Yettie Nation - Industry Trend or Event

For over a year, the author stalked the denizens of the new economy to find a key to the universe of dot-corn geeks. He found the Yettie: the young, entrepreneurial technocrat. An exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming book, A Field Guide to the Yettie.

Here's a question for observers of the Internet Economy as it emerges from the cruel month of October and rolls disruptively toward the end of the fourth quarter: Who are these people? Who are these apple-cheek paper millionaires and big-brained paupers, these smart-kid Banana Republicans building Internet brands devoid of the tainted dot-com suffix? Really, now: What do you call that guy at the snowboard shop who looks exactly like Yahoo's Jerry Yang or Napster's Shawn Fanning or Draper Fisher Jurvetson's Steve Jurvetson or the kid with the greasy hair and a Radiohead T-shirt building a Flash site down on the third floor of your office? Who is he?

Dot-commer doesn't work anymore -- the dot-com era is over. Netizen's too vague and crunchy. Geek's passe. E-yuppie? No. The yuppie is gone, consigned to the stereotype thrift shop by the October 1987 market crash. The yuppie is dead. We are all yuppies now.

These Internet Economy people are yetties. Yetties are young. They are entrepreneurial. And they are technocrats. A yettie is an employee of an Internet company who cannot explain to his mother exactly what he does for a living. A yettie might, be a product-development tech for Amazon in its lawn and patio division. Or a campaign execution specialist for Internet marketing platforms at Oracle. He might be a VP for e-presence. Or a temp. He risks burnout in the hope of a great return on his investment.

From Razor-scooting mouse jockeys on lower Broadway in Silicon Alley to power-mad Cyberlord CEOs with McMansions in Woodside, Calif., yetties represent a new branch on the business culture's evolutionary tree. It is a branch that's growing at an astounding rate. There were 2.5 million yetties at work in America at the start of last year, up from 1.8 million in 1998; together they generated some $523.9 billion in revenue for the year, up from $322.5 billion in 1998. The national paleo-economy, in contrast, grew just 6 percent during the same period. And even with the hammer that the market has put to the Internet Economy, the numbers are still growing. That goofball in expensive glasses buying a bottle of $78 merlot to stuff in his messenger bag on Market Street in San Francisco? He was not there 18 months ago. He was living in a Geekocile, eating ramen noodles. He was a nerd, then.

Upon that nerd -- smart and bespectacled, standing alone on the playground in the fourth grade, taunted by classmates -- was the dotcom geek built. And upon that geek was raised the yettie in all his puzzling forms.

Like the yuppies before them, yetties have changed how we see the world. You may point at them in the street and laugh with derision or approbation. Their culture, if not their software, will survive. There are myriad yettie stereotypes -- 21 who appear in this book. Here are five.

1 The Cyberlord

The most dominant strain of yettie CEO is what the Internet social critic Roberto Verzola has called with some venom the Cyberlord. Cyberlords, like all yettie CEOs, are members of what could be called the Internet culture's propertied class. They control either information or, as Verzola has put it, "the material infrastructure for creating, distributing or using information." Verzola assumes the posture of a vintage Marxist then, and gets kind of angry: "Cyberlords are rent-seeking members of the capitalist class," he seethes.

You bet they are, Roberto! That's how they got to be rich. You want to type a letter to someone on your laptop, then print it or e-mail it? Pay Microsoft, pay Apple, pay Dell, pay Hewlett-Packard, pay AOL, pay! You want to find out how well your widget is selling in malls in the Southwest as opposed to franchise stores in Boston or New York? You want to find out if there's fresh romaine lettuce at the Schnuck's on the corner? Pay Michael Saylor and he'll hook you up. That's what MicroStrategy does, after all, and the intellectual property rights for how to do that belong to him and his company. Pay rent and he'll let you use his devilish little system all night long.

