I, too, was a paper millionaire

The excerpt published on Salon today from James Marcus's "Amazonia" -- his book about his employment at amazon.com and participation in the dotcom boom -- largely echoes my experience. In September 1999, I was hired by a newly-minted company called Commerce One and given a few thousand shares of stock options. Because it was two months after the IPO, I assumed there was little chance the stock would go over the $54 strike price at which my options were granted. But the bubble had just begun, and over the next six months the stock split twice and went to the equivalent of $900. By December all the employees -- or at least the ones who had joined with or before me -- were positively giddy; the ones who had joined recently had stock options that would never be worth anything. One of the original engineers quit and cashed out; a reporter wrote an story about how he bought his old high school math teacher a Masarati.

For several months, my options made me a paper millionaire. And like Marcus, I was lucky enough to be able to cash in a fraction of those options, before getting laid off in January 2001. By the end of that year the company -- along with many other dotcom startups -- was in the toilet. The beautiful sine curve described by the stock price was positively ballistic.