(My) Early Internet Days

This place is littered with the evidence of how I've spent my workdays since late in the summer of 1995. That's when the very first phone list for a new project called Salon Magazine contained only 8 names, 3 of us being Davids.



By the very end of that year, I was working at HotWired. Over the next two years, we grew so rapidly taht we expanded right out of our large warehouse space into an even larger one down Third Street.



By mid-1996 Louis Rossetto had asked me to manage the entire content operations of what would eventuallly be called Wired Digital.



By spring 1998 I was back at Salon. In 1999, I opened a Washington office for the company, just as it went public. We dropped the "magazine" part of our name and secured the salon.com url.



By mid-2000.I was back in Silicon Valley, now with Excite@Home. Soon afterward, came the crash of the first Internet boom.



For a while I didn't have a job, but I did have plenty of T-shirts, hats, mugs and old mailing lists, plus the prospectuses of companies that tried but failed to go public, or went public only to be delisted, or went public and grew huge only to collapse into utter bankruptcy.

No wonder that executive recruiter told me, "David, if you're not out there on the edge somewhere, you're taking up too much room." If you ever catch me complaining about any of this, please ask me why once again I have chosen to work at a startup, quite happily now, thank you...

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