The Cyberlords, unlike most yetties, spend a good deal of time dressed in a suit and tie. (Most yetties wear a suit and tie only on the inside, over their souls.) Cyberlords wear them for meetings with members of the old economy -- a group that has proved remarkably resilient in the new economy's rise and explicit turmoil -- whose approval they crave in exactly the manner of a revolutionary looking for support from the king he has not yet quite succeeded in toppling. The sands of American wealth are shifting, the Cyberlord's mien seems to suggest -- but as the fall's Nasdaq slide pointed out -- not so fast that one should be disrespectful of Those Who Came Before.

Cyberlords are white men, in the main, but they do not have to be. That last is important. They do not have to be. They only have to dress as if they are. As the novelist and Silicon Valley journalist Po Bronson has pointed out, the success-oriented environment bred by Internet culture has led to a fundamental shift in the nature of work and of culture: The new economy rewards success regardless of skin color, class and gender. You can arrive in America from India with $123 in your pocket and return with a billion. This economy allows it: Brains will out.

The Cyberlord almost certainly has a background in technology and an intimate understanding of the product he is hawking: He built the product. He is also probably a great student of new business practices and of instatrendy management books and seminars that allow him, he believes, the possibility of great power over his employees, business partners and potential clients. When he's not wearing a suit, his pants continue to display pleats, long after they have fallen from fashion.

He is also an entrepreneur. All yetties are entrepreneurs, of course, but to the Cyberlord, entrepreneurship is more a divine calling than a mere facet of his personality. The Cyberlord assumes massive risk in the hope of enormous profit. The adjectives are important. They are why he went to business school. And why he dropped out. And they are why, late in the afternoon on an October day, the Cyberlord slugs Tagament in his cubicle and sweats out the raw order of fear: Nortel with its teeth kicked in, the Nasdaq digging a new cellar, his dreams of stock splits and more-money-always dissipating in the cruel wind of market reality.

The Cyberlord is probably single. (He may be married to an employee; as the joke has it, he doesn't need to pick up women -- he hires them.) He possesses limited social skills. He communicates primarily via e-mail and can be cruel in his missives. He may, in the wake of an IPO or a sale, purchase a toy or a gift for himself: a Gulfstream airplane or a large collection of working model helicopters, or a ship, or a complete set of Superman comics. He will not talk about these acquisitions at length.

He has one best friend, who he has known since college, where for the first time in his life he was actually celebrated for his intelligence and his ability to write programs for computers. This person works for him now, as his chief operating officer or his chief technology officer. Sometimes, if the friendship was struck in business school, as his chief financial officer.

The dot-com era came to an end this fall, replaced with a more realistic and cruel new economy. Employees now fear the Cyberlord and revere him as serfs did the beneficient Lord of the manor.

2 The Biz-Dev

Our man in business development is a soi-disant "safe black guy" from suburban Maryland, who majored in history at Wesleyan. He has worked at nine different Manhattan Internet startups over the course of the past six years. He has never been fired from a position; he has always quit on the promise of better chances elsewhere. Nevertheless, he says, with calm authority and only the very slightest hint of the mattress salesman in his voice, he learned a lot at each place, even when the jobs weren't successful. Most important, he says, shooting his cuffs from within a Hugo Boss summer-weight suitcoat, "Keep moving. Like a shark, you know?"

Like a Biz-Dev! Business development is the realm of the slickest yetties, the ones who wear their suits on the outside like the old-economy masters, and who find themselves equally at home amid Paul Stuarted bankers and Web-designing hot girls in baby-tees marked Pervert. Business development isn't marketing, after all. It's not close to that. It's about deals. The Biz-Dev specializes in second-round VC financing, in partnering with other startups to the exclusive traffic-profit of his own, in assessing the pros and cons of changing the tack of the business plan, and in regularly perpetuating the notion that Things Could Be Better Around Here. Biz dev is about one thing, the Biz-Dev says: Monetize the brilliance. The Biz-Dev has been on Silicon Alley since its baby-step days, you understand, 75 hours a week minimum; he's been inside more shops than his CEO even knows exist. The message is: He knows what works and what doesn't. With him around, he makes pains to argue, there's no need for consultants. The Bi z-Dev is the consultant.

