January, 1994

So, late fall of '93, after I had played with the web a lot and really saw that it had a chance to become something big, somehow, I got the idea that I wanted to think about starting a company. I didn't know exactly what, but it really seemed like a good idea. So, I talked to a guy I knew who had done some consulting work and asked if he was interested. He was. I asked another friend who I knew, Eric, who I'd known since freshman year and asked what he thought. He was interested too. By the middle of January, I had a group of 8 or 9 people looking at the idea of starting a company. We met a lot for a couple of months and debated strategies and ideas and the feasability of our entire plan. We decided the best plan was to basically be a shopping mall on the web. We were going to call ourselves "Downtown Enterprises" or something with the word Downtown in it. We thought about it a lot. In April, we decided we just didn't have the business knowledge or skills to actually do it, and we cast away the idea.

So, I figured I would just go back to being a physicist. Wrong.