What Would You Do?

Back in 2000, about the time the dotcom bubble was cresting, I was working for a web development shop in Sacramento. I had a stressful and confusing job, but I had a decent paycheck and a fancy title on my business cards so I was happy for a while. Eventually the stress got to me and I quit. Unsure of what to do, I looked at my bank balance and decided I could take a month off to decompress before looking for another job.

That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I spent a month playing roller hockey and shooting hoops in the breezy Northern California fall. When I wasn’t doing that I was plotting my next move, which I thought might be a startup.

During one of my frequent visits to the bookstore I found a book by a well known Silicon Valley marketing guru slash venture capitalist. This was one of those business books that is light on details but somehow manages to inspire and stimulate through anecdote and analogy. I enjoyed it quite a bit and read it quickly.

At the end of each chapter the book had exercises for the reader. One of the exercises was to do research on people by using the internet. The author suggested starting off by researching him. So that’s exactly what I did.

After a few minutes of “googling my yahoo” I discovered an oddball, partially completed area of the author’s website. The full url was kind of strange, as if the page was buried in an app, but the page I was seeing clearly wasn’t part of an app. If you build web apps long enough this kind of goofiness starts to catch your eye. Feeling a little nosy, I altered the url a bit to try to figure out what kind of app was supposed to be there. That’s when I found an ugly little page with only a few links. This was clearly not part of the main site. It looked to be part of an oddball personal organizer app which had been shoehorned into the website. The kind of thing that you don’t expect to see because you’re not supposed to see it without a password. Except there was no password! This was wide open to the world, but only if you knew exactly where to look. I am not a hacker. I just played with the URL a bit. (Also: I’m not a player. I just crush a lot.)

One of the links on this page said “Angels list”.

I believe “HOLY SHIT!” was the precise phrase that came out of my mouth. You know I clicked that link, right? And sure enough, there was a big old list of names and phone numbers. I had stumbled onto the Rolodex of a well-connected VC during the Bubble. That does not happen every day.

So what did I do? Well, I’ll tell you in my next post. In the meantime, let me ask you: What would you have done?