[quote=pri_dk]Here flu, this will make you feel better:

California Housing Market Braces for Facebook Millionaires

(Notice I didn’t paste the whole article.)[/quote]

But I like to paste the entire article and take up bandwidth and disk space. That way, my western digital stock will go up, my cloud computing/vmware will go up too, because every $1 in extra revenue I help generate for those companies, you have an entire I-bank team that will tell you the valuation of the company is now $100 more, based on their “projections” of future earnings…

Actually, I look forward to all those facebook millionaires. Because that means my house in the Santa Clara county will go up in value even more ridiculously…. and if I keep it as a rental I eventually can start charging a ridiculous $3000/month for a 2000 sqft home… I was also laughing at my relative who bought a home in Pacific Heights a few years back…I’m not laughing anymore, because those areas have gone up too with the rebound of the tech sector. Because unlike in san diego, really in the bay area, there is no more land to build new homes.

Some of us were from the Bay Area for the first .com wave, and while we didn’t clean house then, we definitely didn’t leave empty handed. Unfortunately, for a lot of us, we’re too old for this second wave (basically, if you’re over 30, you’re too old unless you can land SMGMT/CTO position), it ain’t worth it….That’s why we’re here in SoCal and trying to do business with the mothership up there, preferably remotely…

I won’t bother going into details on how some startups at the time tried to pass off was revenue.. Step 1: create a partnership with company X. Commit capital Y to company X, as an investment. Have Company X use commited dollars to buy your product, and then book the sales as revenue…. My favorite was while doing a B2B company, how with a half backed system, our CEO during a demo told a colleague to go to the server room and manually copy the purchase order from one system to the other to fake that it went through our system (when it clearly wasn’t working)… Yeah, the company was eventually sold for $250million. Go figure.

The other game I loved hearing about from colleagues was a big software company (I won’t name names) use to promise a product was done to customers (sometimes government customers). Only at the time they said the product was “in production/shipping”, it hadn’t been developed yet… Said software company, the story goes would end up shipping blank CD’s to customer, counting on that because of the bereaucracy at the customer (government), no one would actually open the software install disk until 3-4 months later. because the consulting arm of the said software company would bury the customer in planning/”design”/”architecture” before actually doing anything with the software…Meanwhile, product development would happen during the 3-4 months window. And finally, if the customer did crack open the CD months later, it would be “oops, we sent a bad CD, here’s the one that’s not broken”. Yup, that’s why when I was a system architect down here and I heard that company was trying to sell a solution to us, I was like “you’re kidding ,right? Is it real, or is it Memorex?”