The Biz-Dev knows that the suits he wears -- Boss, Beau Brummel, one Armani -- help underscore this image. He's almost like the Banana Republicans, but with upgrades: the suit itself, then agnes b. shirts, shoes by Varda. He has heavy debt outstanding on his MasterCard to pay for all that. But the clothes are necessary, he says. He knows that they bother some of the programmers at the shop where he works, a large loft crammed with polished stainless-steel desks and gleaming new iMacs. But so what if Biz-Dev in Silicon Valley runs to pleated Brooks Brothers khakis and neat light-blue buttondowns? This is New York, for one thing. And for another, the Biz-Dev knows his color throws a good vibe into the air -- makes him, to these brainy little white boys from Dallas and St. Louis and Scarsdale, yet another example of the boatraising power of the Web. The Biz-Dev, in his suit, is smart like that. What he likes: The kids at his job just don't know quite what to make of him, heading off to VC meetings at Draper Jur vetsons new Manhattan branch, to content-play meetings in wide Spring Street lofts, to dinner at Odeon with short-film impresarios and we-sell-e-art hucksters, to drinks with a frat buddy from Morgan Stanley, to some sort of dance club in East Flatbush on Saturday night. They just don't know, except that he brings in the deals.

And the Biz-Dev likes it that way. His computer experience boils down to a successfully completed series of programs in the computer lab back in high school and a hell of a lot of what he still calls Web surfing in college. And now this, these past six years. He's in. "These people don't hire for business development because they want to," the Biz-Dev says. "They need to. That's huge."

The Biz-Dev lives in a floor-through apartment in Fort Greene, just two stops on the D from Broadway-Lafayette. There are cotton-weave rugs on the floor, Ikea furniture above it, a big TV, and a workstation with a company-leased iMac on it that he hardly uses except for e-mail and to run music through to Bose speakers his mother bought him when he got out of school. He's had precisely one woman in there since he got the place two and a half years ago for $1,100 a month. He can't remember her name.

The Biz-Dev has a mountain bike in there, too, a Cannondale he bought to ride in the woods of Prospect Park every morning he can. That's twice a month, give or take a day. He comes across all kinds of wild-ass shit out there in the park, things straight out of a New York the Times tells him is gone now, that only happens in movies: crazy blow-job hookups in the trees above Grand Army Plaza, pop-eyed Dominicans cutting up chickens amid candles and drumbeats way up on Santeria Hill, down by the lake. That's the real world, the Biz-Dev thinks, riding. And as nice and real as it is to see, it'll be nicer still to remember, when he gets his four-bedroom Victorian in South Orange, Jersey-style.

Thus work. There's a file cabinet in his bedroom, under a corn plant that grows high against the window, in which he keeps the paperwork outlining his option package at work, should he break with principle and stay for a year. He looks at it sometimes, and at the files behind it that outline the deals he's had before. They can make him happy or sick with regret, depending on the news that the market has dealt the day before. The BizDev is ready, he says, for big-time success. His company's burn rate isn't going to help him get it.

The Biz-Dev carries a shoulder bag from Prada and has in it a copy of David J. Gladstone's Venture Capital Handbook, which he reads on the train, and a Cassiopeia E-100 personal digital assistant. Every contact he's ever made in New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Chicago is on it. Every meeting he's had. Every one he will have. Everything. Women, too, numbers for pretty little PR Bunnies and content-providing ex-Voice interns and self-serious Essence researchers and old college flames, all there and updated constantly though he hasn't had a date in six months -- no time. The PDA he gives his PDA is infectious; he's had seven friends switch from Palm to the Cassiopeia as a result, and there's a note about that in the machine to celebrate it: "Explore poss. of working for Cass." Headphones from a Sony MD MZ E60 snake out of the Prada on a wire; he's got downloaded Jay-Z on it, again for the ride to work, New York beats to make the Biz-Dev smile.

