March 7, 2000.
You park your ‘99 Audi A4 (a gift last month from your boss for the first anniversary of the company’s foundation) right next to the entrance to your workplace. You’re Josh Liu, an employee for Astonish.com- a data analyst, to be exact. Your company’s an online retailer for CD-ROMs and DVDs (and a rapidly dwindling fraction of floppy disks). Last Monday, it hit the NASDAQ, with its price tripling in the first day.
As optimistic as the atmosphere in the HQ is, you can’t shake off a nauseating sense that you can’t figure out. You lean on the wall next to a vending machine to think for a bit. As you sort out your thoughts, you ask yourself how the company pays for delivery fees, gas, and the like. You walk to the main office room- one vast and open in comparison to the cubicles you worked in before getting a job here. It’s been over a year, but you still feel glad that you don’t feel like you’re being choked out as soon as you walk in. In the corner of the room, with a desk twice the size of everyone else’s, is Jeff Sweeney. He’s your CEO, and you probably took at least a few classes with him at Stanford. He’s leaning as far back as the Aeron chair he’s in allows him to, and he’s got his feet crossed, perched up on the desk.
“Ah, Josh. Mornin’.” He immediately rolls his chair towards his computer to look busy.
You ask him how the company pays for the delivery costs, for the gas, practically everything except the wages, marketing, and warehouses.
“Oh. Uh, we’ve been taking out loans before then. We’re paying them back over the course of the year. Shouldn’t be too tough, given that we’ve gotta market cap of, uh, hell if I know, 50 mil?”
You tell him you’ll go check.
You look through the earnings and spendings spreadsheets for every prior fiscal quarter, and start copying the data over onto one big file. You check the sum of the debt. It’s around 40 million bucks. The company only has 31 million in assets, and 7 million on hand. You check the market cap. 10 million shares, times a stock price of 5.11 dollars. Jeff was almost exactly right. Only on that, though. Sure, hundreds of investors would empty their checkbooks to give the company enough cash to pay the debt (as long as they didn’t realize what they specifically were paying for, at least), but so far? There was still 33 million to go. If the stock dips, it’s all over.
You turn around to look for Jeff. He’s gone, probably to another meeting to hash out a deal with Cisco for better bandwidth. You return to tracking the sales on the site. You take your glasses off and rub the inner corners of your eyes.
Sunnyvale, despite the name, was blanketed in fog on your way home. You start to wonder how stable the company really is. Unlike some companies (you saw an ad on the Super Bowl for a site that was literally a glossary of computer-related terms), yours can find comfort in having a reasonable business model. However, it’s also got a ticking time bomb of debt, and the plan to pay it off with injected Wall Street funds was only as stable as the NASDAQ. And as you dwelled on it, you realized that an index that had doubled in under two years was probably a poor choice for your boss to bet all-in on to keep the company afloat.
You log into AIM once you get home, as per usual. Todd sent you (along with some other friends, those being Kenny, Shawn, Travis, and Zack) a message asking if you wanna come to his house for an Unreal Tournament LAN party. He bought ice cream and garlic bread for it, and rented a copy of Reservoir Dogs for if anyone wanted to stay for the night (as most of his guests tend to do). You take him up on the offer, and start packing up your PC.
The ride to his place is even foggier than before, but at least no one else is out on the road at night. Thank god you bought that GPS for the dashboard last month. You make it to his place without too much hassle, and Zack helps you lug the computer up the stairs to Todd’s apartment. The rest of the party is voting on what map to kick the night off with. Kenny wants Deathmatch on Crane, Travis wants Capture the Flag on Facing Worlds. You think Facing Worlds is a good choice. Kenny says that as long as Crane gets picked next, he’s ready to play.
You open a cold root beer as the match begins.
civil code pls
Only Gretchen Whitmer and Cory Booker are narrowing it down to +2 R lmao