You see, my first startup experience was at NetMarket in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was 1996 and this small startup had offices in Cambridge, MA. A few years earlier in 1994 they had figured out early ecommerce and the world as we know it changed.

Very quickly they were acquired by CUC International.

Some of the founders left. Guy Haskins, Eiji Hirai stayed. They hired Hal Pomeranz, Josh Smith, Libby Curtis and others. They hired a temp (ie. me) to help them with “business stuff” while they built early e-commerce platforms on Sun/Solaris Sparc Stations running Perl, Python, Oracle and super early Java.

I think my first day at the American Twine Building, Hal was cranking Jimi Hendrix as loud as possible in his office. He was at the command line doing something wacky. I had never seen such barefooted, crazy haired, tech guys run a startup office before. There were frozen veggie burgers in the fridge. Free soda and generally an air of not giving a fuck.

I was all in.

Someone told me that as a new intern I had to prove myself. It was my first day and my first project was conditional. If I could complete it by the end of the week, I could stay.

Otherwise I was out.

So my first project was to:

• spin up a NCSA httpd server (based on the NCSA Mosaic code)

• get it up and running on my localhost

• mind you, this was a Sun SPARCstation running Solaris UNIX (early precursor to Linux)

• publish it to an internal IP address

• create a Hello World index.html page

• and let the office know that they could reach my server at http://192.168.10.19 or something like that

I accomplished this task in the first week and have never looked back since.