Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

So what went wrong? Well, here’s the condensed version. It’s all to do with investor confidence. Hundreds of dot-com start-ups around the world joined the stock markets. Most weren’t turning a profit and had pitiful sales levels. But what they did have was the distinct whiff of revolutionary technology. Investors were desperate to get in on the ground floor, and banks would offer greenhorn companies huge borrowing levels (debt to you and me) to get them on their way. Share prices skyrocketed as investors ignored profits (there still weren’t any) and instead used measurements such as website hits to measure success. “Not for the first time, Douglas Coupland was ahead of the game.” Then, in 2000, there were some high-profile casualties. In the U.K., online clothing retailer Boo.com was forced to shut down just six months after it was launched. The £80 million of funding with which Boo.com had started was the largest ever in Europe for a retail internet venture, but it quickly ran out. Consumers shunned Boo’s digital shopping experience with its epileptic array of pop-ups and unfathomable purchasing processes. Another sufferer was online travel site Lastminute.com. On the day it floated onto the stock exchange in March 2000 its shares soared from 380p to 550p. Young cofounders Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman became irresistible City pinups. However, although Lastminute.com has survived, by October 2001 its shares were worth less than 20p. It is 1993 in Microserfs when a ve...

venture capitalist tells a deflated Ethan: “There’s nothing the world wants as little as a new technology company. If you give a company $2 million, they’ll spend it all and never ship a profitable product.” Not for the first time, Douglas Coupland was ahead of the game, and it took another seven years for real-world investors to come to the same conclusion. By the end of 2000 the dream was over. Investors who had started getting impatient about their lack of financial return from the Internet now began stampeding toward the exit signs. Technology share prices collapsed, and so did the prospects of thousands of dot-com employees who had accepted equity packages in the companies they worked for. The geek’s beloved desktop WinQuote window, for so many years a kaleidoscope of escalating share prices, now looked out onto a vista of tumbling numbers and corporate bloodshed. Venture capital firms, who two years before couldn’t get enough of projects like Oop!, now couldn’t run away fast enough from hexed technology start-ups.