— 1996 —

That second winter in America, New York had the worst snowstorm in 100 years with 20 inches of snow and drifts over 10 feet deep. I lived only a a few minutes from Wall Street so I set off for work as usual but I was one of only 7 people out of 10,000 who made it so I went back home again. It took the city about two weeks to clear the snow and we were stuck in our apartment for most of that time. There were snowbergs floating down the Hudson River.

Chris came round one evening for a beer and we all moaned about the snow and the cold. Mrs Clown complained about being stuck in our apartment with a new baby and asked if there was anywhere warmer we could live. Chris said “I work for a company in California. It’s warm there. Why don’t we all go work in Silicon Valley?”

We put our hands in the middle and made a vow:

The Internet was just getting started about this time and we decided to build our next application for the World Wide Web. We learned HTTP and HTML and this new programming language, Java. Long story short, we built and launched one of the first Java applications in the world. It was another huge success but suddenly it was July and we remembered we were supposed to be in California.

The only place to chat online in those days was Usenet and I found a forum for jobs in California. A couple of weeks later I walked through the brand new doors of Alphablox.

AlphaBlox was just across the street from Netscape and on the day we arrived, Jeremy and Michael had just come back from their first meeting with Netscape’s CFO who pulled out his chequebook and wrote a cheque for a million dollars. The first few thousand dollars went on custom door handles in the shape of the company logo. A few more tens of thousands went on custom-built furniture to match the logo colours. The DotCom Boom had begun.

The company put us up in beautiful apartments on the Sand Hill Road while we looked for somewhere permanent to live. Chris moved to California too and we both bought shiny new convertibles and went out on the town in Palo Alto every night. We felt like Masters of the Universe.

The founders of Alphablox wanted some of that Masters of the Universe lifestyle too. We had intense induction sessions for new employees where we shared our wildest dreams. We all signed the huge wall that was soon so full of signatures we needed a bigger wall. We had parties every Friday afternoon and we invited celebrity guests, played volleyball and drank wine. Everyone in Silicon Valley came to party — especially the folks who wanted to come and work for us. I made some of my best friends in those early days and they’re still my best friends 30 years later.

One morning, I had a dreadful flu and struggled into work. I was just about to go back home when Jeremy came over and said, “I am going to change your day! Michael is at a conference in Arizona and he just talked to Bill Gates. He wants you to fly out and give a demo this afternoon.” We didn’t even have a demo at that time. We didn’t even have a product. But I took my laptop on the plane and started coding, nearly dying of the flu.

The conference was in Scottsdale, Arizona and by invitation only. All the Silicon Valley bigwigs were there — all the famous venture capitalists and the CEOs of Yahoo and Sun and a hundred other tech boom companies — but I carried on coding. I finished my demo with minutes to spare and just before Michael got a phone call saying the demo was cancelled because Bill Gates was busy with something else. I went and sat by the pool with all the venture capitalists’ wives instead.

At Alphablox, we hired some of the strangest characters I have ever met. We hired a bunch of Extropians who were preparing to become post-human. Two young women were part-time strippers. Two young men used to go watch them strip while they ate their lunch. When I interviewed Romana, her resume had a link to her porn site. Maybe 60% of our first 100 employees were what you might call ‘interesting characters’. We even hired Chris.

Everything was magical for a while and we dreamed dreams of the wonderful software we were going to build and we made plans to change the world. It was fun for a couple of years.

I learned a lot at AlphaBlox. I learned that if you put together a team of twenty-something developers who hate each other you can reconstruct Lord of the Flies without the civilising influence of the conch. Version One of the AlphaBlox product taught me that you can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time if you spend vast sums on marketing.

Each product release began with a requirements document that no one read. The requirements document was turned into a technical spec that no one read and then we’d code frantically for a month. No one talked to anyone else and we’d stop coding six weeks before the end of the release so the testers could test and the writers could write the documentation. At least, we were supposed to stop coding — but no one was even close to being finished and the testers were still testing the previous release. As the release got closer, we’d have a daily Bug Court where we’d decide which bugs to fix. Each Bug Court was a madhouse overflowing with angry uproar. Every stupid decision was made under a cloud of hatred. Should we fix the buttons that had mysteriously turned pink? Noooo! Too dangerous!

It was about this time that people started getting fired.

The rowdiest people in Bug Court were soon gone, closely followed by the entire leadership of the engineering team. We software folks were left to our own devices with no management to speak of. With no one to tell us otherwise, we scrapped the old system and built a new one. When we hired a new VP of Engineering, he took a quick look at what we were up to and said “Well, you guys seem to know what you are doing. Let me know if you need anything.”

Before long we were writing great software again. It was all super fun and we built an awesome application that made us lots of money.

Our families became good friends. We had picnics and went camping in the Santa Cruz Mountains and got a cabin at Tahoe. Bobby introduced me to snowboarding at Squaw Valley, taking me down a double black diamond and through the trees on my first weekend. On a different day, one of those trees stabbed me in the forehead, broke my goggles and made me bleed a lot. I got pretty good at snowboarding though and the Little Clown learned to ski.

Alphablox began to do well and we started hiring again. We hired dozens of VPs of Sales and dozens of VPs of Marketing and VPs of Business Development. The character of a company changes when the technical folks are outnumbered by the business folks and we soon stopped building great software. Instead, we built crappy stuff that a VP of Sales had promised to a customer who barely even knew what they wanted. The final joke came when our technical(ish) CEO was fired and was replaced by a Sales CEO to manage all the other VPs of Sales. You can probably guess the punchline.

We got rid of about a third of the staff in the first round of layoffs and another third in the next round. I requested to be laid off in the next round. A few VPs of Sales and Marketing asked me to stay but my mind was made up. I had tears in my eyes as I walked out the door.

Alphablox was acquired by IBM soon after and I sometimes wonder if I would have enjoyed it had I stayed. I would’ve enjoyed the money but I am a start-up kind of guy and was glad to move on.

— 2002 —

I tried starting my own company after Alphablox. Extreme Programming was all the rage and I built a project management tool that captured the mood of XP. I sold a few copies but starting a company in the middle of a recession wasn’t the best of ideas. Eventually, the loneliness drove me mad and had to look for a proper job.

My next startup, Agitar, had a similar story to Alphablox. Most people who work in tech don’t actually do anything technically difficult. It’s mostly just login boxes and connecting to a database. But the technology at Agitar was incredibly advanced.

We won InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year Award and a Duke Award and a Jolt Award and my salary went up and up. But as we started to become successful — and hired some VPs of Sales — the leadership took us in a direction that was pretty stupid and we folded after just a few years.

Practically everyone at Agitar went to work for Google or Apple but I decided I’d had enough of Silicon Valley and went to work in Portland, Oregon instead.