The black bag

I was given this Kenneth Cole black bag at the official IPO party for PSINet (traded as PSIX) by the investment banker who led the IPO. I used to keep my computer and various corporate stuff in this bag as I travelled around, it was and is a great bag. More bag then I would have bought myself and eventually more bag that I needed for my Panasonic ToughBook being rained on in the mud.

In some ways it is one of the last vestiges of a former corporate life. It was in the bottom of my closet and I gave it to my son to carry his books in to and from school (sans strap). It kind of has a renewed lease on life.

The bag reminds me of temptation, the temptation of ego which is one of my weaknesses, it takes me back to some decisions I made during the hey days of the 90's and the Internet bubble, something that is in a bit of a comeback right now. Being in the center of the Internet run up, a CTO/COO and doing an IPO was pretty much a corporate person's dream. It was great but it wasn't quite my dream.

I was just trying to build a better mouse trap, the rest of it was I guess just icing.

However the mouse trip issue alone was enough to destroy oneself through ego.
Years before I had set some trigger points for myself to power down. One of them for me was the IPO itself, I decided not to participate in this 1995 IPO, not to go to the investment banker's trading floor etc. I stayed home and played with Derek and didn't even goto work. My partner was a little surprised, but he had gotten used to my out of the box actions over 10 years of partnering, be called me from the trading floor to give me the news.

But I knew that I had to do one thing this day, I called up the 20 some people who had worked for the previous 5-10 years who were employees 3-25 and invited them to my favorite spot, the Ice House Cafe in Herndon Virginia at five 5pm. 5PM? They had never left work at 5PM before, but this was an important day for Mark Fedor, Wengyik Yeong, Mitch Levinn, Kimberly Brown, my dad, and my brother and others.

The "Ice House" had a private back bar which I rented, and for a couple of hours bought appetizers, beer, and their speciality - raw oysters. The owner would show up about 6pm with two buckets of ice filled with these bad boys everyday from his trip to the Bay, they were fresh and they were good.

And for the first time in 10 years we talked about money, not the whole time, but a bit. In 10 years I had never talked to these people about money, I didn't want to use money as the motivator it became for the rest of the Internet, and certainly as the 90's progressed. I wanted them to build the mouse trap.

Maybe this was a trade of Hubris for Greed, but I don't think so, because I remember the fear more than any hubris in building that mouse trap.