On the corner, near the train, the Biz-Dev shoots his cuffs again, checks the time on his Spoon watch. He's got an 8:30 in Tribeca to discuss a wireless Web menu service with some friends from Wesleyan. It could be his next gig, he says, if they have the money and the smarts to let him run the business end of the business itself. The Biz-Dev, after six years, is getting sick of offering advice, taking home salary. He's got those suits to pay for and that dream house to buy. And cash is tight. They'll be laying off 10 percent of his shop at the end of the quarter. You know what? It's getting to be time to move on.

3 The PR Bunny

A publicist of middling rank stands guard near the door of an airy downtown San Francisco loft, greeting guests. PR Bunnies, the yettie CEO had called her firm of women -- right before handing them the account. To the women themselves, this paradox is sort of hilarious. The PR Bunny wears a fitted, dark denim jacket over a dressy tank top that does little to hide the outline of her high breasts, and Marc Jacobs slacks over three-inch Gucci heels she'd purchased online one afternoon last week, for stress relief. Her blond hair falls Onto her shoulders in the style of a TV comedienne: Tea Leoni, say. The PR Bunny shakes her mane sporadically and greets each arriving person she knows (roughly 80 percent of the invited list) by name, exactly in the manner of a flirtatious politician. She offers each of those she knows with any-thing more than passing recognition a warm and friendly hug. People she has been to lunch with, for instance.

Later, the PR Bunny will approach each of those guests she needs to spin -- a journalist from one of the maga-bibles about a second-round financing snafu at the shop for which the party is being thrown, for instance -- and get that person a drink, or more pieces of sushi, or an extra gift bag, and eventually, off in a corner, as if she had all the time in the world, she will extract whatever it is she needs from him. A promise, usually. A promise disguised as a favor returned off a favor, with the understanding that in receiving the promise-cum-favor, the PR Bunny is in fact doing the mark (as she thinks of journalists, generally) a favor, and not the other way around. She will do this perhaps 16 times over the course of the party, to 16 different individuals, for results both picayune and gigantic. It is exhausting work, and her shoes will start to kill her at about hour 1.5 of the party, but this is in great measure her job, and she enjoys it immensely.

The PR Bunny lives in the Presidio, in an insulated yettie demimonde apartment that until recently she shared with two other girls in her firm. She is six years out of the University of California at Santa Barbara and retains the fiat stomach and fit legs of the recreational surfer she was during her time there. She majored in communications and minored in athlete boys, and began reading Trollope during her senior year for no reason that she can adequately explain. One of his novels was there in the library one day, and she just, you, know, picked it up. And that was that. She just finished the last one, one novel after another, a chapter a night no matter how tired she got -- which was very.

She drives a '94 Volkswagen Jetta, used, that she bought off a product manager who soured on the Web when his company went public and saw its stock price head straight to the gutter. Last the PR Bunny heard, the product manager was working as a personal trainer in Bel Air, about 10 blocks from where the PR Bunny grew up, the only daughter in a family of boys. Her mom's a social worker. Her dad's a network executive, someone most people have never heard of, especially in San Francisco.

The PR Bunny doesn't have time for a boyfriend now and thinks that having one would be a liability anyway; boyfriends lead to marriage, and a ring on her finger would take away one of her most successful PR techniques, which is to schedule, with an important mark, the Late Drink. She loves her job. "It's much easier to be successful out here," the PR Bunny says, "when people think you're dumb, easy and hot."

The Content Provider

So it's like this. You're in high school, and you hang out on this really shaky bridge you built between the nerd world over in the computer-science lab and the more popular one that throws parties all the time and gets good grades and better pot.

