Requiem for a dream

(Upstart) It’s been hard to stay sane in this business. Every winter morning there’s another Chapter 11. Discussing it’s bringing us deeper down. I saw a guy for ICG crack on a show floor a little while ago, but it’s not going to be me, man. I don’t want to point the finger for NorthPoint’s Chapter 11 yesterday at the company, its bank, or that RBOC that ditched. We’ll just have to accept it.

I just keep telling myself: This was bound to happen. The world’s changing. The markets are drying up. There were too many players. The big guys are playing God again, or maybe there was some conspiracy by RBOCs like Verizon to destroy high-speed access. Or maybe Verizon was looking to get a better deal.

Yeah, maybe that was it. They were all in this together. And those damned black helicopters. And those calls I was getting asking what I thought about DSL. All of those billboards. That little green guy underneath my bed—never should have trusted him. No, there I go placing blame again. There’s no conspiracy—it’s just that some companies make it, some don’t.

But these were the ones that were going to make it about a year and a half ago. After hanging out with a CEO, I’d have dreams about climbing to the top of a golden pyramid, little hotdogs in hand, looking out over the desert to see the ocean filled with mustard. (All right, I don’t know what the hell that was about, but talking to CEOs still got me moving.)

Those business plans that looked so pretty—like NorthPoint running a network across the country—turned out to be based on the flawed assumption that people would keep handing out money. It took so little to turn sour, a few missed earnings caused in part by the hype and reactionary investors. Maybe the start-up revolution wasn’t going to change the world. Maybe we were mad.

There has to be some analogy that would make this easier—some sweet little sugary thing to make it taste less bitter. Like when the dot-coms started failing and people were saying things like, “The guys that made the money during the gold rush…” Or that one about dead babies and selling them, or something.

Maybe you could compare NorthPoint to Christ. You know, there were three big companies. One went after the masses, while the traitor’s Verizon, and the bank would be Pontius Pilate. But I couldn’t figure out how the company was planning on rising. Just having them sell off their assets really doesn’t cut it.

Next try: Humpty Dumpty, nah. Too much about putting things back together again. And they didn’t ever fix it anyway. Little Red Riding Hood…The witch… Maybe a Dr. Seuss book, wasn’t there something about trees, maybe green eggs...

Staff Writer David Schober was last seen flipping madly through a tattered copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, mumbling something about Cinderella being a little like Kennard. Write him at david_schober@intertec.com.