Notes on Chapter 28

In Chapter 28, Len gets to boast about his new gig to his daughter Janet and her husband. He’s going to be a Venture Capitalist Assistant (a job title I made up) and help out one of their companies that’s probably going to be wanting more capital soon. His job is to both help them out, and report back to the VC what’s really going on there, and what he thinks should be done with it. His appearance on TV as an “Internet investing wizard” led directly to this.

This company, NetsForAll, is fictional, but I modeled it after several companies that were ISPs (Internet Service Providers) before anyone knew there was such a thing.

There actually were a lot of people using the Internet before it burst on the scene on Netscape Day (the Netscape initial public offering). One of the companies was Best Internet, run by a friend of mine, but NetsForAll is not Best. They didn’t have Sand Hill Road venture backing, for one thing.

Len is in Seventh Heaven. He gets to hang out with the VP of Finance and the VP of Marketing and see what makes the Internet business tick, and most of all, he’s back in the saddle again! He gets to tell everyone about his big bust of the embezzlement ring up in the mountains, and his brave dog Gretchen who took down the old man who attacked him.

One of the fictional customers Len visits is modeled on my supervisor from grad school (hi, Al!):

He found a guy in Palo Alto who had two T-1 lines to his apartment, and he was running a travel site! You could book plane flights and hotel reservations. Amazing. This guy was getting calls from the phone company, asking why in God’s name anyone needed two T-1 lines!

One of the reasons I wrote this was to explore what people actually thought when this gigantic opportunity was staring them in the face. Many of us in the business were blasé about it. We’d had the Internet for years now, and who the hell wanted John Q. Public to come and use it anyway? They’d probably just fuck it up (more or less what’s happened in the last 30 years).