I remember the last time I flew through Denver. It was in late November 2000, a beautiful fall in San Diego. I was on a business trip for Code Ventures with Harry and Nicci.
We were headed to a customer's site in Broomfield, Colorado. Dave was a day trader. Code Ventures was building day trading software for his company.
Harry used to tell us about the California Gold Rush. He would ask, "who really got rich? The miners? Or the people selling shovels?" The Levi Strauss' of the world.
That was going to be us. We would build a better shovel and sell it to the sucker day traders making money off the sucker little guy. Nevermind what Dave was shoveling Harry. We were all going to be rich.
Dave's office was in a small building in a boring Denver suburb. They had a painting on the wall of a bull and a bear fighting. The bear was intimidated, backing off. I wonder if that painting is still there. Maybe the bear is winning now. Like those desk lamps that change color with the mood of the market.
Dave was an aggressive guy. You could tell he was used to getting his way. So was Harry, though, so we all worried when they got together. Nobody wanted to see a reenactment of the Mountain Dew commercial with the dumb guy and a deer butting heads. Who would play the deer?
Nicci and I setup the testing environment while Harry tried to entertain Dave and stay out of the way. We had a lot of work to do and it came down to the last day. We tackled a few big challenges, including the infamous "router on a stick" that nobody understood. But we got it done. And Harry managed to not piss off the customer too much.
That evening we had dinner at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant at the airport and fled back to SD. I never even had a chance to use my snowboard at Vail.
The next week Dave ended his contract with Code Ventures. He claimed that we had broken the contract and were not progressing fast enough. In arbitration CV lost all of their options in his company. I heard later that he sold the incomplete software to Terra Nova and bought a ranch and a jet with the proceeds. I wonder if Terra Nova ever did anything with that software.
I was out of a job on December 1st. I was happy of course, because I could take the month off. The job market would stay hot for a few more months. But I have yet to find a workplace quite like Code Ventures.