Venture Crapital

Back in 1999 I was walking around in a mental fog because I was coming off of a multi-year bender and had recently stopped drinking, smoking and,uh, other related recreational vices. At the time I was worried I was going to die from boredom (turned out not to be the case at all. My life has been more exciting and fulfilling since I cleaned up than I ever could have imagined, but that's another story...)

So I decided to start daytrading. I took out a $1,000 cash advance on my VISA card and opened an E-trade account. By March 2000, it was worth over $9,000 and I thought Warren Buffet was a pussy. I keep that E-Trade account open to this day as a reminder. It's worth $200 now.

Anyway, at the time I remember walking around the warehouse district where my office was thinking about "the new economy". I just couldn't wrap my head around it. A lot of the companies trading on the stock market weren't making any money. A lot of the start-ups getting funded had no prospects of revenues. "Aha" I thought. "I guess what it's about now, is the stock price and investment flow". Companies didn't make money by selling stuff at a profit, I realized, they made money by raising it in the capital markets!

It was one of the many moments I stood on the precipice of a major epiphany, had I thought it through properly I probably could have done well, but once again, I missed the point. My mind couldn't make the critical leap to where it needed to get in order to profit handsomely ("Aha! We're in the middle of a bubble! START SHORTING STUFF") and knuckled under to the flawed, murky newspeak "I guess that's how things work now. This is a new paradigm for wealth building. The old rules don't apply at this new, permanently high plateau of the New Economy", and I went along with it. Silly me.

Well lightning does strike twice. Here we are and the DOW is reaching new highs daily while insider selling outpaced insider buying 55 to 1 last month (this ratio has been higher than 30 to 1 for over two years). The new Kook-aid (that was a typo for Kool-aid but I think I'll leave it), is "Web 2.0".