Ah, yes, those heady days of the .com boom.

I got an email:

Subject: Your Headhunter has arrived…

Currently, we are staffing many of Silicon Valley’s start-up companies including Jim Clark’s latest venture, as well as established public companies such as Nokia and Network Appliance.

I wanted to get in touch, introduce myself and learn a little more about your sphere, focus and goals.

If you aren’t in ‘search mode’ at this time, that is fine.  My purpose is more to open a dialog and keep you on top of what is going on outside of your present situation.

Please contact me at your convenience, so I can share the details of these opportunities, if not for yourself possibly for someone you know.

Thank you for your time,

and gave me her name, email, recruiting company name, and phone number.

I wrote back asking who Jim Clark was:

Jim Clark’s start-up is going to be providing financial services over the
Internet. Everything from Director of MIS to UI / Web / DB developers is needed at
this point. More specific, there is a need for a SR Languages/compiler/tools developer.

In addition to this company, quite a few of my other clients (other start-ups as well as public companies) would be interested in speaking with you. Please give me a call or shoot me an email with a good time and place for me to contact you.   Then we can discuss the details of these opportunities in more detail.

I wrote her back asking about management jobs, and she indicated that there might be manager jobs out there.

Here is a list of companies she was working with:

www.healtheon.com – redirects to webmd
www.justliketv.com – website still up with copyright date of 2009
www.liberate.com – redirects to liberatehealth.com, which hawks an app. There is a video on the bad home page with 2014 in the date.
www.netapps.com – I think this is a typo for netapp.com, which she mentioned above. NetApp is still a going concern.
www.iprg.nokia.com – This site is gone. nokia.com works. However, since Microsoft bought them and gutted them…
www.pacoffee.com – “Undergoing maintenance; be back soon”
www.pluris.com – some kind of financial firm. Possibly Jim Clark’s.
www.tivo.com – well, they are still here, but they are not what they used to be.
www.veritas.com – still going strong
www.yodlee.com – apparently owned by edvestnet, whomever they are. Appear to still be breathing.
www.tumbleweed.com – acquired by a company called Axway in 2008. Not really sure what the products are.
www.asctivesw.com – D-E-D dead
www.whowhere.com – They actually formed in 1996, and are still active. The copyright notice says “© Lycos”, so they got acquired at some point.
www.arasys.com – “who has changed there(sic) name to @motion.” – The domain is for sale.

I’m actually reasonably impressed at how many of these companies survived what was coming in the next year or two. She had a good instinct.

We never reached a point where any of these companies interviewed me, but it is an interesting window to the frenzy that was happening during that time.

She did send me one job description, which I will talk about in a future post.