The biggest mistake I made was assuming that somebody else had his hands on the wheel.


By the time I even got around to visiting VerticalNet's web site, the stock had already gone from like 150 to 12. But I'm thinking how is this stock not worth zero? What does somebody know that I don't? I was shocked, the emperor had NO clothes.


Same thing with, like JWEB and Net-Zero. Steve Jurveston thought they were great business ideas. But I used these services, and it was pretty plain to me as a customer that they were getting broker by the day at an alarming rate, and scaling back their ambitions even at the same time as putting on a good face for the public.


You can feel it, as a customer, when each additional customer is costing a business money, when they're forced to add customers to keep Wall St. happy, but at the same time they're trying to minimize their per-customer loss so they can eat. It's like Knight Trading was already saying how they were considering charging to execute Nasdaq orders - saying out loud they couldn't afford your business, wanted less of it - and yet people were still paying over 20 for NITE.


I also used to do temp work in Silicon Valley in the early 90's. I debugged microncontrollers at C-Cube, so I knew how many orders and interest they were getting for chip-sets for the Asian DVD market. The analysts heard about it a few weeks later, and the stock went from, like, 20 to 40.


I separated bad die from the RayChem substrate in the Intel prototype-tooling lab, so I got the runs straight from the new Texas plant, and "knew" the yields from their latest sub-micron process probably better than any single of the other 5 billion people on Earth.


I built cardboard boxes at the 3COM shipping plant right before the hey-day and washout (remember Ascend and Cascade?) and it seemed pretty clear capacity was lagging demand in both directions. I worked at Sun, Raychem, interviewed for logistics for AMD's new plant, I coordinated the major hub for the purchase and sale of used/refurbished Hewlett test equipment in the Valley, I sold the new Dot-Coms all the free juice and snacks for their break rooms which gave me a perfect index of the rise and fall of throwaway money - as well as of the day-to-day orders of Kozmo, WebVan, etc. - oh, I remember a good one, this loser VP from Oracle, Umang Gupta (GPTA?), started his own database company, and there was no doubt in my mind the place was doomed from the first day I worked there.


So the point is not that I had the sense to make a billion dollars while temping for $16.00/hr. The point is that people are dumb, and the truth can stare them right in the face and yet nobody sees it.


leroy