So it was off to Netscape. I began work when the stock was pretty low, so the option deal was good. Not great, but good. The salary was great, however, and the task at hand seemed pretty cool. The group of people I was to work with was amazing, and the company moral was great. What more could I be looking for? This, I felt, would be the high point of my burgeoning career up to that time.

So there I was, working at Netscape. I couldn't believe it. I have to say that it is pretty easy to get star-struck in Silly Valley with all of the big-name companies around. I'll never forget how shocked I was when I realized that Sun Microsystems was a block away from my apartment (one of many Sun facilities, of course). So the excitement of knowing that I was working at such a well-known and quickly-successful company was almost intoxicating.

For the first time in a long time, it seemed that I could enjoy going to work again. I even started working out in the morning, since we had a corporate membership at Gold's Gym. The manager of the group, Jeff Winner, worked out there religiously every morning, so it was a good time to catch up on the gossip channel. The hours were 100% flexible, and there was as much free soda as one could drink in the traditionally-glass-doored refrigerators.

Friday parties were the norm, and at each one, I started seeing how socially-wacked the company was. I mean, there we had employee number 25 sitting down with employee number 1000, and neither of them had necessarily been with the company for more than two years, and neither of them was necessarily older than, say, 25 years old. So there was a strange dynamic to deal with, and I really didn't want to. [I have over-simplified things in the interest of brevity]

This, however, was surpassed most mightily by the internal strife that plagued the entire engineering group. Since the Netscape products are developed on multiple platforms, there are, of course, certain people who feel rather ferociously tied to their platform-of-choice, and when things began to slant heavily toward the Microsoft platform, UNIX and Mac fans were up in arms. Of course, Netscape was bowing to market pressures, and market share (and hence money) certainly does speak a lot louder than a bunch of hackers working on this killer app commodity. Well, that was the case, anyway (in my personal opinion).

Anyway, when I left Netscape, they were losing an average of 6 people every week, including 2 from engineering (again, that was Each Week). I had referred five people over the course of my time at Netscape, and all of them had turned down offers from Netscape, which did not make me overly excited either.

Before any of this really came to a head, though, I had an opportunity to meet with a guy named Deniz Teoman. I actually called him at Bruce's urging when I was still at SCM Microsystems, but this time I actually met with him at a Raiders-Dolphins game in Oakland over the Thanksgiving Weekend in 1996. We had a good discussion about technologies and your general nerdy type stuff, but at the time I had only been at Netscape for almost four months. Now that four more months and a lot more familiarity with an explosively-large company, I decided to get back to Deniz and his company, UMAX Computer Corporation, to see what they had going on.

After a relatively-relaxed interview process (including some missed appointments and miscommunications) we arrived at a deal and I signed everything off. For the first time in my nearly-four-year career in Silly Valley, I made my announcement about departing to the entire group in person, with the manager and all of my peers finding out at the same time. Since I had always chickened out and emailed my manager in previous scenarios, and since I had almost always leaked news of my impending departure before that email went out anyway, this bold delivery was actually quite nerve-racking for me. But, I did it, and once I did, everything was swell...