Interlude - Index of

9
Vision
On Whining, Eras, Future
History, and the Meaning of Life
By 2003, I was happy, hopeful, and oddly confused. We
had pretty much recovered from the dot-com crash. We were
growing again, and our profit levels were healthy. I should
have been pleased, but instead I was anxious. What we were
doing was obviously working, given how well we’d bounced
back, but I didn’t understand where we were headed. In the
hypergrowth period, our goal was always simple: double last
year’s revenues. That worked great, all the way up to a billion
dollars. After the crash, our goal was simple again: return
to health. But when we reached a billion the second time, it
wasn’t clear what our next big milestone should be.
Two questions kept me up at night: Where should we go
next? and How will we get there? Doubling annually was not
a realistic option, both because of our size and because the
economy was still slow. I fell back on an old management technique:
I began to whine.
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