“Borrow it,” they replied. “Listen, if we do an IPO for you, this company will be worth five hundred dollars for every Internet client you have. Five hundred dollars! How much is it costing you to get an account now? Maybe ten in advertising. So just spend more. Even if your cost increases to twenty, that’s still four hundred eighty dollars profit, plus your eight bucks a month. Don’t be a jerk, go for it!”

That small voice inside me said be careful. But it was too late. I’d already been offered the keys to the vault.

Growing by a thousand accounts a day turned out to be quite a different thing than growing by a few dozen. A few dozen will find you. They’ll comb the classifieds, talk to other techies, and discover you. A thousand, on the other hand, require you to find them.

You have to run large ads in the big papers. Large, expensive ads. And you need to run TV and radio commercials. Not the cheap ten p.m.–to–two a.m. spots you run on radio when you’re happy if three or four clients call in, but expensive prime-time slots. Soon it’s not costing you $10 to make a sale, but $40—as much as you’ll make on the client the first six months. But wait, the best is yet to come.

Seems there’s not enough people in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington—where your equipment is—to sign up a thousand new accounts a day. So soon you’re installing equipment all over the country. Expensive equipment for which the clients aren’t yet signed. You even contract with other local Internet providers to handle your accounts, but not all of them know what they’re doing and soon accounts start to complain and even cancel.

Speaking of not knowing what they’re doing, congratulations. You’re selling to the general public now, not a bunch of techies. They don’t even know how to install the software when it arrives. They just want to wave it in front of the computer, say “Internet, Internet, Internet” three times, spit over their shoulder, turn the computer on—and magic—there they are on the Internet checking out Madonna’s Web site.

They can’t connect. They still have only a 2400-band Atari modem. Well, that’s not their fault. You never said the modem can’t be ten years old. If you’re lucky, you never said in the ad you needed a modem at all.

“Now you’re telling me I need a modem. I’m calling the consumer authorities.”

“But sir, how do you expect to connect without a modem? What are you going to plug the phone line into?”