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improved?"
    He liked my answers well enough to call me in for face-to-face questioning that very afternoon. A large Plexiglas cow stood patiently in Yahoo's lobby, surrounded by big overstuffed purple furniture that looked as if it had been appropriated from
Pee-wee's Playhouse.
A t-shirted drone showed me to a windowless white room, where for the next three hours a series of marketing staffers jabbed at me with pointed questions. I kept my energy high and my answers short as my interrogators flitted from topic to topic and then flew off to more important meetings.
    When it was over, Yahoo offered me a low-level position, a salary I couldn't live on, and the prestige of a purple badge. I politely declined, shook hands, and left. I was way too late for Yahoo.
    I didn't give up.
    I had been swept away by tales of a new legion of dot-com heroes and had happily contributed fables to the frenzy. Our ads for the
Mercury News
online service asked, "Why wait 'til you're twenty-seven to make your first million?" and urged executives to "Find out when your mailroom guy is going public." I embraced the hype. At night I murmured into my pillow that we needed to "win mind share" and "go big fast."
    The dot-com energy in the Valley vibrated at a frequency visible everywhere, overwhelming and electrifying and so intoxicating that whole cities became drunk on it. High-tech gold was all around us; you could feel the weight of it displacing rationality. Houses sold overnight for a million dollars above the asking price, paid in cash. Lamborghinis and Ferraris zipped past the Beamers and Benzes cruising Highway 280. Elvis Costello jammed at company parties and private fireworks displays lit up backyard barbeques.
    I invested my minimal savings in companies I read about in
Red Herring
and the
Industry Standard:
JDS Uniphase and NetGravity and DoubleClick. I watched their value soar and became convinced I was a keen analyst of the burgeoning Internet economy. Relatives turned to me for stock tips and I began pontificating on the future of XML and push media as if I actually knew what I was talking about.
    The millennium was ending and maybe civilization too. Y2K was almost here. A software bug would cause computer clocks to fail, and planes would fall from the sky. The power grid would shut down and cities go dark. Better day trade while the lights were still on.
    The next big thing was out there, lurking in a renovated warehouse in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch or hanging around in a rented one-room office, sharing utilities and a blackened Mr. Coffee machine with other aspiring successes. Brilliant schemes were cooking up like idea popcorn. Most died quietly; half-baked, warmed over, unpalatable. But occasionally one would explode into a wild success and the Valley would come running, throwing business cards and venture capital at the new marvel of fluff and air.
    I talked to anyone who had a business plan with "Internet" scrawled in crayon across the top and enough backing to cover my salary for a month, from iTix and Bits2Go to AllBusiness and NexTag. I talked with Sinanet though every word on their site was in Chinese. I begged for an interview at InsWeb, a company offering insurance over the Internet, because somehow it didn't sound lame to say "I sell auto coverage" if you could add the magic word "online."
    I lowered my standards and flung out another dozen résumés in hopes of locating a landing place, even aiming one at the little startup that had been part of our Siliconvalley.com store—what was it called? Oh yeah, "Google." It was likely a waste of buff-colored stationery and a thirty-three-cent stamp, because I was looking for the next big thing and I was pretty sure they weren't it. Search was so 1997.
    Still, since I'd sent Google a résumé, I figured I should give their product a try. I went to their site and entered the name of a girl I'd known in high school but hadn't heard from in twenty years. Even AltaVista, which I