|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
![](\"../images/spacer.gif\"){kind=spacer}
![](\"../images/top3.gif\")
![](\"../images/top4.gif\")
![](\"../images/top5.gif\")
![](\"../images/top6a.gif\")
![](\"../images/artsa.gif\")
![](\"../images/top8a.gif\")
|
|
|
|
|
Also this issue: Reflections High School Reunion Bill T. Jones Sounds Like Progress My Lord, What a Morning |
|
|
|
|
![](\"../images/teal.gif\") |
April 11-17, 2002
art
![\"life](\"art6-1.jpg\") life is sweet: Kaplan, enjoying a well-earned smoke. |
ARCHIVES .
April 11-17, 2002 art Company Man
During the dot-com boom, everyone could be an executive -- or at least sit next to one. Offices that had been designed as cubicle farms were redesigned into “open plan” spaces, where customer-service reps could eavesdrop on the CFO while getting lumbar support from an $800 Aeron chair. Launch parties allowed every employee to imbibe top-shelf liquor and sample hors d’oeuvres not found in any frozen-food aisle. Never mind that the site being feted wouldn’t actually go live until six months later. But when venture capitalists started to take their money and go home, the walls in offices started to go up, and the volume of whispering began to rise at the same rate. That top-shelf liquor? It ran dry. And the companies began to fall, one by one. There are some official stories of this humbling time in bookstores. You can find them in the business section, located where copies of Business @ the Speed of Thought would have been a couple of years back. These books all come from the point of view of the formerly blue-shirted, Palm V'd executives -- the ValueAmerica VP who wrote dot.bomb, the theglobe.com co-founder who penned the ponderously titled A Very Public Offering -- who led these companies into the land of free shipping and unprofitability. Documentaries like Startup.com (2001) and e-Dreams (2001) watched businesses crumble from behind the executive desk. Yet the voices of dot-com workers -- who, when they weren't getting their asses and bank accounts massaged by their Aerons, had to sift through incoherent memos describing inchoate business plans, deal with "team building" in the form of cultlike rallies, and cost clients tens of thousands of dollars per project while seeing only a fraction of that -- are scarce in the stores. Philip Kaplan, the 25-year-old founder of FuckedCompany.com, has compiled F'd Companies (Simon & Schuster), a greatest hits of the dot-com flameout. The directory of now-defunct URLs, from Flooz.com to Pets.com, is not literary genius in the least -- "My book is good bathroom reading, that's what I'm going for," says Kaplan -- but it probably paints the most accurate picture of the tuliplike mania that hit the world as soon as the word "e-commerce" was first uttered. The humor derived from his book's pages and the sometimes unbelievable tales of these dot-coms is, to Kaplan, not really all that funny. "I don't really enjoy watching any companies fall apart. That's sort of a misconception," says Kaplan from his office in New York. "The point of my site is to protect the employee, and attack the crooked employer. If there's anyone who's not happy when people get laid off, it's me." FuckedCompany began its life in May 2000. At the time, Kaplan, a programmer who currently runs the interactive consulting firm PK Interactive, had just left his position at Think New Ideas, a web shop founded by ex-MTV VJ Adam Curry. The site started off as a "dot-com deadpool," where laid-off workers and passersby could bet on which companies were going to fall victim to the late '90s bubble popping. (Since the site launched, it's gained sister-site Luckedcompany.com, which tracks memorable events in companies' lives, most of which revolve around the point when they start charging for services.) Almost as soon as the site launched, tips on companies that were about to go under flowed in like water. Kaplan's often-sardonic perspective on the melee was refreshingly removed from CNBC's churn of hyped-up analysts and CEOs on road-show tours, which made the site a hit among disgruntled cube jockeys. "I'm really more of a programmer," claims Kaplan. "I'm just that guy who works in the cubicle. I'm not a Wall Street analyst, I'm not a major CEO of some big company. That perspective is why I started the site -- all these people were buying into all this crap." And it's that perspective that's been sorely lacking from most of the discourse since the dot-com fallout began. The perception of dot-com workers, particularly in the post-layoff world, has been that they're spoiled children who got what they deserved. Which shouldn't be surprising: Thedot-commers who soaked up the most ink in chronicles of the "New New Things" like Wired, Fast Company and the local paper's business pages were those very same executives who thought that charging for shipping on a 10-pound bag of dog food would shackle them to the "old economy." Kaplan is quick to point out -- and the traffic on his message boards, once you sift through the trolling, would back this up -- that many people went into this industry simply because they were excited that people were willing to give them money to deal with topics they cared about. "[BBQ.com] was a barbecue portal, with like $2 million and 12 employees. I was in San Francisco and this guy came up to me and said, ŒYou know, I'm one of the founders of BBQ.com,'" Kaplan recalls. Kaplan had been rough on the company on his site, but the San Franciscan was a big fan, so all was well. "I said, ŒYou know, now that we're just talking about it, what were you thinking? How did you think that this was going to stay in business? I mean, you didn't even sell anything -- you had articles about barbecue and recipes. How did you think you were going to make two million dollars on this? And he said, ŒTo be honest, I don't know. All I know is that I really love barbecue, and I thought the coolest job in the world would be to run a magazine about barbecuing.' "I guess what you have to question," says Kaplan, "is the people who gave him money to do that." 
ADVERTISEMENT
| ||||||||||||||||||||
