Longtime readers know my timeline by now. I graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in 1996, went to sea for two years, and then settled in the San Francisco Bay Area to work on the Coast Guard Pacific Area staff and go to grad school.
I was at the Academy from 1992-1996, and totally cut off from the outside world, and then at sea from 1996-1998, and totally cut off from the outside world. So when I rotated back to society in 1998, I wasn't really up on current events. The last I heard, it was 1991 and we were having a great, big recession. What had happened? Everyone was happy all of a sudden.
San Francisco was a pretty magical place back then. First of all, it was a lot cleaner. The Tenderloin has always been a mess, and Market Street has always been a bit gritty, but it was better then than it is now. I never spent any time in Silicon Valley proper, but I went to business school at the University of San Francisco up at Lone Mountain, one of the most beautiful neighborhoods I have ever seen.
They had an entrepreneurship track in the MBA program, which I skipped. I was a finance major, and I was going to work on Wall Street.
Everyone else thought that was weird. Why would you go to the University of San Francisco if you are going to work on Wall Street? All my classmates were going to work in technology in some capacity.
So, my first-ever class at USF was financial accounting, and I remember the professor saying something about “venture capital.” I followed her into the elevator and asked…
“What's venture capital?”
I was about as unsophisticated as you could possibly get, and I was plopped in the middle of one of the greatest stock market bubbles in recorded history. It took me a while to realize that was unusual.
I drove in and out of the city every day, and what I started to notice was that all the billboards were for internet companies. I remember a big one for WebEx right before I went over the Bay Bridge. I remember going to the Oakland Coliseum to see the A's and seeing advertisements for Yahoo! and such.
