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.