Yo, technology. What is it all about?

Before I became a journalist, I was one of them.

A tech bro.

It was 1999 and I just graduated with a relatively useless degree in Spanish and political science.

I had no idea what I wanted to do.

But I kept reading these stories about 22-year-old millionaires

at some random startup in San Francisco.

It was the height of the first dot-com boom.

It all sounded so easy.

So I moved to the city with a couple of friends of mine

and promptly got an entry-level job at a dot-com.

Phase one complete.

I had visions of living large and very soon, once my

stock options vested. My employer's claim to fame was that it was the world's largest

paper greeting card store, as if the world needed one of those. It had raised millions of dollars

from top venture capitalists and had all the cool startup stuff you might expect.

The headquarters was a big warehouse with rows and rows of racks stuffed with catalog cards.

We played lots of table football.

If you retired, you could take a nap in the beanbag room.

Yeah, we had a beanbag room.

The CTO had a man bun before man buns were a thing.

I wore shorts to work most days.

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