If You Can Make It in Silicon Valley, You Can Make It . . . in Silicon Valley Again

New York Times ^ | June 5, 2005 | GARY RIVLIN

[nickcarraway]

One evening this spring, Marc Andreessen, the first outsize icon of the Internet era, caught a glimpse of his former life while mingling at the San Francisco launch party for Current, Al Gore's new 24-hour cable station. In 1994, when Andreessen was only 22, he and a high-tech veteran named Jim Clark created the Internet-browser company Netscape Communications. Two years later, there he was on the cover of Time, sitting barefoot on a golden throne, dressed in jeans and a rumpled black polo. The magazine cast him as the king of the ''golden geeks,'' a group that popularized the formerly novel notion of surfing the Web and, not incidentally, helped create a vision of Silicon Valley as a glittering gold field where the young, bright and vigorous could stake a claim and make themselves unimaginably wealthy before they even had the time to put up posters in their barely furnished apartments.

The baby fat has melted from the face of Andreessen; now 33, he is tall and almost slim, with short hair, and he dresses more like a grown-up (crisp white dress shirt, brass-buttoned black blazer). America Online bought Netscape for $4 billion in stock in 1998, and Andreessen left to start a company called Loudcloud, which went public in 2001; he serves as its chairman (the company was renamed Opsware in 2002). Several years back, Fortune pegged Andreessen's net worth at roughly $500 million, but with a wink and a playful dance of his eyebrows he implies that he's worth much more than that. Still, he continues to fill up notebooks with ideas and sketched-out business plans for new companies. Among the gossipy cognoscenti, it's a poorly kept secret that in recent months Andreessen has been occupied starting a new Internet company.

[nickcarraway]

Gary Rivlin covers Silicon Valley for The New York Times. He is the author of ''The Plot to Get Bill Gates.''

[astounded]

..."they still routinely work 60 to 70 hours a week -- except those who sheepishly confess to working 80."

These individuals do not "work" in the sense most people understand. Rather, they sit around in meetings, talk on the telephone, drink coffee, work out, and go to cocktail parties to "network". Mostly, they were - and likely still are - social misfits like Dilbert for whom their "workplace" is their life. That's all the more evident in their choice of politicians - democrats like clinton and gore - a more repulsive bunch would be tough to identify.

The notion of a horde of 2- and 3-year olds in the Valley is scary - political leftists in the making, outrageously wealthy limousine liberals, but clothed in that all-too-Hillary phony social concern.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"These individuals do not "work" in the sense most people understand. Rather, they sit around in meetings, talk on the telephone, drink coffee, work out, and go to cocktail parties to "network". Mostly, they were - and likely still are - social misfits like Dilbert for whom their "workplace" is their life."

You are incredibly, unbelievably, staggeringly wrong.

[Salgak]

You've obviously NEVER crunched a bit in your life. . . we routinely worked 60+ hour weeks in a small software firm I used to work at, and release weeks (about every 6 weeks) we'd be in 80+ hours a week to get the product out and working on time. . .

Maybe the marketeers and "biz dev" types worked that way, but not the line techies. . .

[astounded]

"Maybe the marketeers and "biz dev" types worked that way, but not the line techies. . ."

I was referring to the "biz dev" types - the money folks. Sure, programmers may make good money, and get rich on stock options, but you are not at the top of the hierarchy that the article was lauding. Sorry if I offended, and no, I am not a cruncher, I am a scientist...

[Utilizer]

Wrong. I was one of those individuals, and I WORKED. Almost killed Myself with it, and seventy hours per week was just a starting point -I averaged ninety to over one hundred hours at the peak of My career, and I will swear that on the Good Book itself.

[Utilizer]

Nope, no offence taken here. As a scientist you probably would not understand, but I started as an Entry Level Electronics Technician and finished as a Production / R&D Engineer. Put it this way; if I did not develop and ship product, NOBODY got paid -including the Boss / CEO. And I reported directly to him. Talk about STRESS.

[clamper1797]

they still routinely work 60 to 70 hours a week -- except those who sheepishly confess to working 80

Then they are NOT working smart ... work to much OT and you spend more time fixing mistakes than getting the project done