Essays

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If there is a problem with options, it's that they reward slightly the wrong thing. Not surprisingly, people do what you pay them to. If you pay them by the hour, they'll work a lot of hours. If you pay them by the volume of work done, they'll get a lot of work done (but only as you defined work). And if you pay them to raise the stock price, which is what options amount to, they'll raise the stock price.

But that's not quite what you want. What you want is to increase the actual value of the company, not its market cap. Over time the two inevitably meet, but not always as quickly as options vest. Which means options tempt employees, if only unconsciously, to "pump and dump"-- to do things that will make the company seem valuable. I found that when I was at Yahoo, I couldn't help thinking, "how will this sound to investors?" when I should have been thinking "is this a good idea?"

So maybe the standard option deal needs to be tweaked slightly. Maybe options should be replaced with something tied more directly to earnings. It's still early days.

8. Startups

What made the options valuable, for the most part, is that they were options on the stock of startups. Startups were not of course a creation of the Bubble, but they were more visible during the Bubble than ever before.

One thing most people did learn about for the first time during the Bubble was the startup created with the intention of selling it. Originally a startup meant a small company that hoped to grow into a big one. But increasingly startups are evolving into a vehicle for developing technology on spec.

As I wrote in Hackers & Painters, employees seem to be most productive when they're paid in proportion to the wealth they generate. And the advantage of a startup-- indeed, almost its raison d'etre-- is that it offers something otherwise impossible to obtain: a way of measuring that.

In many businesses, it just makes more sense for companies to get technology by buying startups rather than developing it in house. You pay more, but there is less risk, and risk is what big companies don't want. It makes the guys developing the technology more accountable, because they only get paid if they build the winner. And you end up with better technology, created faster, because things are made in the innovative atmosphere of startups instead of the bureaucratic atmosphere of big companies.

Our startup, Viaweb, was built to be sold. We were open with investors about that from the start. And we were careful to create something that could slot easily into a larger company. That is the pattern for the future.

9. California

The Bubble was a California phenomenon. When I showed up in Silicon Valley in 1998, I felt like an immigrant from Eastern Europe arriving in America in 1900. Everyone was so cheerful and healthy and rich. It seemed a new and improved world.

The press, ever eager to exaggerate small trends, now gives one the impression that Silicon Valley is a ghost town. Not at all. When I drive down 101 from the airport, I still feel a buzz of energy, as if there were a giant transformer nearby. Real estate is still more expensive than just about anywhere else in the country. The people still look healthy, and the weather is still fabulous. The future is there. (I say "there" because I moved back to the East Coast after Yahoo. I still wonder if this was a smart idea.)

What makes the Bay Area superior is the attitude of the people. I notice that when I come home to Boston. The first thing I see when I walk out of the airline terminal is the fat, grumpy guy in charge of the taxi line. I brace myself for rudeness: remember, you're back on the East Coast now.

The atmosphere varies from city to city, and fragile organisms like startups are exceedingly sensitive to such variation. If it hadn't already been hijacked as a new euphemism for liberal, the word to describe the atmosphere in the Bay Area would be "progressive." People there are trying to build the future. Boston has MIT and Harvard, but it also has a lot of truculent, unionized employees like the police who recently held the Democratic National Convention for ransom, and a lot of people trying to be Thurston Howell. Two sides of an obsolete coin.

Silicon Valley may not be the next Paris or London, but it is at least the next Chicago. For the next fifty years, that's where new wealth will come from.


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