You're a girl. You edit the school paper and stage-manage the school's production of Picnic. You bid liberal arts for college and end up amid ivy and Birkenstocks somewhere in New England, beneath wide hills that don't quite pass for mountains, where you discover poetry. You have a T1 line into your dorm room and find that you get the principles by which the Internet works and that you understand the power of the Web as a delivery system for information. You debug the college literary magazine's Web site and land an editor's slot. And continue to write poems.

Graduate. Move to New York on the promise of a gig reading manuscripts for George Plimpton at the Paris Review and $11 an hour doing research for the guy who taught creative nonfiction your senior year. You've read his stories in The New Yorker. It's a good start.

And it is, until the parties at Plimpton's house begin to wear you down, and the research dries up, and your old friend Cindy calls out of the blue from San Francisco to say she's creating Web sites for brick-and-mortar retail ouffits and just bought a house in the Mission. It all falls to pieces then. You haven't written a poem in 16 months. You're maxed out on your Visa. You have three roommates in a two-bedroom apartment on East 87th St. Cindy bought a house?

"Really?" you say. And just like that, you end up a Content Provider. You write blurbs for Cindy at first: dozens and dozens of 43-word treatises on pressure-treated lumber, Makita planers, Kohler faucets. Cindy puts these things up on the Web next to pictures of the products, and armchair carpenters in Topeka click on the icon and buy. You do this for a candy-company site, for a business-to-business franchise, for some guy selling wine. You learn a lot about Sauvignon grapes. You get laid off a few times. At the New York launch of an online media magazine, you see a nerd from college, who asks shyly what you're doing. You say, and he smiles. He needs writers himself, he says, suddenly not shy at all. Something about streaming video comes out of his mouth, and then about news, poetry, art. He's CEO of what-ever it- is. He's made good.

So three weeks later-you've got a cubicle on lower Broadway and the mandate to write 200-word reviews of, like, art. Once, twice a day, five days a week: The company needs content that will draw traffic to its site. Hits. Be controversial, says the CEO, the Nerd Made Good. There's an office party every Friday, with margaritas. You make $60,000 a year, and your package started with 5,000 stock options. You get a tribal tattoo on your ankle. Guys begin to talk to you at parties in ways they haven't before. Self-confidence blooms in you like a rose. Only sporadically do you worry-about rollbacks, burn rate, unemployment, death.

Content Providers still live on high school's precarious bridge. They're often caught between the Geekocile and the in-crowd. Their clothes are Banana Republican tricked down with thrift-store sweaters, cocktail dresses on the weekends. If male, the gear runs gray and black for meetings with bosses, and skater-in-Geranimals for sitting around the apartment writing e-commerce haiku. Occasionally Actual Modern Fiction ensues, and friends put it on other Web sites or in zines made up to be magazines. The Content Provider is only writing for the Web for now. She's got a few book ideas. And her poetry. But she tells no one about this, because there is actually a part of her that understands the medium to be the single greatest boon to writing since Gutenberg's press. That people won't read long pieces on screen, she feels, is a fact sure to change. Some bright young thing will come up with better technology and we will all, suddenly, read everything over a monitor of some kind. We will. Won't we?

If not, she figures, there's always graduate school.

5 The Crossover Geezer

The Crossover Geezer comes to an Internet startup with a decent salary, heavy options, and a top-secret, golden-handshake deal if things don't work out within eight quarters. Because, look, it very well might not, given the temperature of the market right now. The company needs the Crossover Geezer to counteract that reality. Its investors, frankly, are a little scared of going public with just the founders on board, what with their wild entrepreneurial egos and incessant craziness, fueled by attention-deficit disorder and lack of sleep.

You need some gray at the temples if the company is going to blow up huge. The CEO who came from b-school to run a firm out of a garage in Menlo Park is not the one to scale up to $300 million in revenue and 520 employees over the course of a couple of years. Not in public, anyway. Not now. The VC wants to see a clear path to profitability now, with a friendly old man to lead the company down it.

