• by Michael Kubin , November 22, 2000

By Michael Kubin, Co-CEO, Leading Web Advertisers

This New Yorker spent a few days out West, in San Francisco and San Jose, looking first hand at the carnage that remains of the dot-com industry. The contrast is difficult to absorb: only eight months ago the media were replete with stories about the dip-resistant New Economy and its Web megazillionaires.

Otherwise sane, rational people were leaving perfectly good jobs in old-line companies for the opportunity to turn paper money-stock options-into great wealth in Web-related businesses. Black humor abounds: "I gave up my job to work at a dot-com and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

The fall has come to Silicon Valley in so many other ways:

* Today IBM looks to win back some of its deserters, or perhaps just wants to thumb its nose at them, via this billboard on route 101: "Work for IBM and make real money."

* The big joke at Comdex is this: What are the new definitions of b-to-b and b-to-c? Back to banking and back to consulting.

* Interestingly, the waves of layoffs seem not to have affected dot-com salespeople, who are still in great demand. One company I visited, whose stock has dropped from $14 to under a dollar, has lost a fifth of its work force but continues to aggressively seek salespeople. I wonder: just what do they think they're going to be selling?

* From a friend who runs a struggling Web-based company: "It used to be prestigious to say you're with a dot-com. Now it's embarrassing."

* From a venture capitalist: "There weren't many people who thought it would be this bad. And there are still dead bodies that haven't floated to the surface." One VC was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying "We've got to learn when to shoot our ponies." Apparently crisis brings out the poet in venture capitalists.

* There are a few patches of sunshine, but even they are not bragging about their relative success. It was fun to celebrate when everyone was winning; today, with only a few winners around, it's no longer cool.

* But perhaps the clearest sign that the world has changed happens during the flight back East. Sitting next to me is a woman who spends most of the flight poring over spreadsheets, pecking away at her laptop, and otherwise giving her company their money's worth. I ask what she does for a living; she tells me she's head of sales for a prominent dot-com. I mean a really prominent dot-com. What's so unusual about this? We're flying coach.

If you've made it all the way down here, it's time for a change of subject. Today is the 37th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination. If you would like to experience magnificent speechwriting, if you would like to be inspired, take ten minutes to read JFK's inaugural address at http://users.southeast.net/~cheryl/speech.html. It remains uncannily pertinent, so much so that I carry it in my pda.

- Michael Kubin is co-CEO of New York-based Leading Web Advertisers (LWA), a comprehensive Web advertisement monit