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Thursday, April 19, 2001
Mocking dot-com failures
One-man comedy show features former employee of Amazon.com
By Allison Linn
Associated Press
SEATTLE - Mike Daisey was one of countless twentysomething liberal arts majors lured into the dot-com dream. Now he's one of the few whose careers are thriving from the Internet boom gone bust.
   Daisey, 28, left life in the New Economy cubicle as an employee at Amazon.com and started a one-man show that recounts his 80-hour work weeks at the online retailer that was once a Wall Street darling.
   He says in "21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com" that his was a life in the reality-altered world of the Web, where everyone had forgotten that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
   "That's called 'common sense'," Daisey tells his audiences, "And by mid-1998, everyone who believed in that in the Internet industry had been shot."
   "21 Dog Years," which opened days after Amazon.com announced major layoffs to cut costs, has been selling out its small Seattle venue and will likely head to Portland, Ore., next month. Daisey is in talks to bring it to New York, San Jose and Boston.
   The Free Press, a unit of the publishing house Simon & Schuster, also is scheduled to publish a book based on the show.
   "I think the thing people see in it is a little bit of themselves in the past two years," says Jon Staenberg, a Seattle-based venture capitalist who liked the show so much he asked Daisey to perform at a company function in San Mateo, Calif., earlier this month.
   Daisey says the show's name was inspired by the seniority-obsessed geeks at Amazon, who found a Web site asserting that, contrary to popular reports, the first year of a dog's life is equal to 14 human life years, and the second to 9 human years. Using that math, Daisey's 22-month tenure works out to about 21 dog years.
   He sees his show as part support group, part educational documentary and part entertainment.
   "I think it serves a better purpose than endless pink-slip parties," he said.
   In his vaguely scripted, stream-of-consciousness performance, the portly, baby-faced Daisey does not resist the temptation to mock dot-com failures.
   Mentality explored
   He pokes fun at Pets.com, which he says failed after the company realized people would not pay lots of money to have large quantities of dog food delivered to their doorsteps because "people are not insane."
   But he also tries to explore the mentality of people like himself, who truly believed in their dot-com start-ups. He says he joined Amazon because he wanted to be like the people he saw there - geeky yet hip, and truly dedicated to the company.
   "We really believed that sending people books was going to change the world," he explained.
   And Daisey admits that he bought into that dream completely, even though he should have seen the warning signs - including an article that appeared the week he started training there that called the company "Amazon.cult."
   'Just say no'
   "A news flash for you: if an article comes out saying that the company you're about to work for is a cult, don't even think about it. Just say no," he says in the show.
   Daisey was one of the many highly educated "Amazonians" hired to work in entry-level customer service jobs as part of Jeff Bezos' democratic vision of the New Economy. He rose in the ranks by vastly improving the time it took him to deal with each caller. He hung up on some to make up for longer time he took with others.
   Up in the corporate offices, he found himself calculating the projected value of his stock options and sorting through business plans, looking - his supervisors told him confidently - for another company with as high a chance of success as Pets.com, which failed last year.

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