Conspicuous consumption – the idiotic kind, not the richly deserved fruits of success – may be the single most enduring image of the original dot-com boom and bust. Not only was recklessly lavish spending a hallmark of the time, once the bubble burst it was also grist for late-night comics and all the I-told-you-so’s.
So it is with some relief that a technology industry watcher reads the story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle that paints a picture of Yankee parsimony applied to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Here’s a bite from that story to illustrate exactly how much things have changed:
With no venture capital funding, Jay Borenstein and his fellow founders of Palo Alto’s Integration Appliance Inc. knew they would have to stretch every dollar.
So they came up with a “bring your own chair” hiring policy. New employees might have developed poor posture, but they also learned the company’s Spartan mind-set.
“It was kind of a litmus test for people who were thinking about joining us,” said Borenstein, Integration Appliance’s CEO.
Gone are the Herman Miller Aeron desk chairs and the other technocrat excesses of the late 1990s when dot-coms burned through money and hype, throwing lavish launch parties, staffing up quickly and spending millions on Super Bowl ads.
Emerging in their stead is a post-crash generation of stingy startups using ingenuity to minimize the cost of turning raw ideas into viable businesses.
No Super Bowl ads? Is nothing sacred?
Heck, one company exec even put the kibosh on buying his troops T-shirts.
The steady-as-she-goes ethos described in this story does engender a sense of confidence in the current crop of Internet entrepreneurs – provided it’s as widespread as the reporting implies. But it doesn’t sound anywhere near as much fun as the good old/bad old days.
Foosball is still OK, right?
