John and I grew up 11 years apart, too big a gap for any serious sibling rivalry to develop, so I mostly feel proud and happy about his achievement. But I had imagined him being rich and successful in his 40s or at least his 30s. Instead he surfed the dot-com wave and made it in his 20s, living the cyberworld's implausible dream. Both are unreal, completely out of whack with the everyday reality that existed before the mid-1990s. In the old world, an entrepreneur got a good idea, then spent a couple of years obsessing over whether it could work before quitting the corporate job to launch a company and spend many more years nurturing it in the hope it might one day be big enough to pass down to the kids.
Nobody moves that slowly anymore.
Get the idea, get a mountain of cash from a venture capitalist, burn it getting the company up to speed and either flame out in a year or light a cigar to celebrate. All before you're 30 and too world-weary to believe it can happen that way. One weekend in November 1997, John, who is always in a very different stage of life than I am, mentioned this little idea he'd had that week at law school. Amid my detailed accounts of my toddler daughter's every giggle and poop, he told me that while reading legal cases he had thought of a way to make studying law more efficient. You'd put all the assigned readings on-line and insert links so that every time one case cited another as a precedent, a click would bring the precedent case onto the screen.