A piece on the state of the Silicon Valley in the Sacramento Bee by Dale Kasler profiles me. The context for the piece is many gubenatorial candidates for tomorrow's election are counting on tax revenues from a revival in the valley to fund the deficit. Which only shows they can't count. Nice picture of my two laptops:
 Ross Mayfield used to run his startup out of an old cannery in San Francisco's dot-com district. Today, he runs a new firm from his home in Palo Alto -- where he keeps an eye on son Erik, 1 1/2 -- and employs a handful of workers similarly situated around the country. Photo: Sacramento Bee/Anne Chadwick Williams |
PALO ALTO -- Ross Mayfield lived and breathed the tech bubble. He was president of a hot telecommunications startup in San Francisco's trendy dot-com district that became worth $1 billion practically overnight and turned him, temporarily, into a multimillionaire
"We would literally wake up every morning, at the dawn of the market, and my wife and I would say, 'Oh, my God, we're worth another million, on paper," Mayfield said.
Then the bubble burst, his company faltered and his paper millions floated away. But he's launched another business, a software firm, with a firm conviction that now "is absolutely the best time to start a company."
So Silicon Valley is roaring back to life, right? Not exactly.
True, unemployment is subsiding and tech stocks are rising. Venture capitalists are opening their wallets again.
But with the economy still sluggish and many tech jobs drifting out of state or overseas, it's likely the recovery will be gradual -- and won't generate the levels of wealth seen during the bubble.
"Everybody will be smaller and a little bit smarter," said Mayfield, 33, who works out of his house in Palo Alto. "A lot of companies are going to take longer to grow. We're back to a more normal pace."...
...Ross Mayfield understands adrenaline. As president of RateXchange Inc., which traded telecommunications bandwidth, he was at the center of the dot-com universe, based in a former fish cannery in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood.
Within two years, RateXchange held a $1 billion market value (stock price times the number of shares). Mayfield's stock was worth $50 million. [correction: fifteen]
Then the telecom market collapsed. RateXchange fell on hard times and turned itself into an investment bank. Mayfield's stock -- he still owns it -- became worth "less than 50 grand" and he left.
After stints at two other companies, Mayfield launched Socialtext Inc., a maker of software that lets employees share data and collaborate on projects via an easy-to-use, in-house Web site. Socialtext has seven employees around the country, working out of their homes.
An office may be opened soon, but for now, Mayfield speaks proudly of SocialText's "humbler origins" and its bright future. It's harder to raise money these days, but Mayfield thinks the slump has simply cleared the field for true businessmen like him.
"The people who just showed up for the boom and left -- good riddance," he said. "The real entrepreneurs are still here."
