| August 20, 2001 | Start-up and Go |
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You never know the true meaning of fear until you receive a fat packet from the IRS with your name on it. Last week the IRS sent me a letter saying how I owe over $4,000 in back taxes on my 1999 earnings (payable immediately). After freaking out and feeling guilty and trying to decipher why they were accusing me of lying on my taxes, I figured out it was due to an error my (also) now-gone start-up company WildWeb.com made in its payroll. In its defense, WildWeb was owned by about three different parent companies during the course of the 1999 calendar year and had about as many different names and URLs including, "Wild, Wild Web" (the now defunct TV show), Getwild.com, and One Zero Media. Two of the parent companies reported my earned income to the IRS in duplicate W-2's, so it looks like I made a humongous amount of money that year. An amount of money that a 25-year-old whose job title was writer and then editor should NEVER have been earning. But then again, now that I know how much these start-up companies were spending on our Aeron chairs... And now I hafta somehow prove that this company that no longer exists made a mistake with its payroll. I guess this is yet another negative thing about a past history filled almost completely by working at companies that no longer exist.
posted by Jess Barron @ 12:01 AM 
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| September 13, 2000 | Dour Day for Scour |
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The evening I returned from Burning Man (I arrived in Los Angeles at 11:30 PM after unpacking my campmates' trucks in Sacramento and then driving for 7 or so hours), I had a full tape of messages on my answering machine. Among them was a message from my boss, Lawrence. He said, "Jess, it's really important that you call me. I have some news, and it isn't good. You can call me at any time." Well, I thought to myself, they obviously layed off the web production department, and my friends Selena, John, Steve, Lawrence, Arlene, Tim, and Michele and I no longer have jobs. Before I allowed myself to get too upset, I decided to call Lawrence. It was around midnight, but he said it was all right to call, so I did. As it turned out, Scour had not only layed off the production department, they had layed off *everyone*. Engineering team, business development, ad sales, everyone. Only the 12 founders will be staying onboard to try to keep the company afloat through the lawsuit over peer-to-peer file-sharing. Apparently, some big investors they were expecting to receive funding from, pulled out due to the lawsuit. (I guess they didn't want to invest millions of their dollars in a company that might be shut down in the near future due to a federal ruling. Go figure.) So, on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, Scour's founders realized that they had completely run out of money and needed to let everyone go. I had missed the emotional "suprise" company meeting on Friday afternoon where everyone learned that they were being let go with only one week's severance pay because I was out braving the dust storms at Burning Man. The weird thing is, I didn't freak out too much about hearing this. I suppose I'm getting used to my start-up jobs just disappearing overnight without much warning. CollegeBeat went under in the fall of 1998. WildWeb went under in the fall of 1999. So, I guess I'm just embracing the fly-by-night "anything can happen" mentality. Labels: scour, selena, startup, web, wildweb posted by Jess Barron @ 10:23 PM
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| February 23, 2000 | The "C" Word |
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Yesterday evening when I returned home from my start-up job (I'm a Product Manager for Scour) at (the not unusual time of) 10pm, Jeff began lamenting the changes he has seen in the web over the past few years. He ranted and raved against consumerism and e-commerce and talked about how the Web has moved away from what it was initially all about -- a community of diverse personal expression, with all of its clumsiness, wackiness and arcane beauty. Strangely, despite the fact that I have had a personal website since 1995, when I was a senior at Vassar and built a \personal site called "The Dungeon" with my close friend Mindy who shared and encouraged my technological obsessions, I played devil's advocate with Jeff and argued for at least an hour with him -- asking why e-commerce was *so* bad. After all, e-commerce (and the future promise of e-commerce) is what allowed and continues to allow me and him to fall into lucrative and somewhat creative web jobs. We argued passionately for at least an hour about whether content and commerce can mix without corrupting the content. And both of our arguments contained numerous contradictions. He raged against consumerism ("Fight Club" style), but admitted that he loves IKEA. I allowed that there are some huge media conglomerates controlling what gets said/written about movies, books, and politics, but then added my purposely inflammatory closing remark, "We were born to sell out." Sure, I get pissed that I never have time to update my personal website because I'm burnt out on the web after enduring 50-plus hours of eyestrain per week at my day job. There are only so many hours per day a person can spend in front of a computer monitor with hands and fingers making tiny movements on mouses and keyboards without suffering from eyestrain or repetitive stress injury as longtime web diarist Justin Hall does. And I have bills to pay. A whole lotta bills. Ever since my first job working as a copywriter at Monster.com I have always heard managers and higher-ups proclaiming that "Content is king" while asking their creative teams to come up with some infotainment and advertorials. So, as my annoyance with my own laziness (or exhaustion?) and apathy (or web burn-out?) was reaching a melt-down point --(would I ever give my personal website a much-needed overhaul -- fix links, change outdated information, etc?), I noticed an article this morning on Wired, called "The Web The Way It Was" which talked about something which I had noticed for the first time last summer when I noticed that someone with a blog had linked to my website. Perhaps Blogger or one of these easily-updated sprawling blogging tools was just the solution I needed to get myself writing in my web journal on a regular basis. Labels: jeff, scour, startup, web posted by Jess Barron @ 2:18 PM
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