JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

This week The Seattle Times has run a series describing Dot-con job: How InfoSpace took its investors for a ride

At its peak, InfoSpace was the Northwest’s biggest Internet business, worth more than $31 billion. Jain, a man obsessed with being more successful than Bill Gates, was himself worth $8 billion. He bought a palatial waterfront home in Medina down the street from his idol and another nearby on Mercer Island, along with two yachts and a piece of the Seattle SuperSonics.

What Paul Allen, Bev Hess and hundreds of other shareholders didn’t know was this: InfoSpace’s success was an illusion, created by lies and deception.

Sunday morning, after I read the Seattle Times article, through Euan Semple I discovered this insight, excerpted calling all spiritual nomads by amba

In the affluent, manic late ‘60s and late ‘90s, we really believed we had the power to reinvent ourselves. New ideas, new freedoms, or new technologies were going to bring forth the new, improved human at last. Then we woke up from that dream on recession’s morning after and found ourselves stuck with the same old, same old: greed, lust, wrath, envy, pride, gluttony and sloth.

How could I forget the frenzy: the years Ted and I survived in Silicon Valley amidst the highways and hype, the excitement and enticements, the dreams and delusions. I know that there are many business and technology lessons to be learned from the dot com bust. However, I suspect the ultimate lessons are what we learned about ourselves.