"So, he's like -- 50? Maybe 60?" says the CEO's barrister, introducing the idea of the Crossover Geezer to the CEO, one sunny day. A venture capitalist said something similar to the CEO just two mornings before, at Buck's, talking about the need for a "mature presence" in the offices, someone amid the used cubicles and dying office plants to counteract young Sarjeet the lead programmer, and the youthful barrister, and all those T-shirt kids he hired to work 90 hours a week, every week. The CEO nodded then and he nods now. Then at how smart it would be to get some full-growth timber into the board meetings, and now because, yeah, those might-have-been hippies are sometimes tough to place in the age spectrum.

"Go ahead," the CEO says, spinning a 165-gram Frisbee on the end of his left middle finger.

"He did incredible work on the business side at a music label in the early '70s, and before that -- after that? I can't remember -- he was at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York. And he's my college roommate's uncle, so I got the skinny on him, above the particulars. Dude, he used to smoke pot. He knew Allen Ginsberg. That's why he moved out here! He's really into jazz, and he's got a ton of cash already. He just wants to be in the game; his daughter turned him on to e-mail in '93, and he saw the potential right away. He knows every fucking suit in San Francisco and a whole shitload in New York. Dude, he is perfect."

Another nod, another few meetings, and the Crossover Geezer is aboard, with a private office, an assistant, and a mandate to do breakfast and lunch on the company at least eight times a week. Maturity needs to schmooze is the general message he takes home after the first week. It's a sweet deal.

The Crossover Geezer is in fact 61 years old. A year ago he walked away from his position as CEO of a middling-large brick-and-mortar retail outfit. Midlife crisis was the word on the street. He is the divorced father of three young women, the younger two of whom are stone yetties: One's a market analyst for a Manhattan Internet startup that tracks IPOs for online investors; and the other's a PR Bunny for a large-going-larger software outfit in the Valley. The oldest girl's married and raising kids in Vermont; her husband sold his software company to Microsoft two years ago for $110 million and now runs an organic dairy farm that operates at a slight loss. The geezer's ex-wife is up there, too. She ashamed in the '70s and now owns a crafts store in Manchester Center. She lives with a guy who runs the snowmaking operations at one of those icy East Coast ski hills.

The Crossover Geezer has smoked pot only five, maybe six times in his life. His tastes run to tattersall shirts and wheat-colored corduroys. He did in fact cut his business teeth at Brown Brothers and had indeed left after five years to work at a record label a friend from Williams started after the counterculture hit big. But he cut ties with the place after eight months -- "freaks," he thought, privately, was indeed the apposite word for those he'd encountered -- and returned to the wide halls of the old economy. The hippie stint helped him enormously there, however; he seemed perpetually to be the go-to meeting guy, the worldly one with the new way of looking at things. By 1978, the nascent Geezer was comfortably running a retail sporting-goods demiempire and watching his marriage deteriorate. In 1980, his company moved to the West Coast. He took the children and went.

The Crossover Geezer drives a Volvo Cross Country wagon; it makes him feel young. He lives in a faux colonial house in Atherton with a real den, and he'll throw barbecue parties in the summer for the kids at the office, who will treat the Saturday afternoons in his well-groomed yard exactly as his own children do, which is to say with a mixture of nostalgia and contempt. He will golf no fewer than four times a month. Soon, the Crossover Geezer will commence a sexual relationship with one of the women in his new company's marketing department; she will be his eldest daughter's elder by 14 months.

But the road to the IPO -- how much smoother it will roll beneath the feet of the CEO and the VC and all the rest! For with this firm-spun old codger in among them, chairing meetings and keeping people on message and away from the whiteboards, with his encyclopedic knowledge of old-economy gurus and his apparently limitless capacity for bullshitting it with tales of future profits and brilliant models for revenue growth, how can the company fail?

The Crossover Geezer is equal parts mascot and father figure and Trojan horse. He is a yettie, of course, but in the most abstract sense. He is a human security blanket. "You don't remember 1987," he tells his young colleagues. "Now, that was a real crash."

Sam Sifton is a senior writer and editor at Talk Magazine.

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