RTFM Blast From The Past

I had a software company back in the dotcom days. It was lots of big parties, ridiculous earning, even more ridiculous spending. A collection of shenanigans both subtle and nefarious. My dotcom had clients, which was a rarity in those days; you could usually get away with having nothing but tons of venture capital, the obligatory Foosball table, and a staff hired mostly for the fact they had a pulse.

So, “Doing Business” cut into our level of mirth…we didn’t get to spend days gushing to the media about how we were changing the world of business — nay, of civilization — by taking a ridiculous loss on every single sale we made. Instead, we had to be accountable and responsive (read: grudgingly sober).

This obviously led to the occasional buildup of steam. And when the bubble started to deflate a bit, and we stopped the drunken dancing on tabletops with CEOs, brutal reality set in and we realized that most clients mostly suck. They want everything for nothing, and the everything they want makes no sense, and if you explain that they freak out.

One strategy to fill the dull, brutal hours of sobriety was to write documentation. Mind you, this wasn’t in the dotcom playbook since the majority of the dotcom world had no products to document. This was doubly ironic since one of our main products was a web Knowledgebase system.

Below is one of the better documents we produced.