Clue three.

About a week after we launched, I was taken to an early-morning meeting at the still-tiny headquarters of Yahoo!. (Again, as window-dressing. Somehow I was vital to BigBook’s legitimacy.) They wanted to talk about ways we could work together. The subtext: acquisition. The talks continued for a few weeks, and got very heated. Their final offer? Twenty million dollars of Yahoo! stock (worth about half a billion today). Our beloved founder turned them down – and managed to so piss off Yahoo!’s management team they made it a top priority to drive us out of business. After all, we had nothing they couldn’t duplicate – given enough time and money. And Yahoo! had both. Our founder didn’t care – he didn’t want to be a subsidiary of a giant – he wanted to be a giant himself, right out of the gate.

We argued with him, we pleaded. It’s a good offer. We’ll all make some money. Nothing to what we’ll make on our own, he replied. We’ll be as big as Yahoo! You’ll see.

Shortly thereafter I got tired of speaking to a brick wall and quit. In fact, there’s a magazine cover photo of my mug, snapped about five minutes after I sent the "take this job and shove it" email. And there’s this curious smile on my face, almost a smirk. Because I knew.

I’ve heard that this not-quite-so-beloved CEO ran through more than $30 million of other people’s money, good after bad, until he was finally forced to sell the company to one of those Baby Bells he’d thought he’d drive from the business. I have to admit that I wasn’t sorry when I heard the news; when it’s not yours, the revenges of karma can taste very sweet.

So imagine my surprise when I heard – just a year later – that he’d started another company, that someone else was willing to stake him another thirty million dollars. Perhaps he’d learned to listen. Perhaps failure had tempered his arrogance. Or, perhaps, no one in the dot-com culture is quite in their right mind.

When you have such wholly American success stories as Marc Andreesen plastered across the pages of the business section, or Jeff Bezos anointed as Time’s Man of the Year, when you have Harvard and Stanford MBAs spurning high-paying jobs at the Big Five for an equity stake in a not-yet-and-may-never-be profitable dream, you have to step back and wonder: what is going on here? And have we seen it before?

We have.

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