible, keeping his eye on the bigger prize. I suppose the height of the mystery came the afternoon Squish was in my o ce directing me to bigcharts.com. He guided me to its market capitalization entry for F5, pointed to the gure there, and said, giggling, Hee- hee.. .look at me! I started a $3 billion company! The last time I had been in the F5 o ces,^6 the place was a mess, Hussey was jumping up and down on his desk screaming Mother of God! over and over, waving his arms, and the programmers were safely behind a door they had duct-taped shut, with a sign on it telling everyone else to stay away unless they were willing to sacri ce a goat to gain entrance. Safely behind the barricade, they were playing networked Duke Nukem. Now American investors had decreed that F5 was worth $3 billion, and Squish expected it to be worth nearly $6 billion before the run was over. I walked out of my o ce a few hours later, with that Hee-hee.. .look at me! still ringing in my ears, and looked around at a wasteland. I had just spent the afternoon editing down Mike Romano's unreadable 7,000-word piece on the New Pornography to an unmemorable 2,000-word piece entitled Not Your Daddy's Porn. That was my job nowturning the unreadable into the unmemorable. The walls looming up behind the cubicles in the Weekly looked like they were crumbling; the computers were covered with grime. Only a few dispirited souls were still there, trudging around as if trying to cultivate that precious updated Dickensian look. I hadn't had a beer for four hours and was a walk, ferry ride, and bicycle trek away from my next one. Soon the Weekly would hit the newsstands with a dull thud, a few days later the leftover copies would be retrieved, a new Weekly would thud standward, the owners in New York would call to complain about each issue the day after it was released, and the bad copy would come pouring through my computer from writer to reader, just keep coming and coming and coming like that relentless hair would, years hence, through that unbearably depressing barber shop in the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. Every word I edited and sent on to typesetting was an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. How much was the despair I felt about the Weekly at that moment, in those days, in the ensuing months, a function of Squish's astounding, inexplicable wealth? I would look at him and think he could see where the world was headed while Ihelpless, old, outdated, Seattlebound, Maynardblindedhad no idea what was happening around me. I saw my life at the Weekly as a pointless exercise in ghting a losing battle to keep a failing paper from abandoning a tradition not worth preserving. And all the while, Squish and Joey were ridiculing me for feeling hesitant about leaving the Weekly and going to work for them. They found my doubts about their next enterprise to be tremendously amusing. Why the hell are you hesitating over this? Joey asked me one day. It's like a book contract with a salaryyou won't have to live
(^6) Before being banished by Hussey, who felt I was paying too much attention to Squish and not enough to him.
