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about Asia Buzz
Asia Buzz: Unfinished Business
Why I joined the world's smallest company
By ERIC ELLIS
JUNE
1, 2000
Web posted at 1:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 1:00 a.m. EDT
So why did I join an Internet start-up at a time when the market has
tanked? It's a question I am getting weary of since I bailed a month
ago from the world's biggest media company (TIME) to probably the
world's smallest (AsiaWise.com).
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 ASIA BUZZ
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- Thursday,
June 1, 2000
Asia Buzz: You've Got Mail
Hong Kong has a new tabloid--let the sparks fly
- Wednesday,
May 31, 2000
Asia Buzz: China's Shame
Clear thinking on the Tiananmen Massacre
- Monday,
May 29, 2000
Culture on Demand: Heaven on a Stick
The Hawaiian islands of Lana'i and Maui
- Saturday,
May 27, 2000
Letter from Japan:
Get Off Your Bum!
Your country needs you
- Friday,
May 26, 2000
Asia Buzz: Junta.com
Asia must embrace the Net, or suffer
- Thursday,
May 25, 2000
Asia Buzz: Breaking News!
Get it here first
- Tuesday,
May 23, 2000
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 ASIAWEEK
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Let's deal with the boring money part first; I don't get paid as much as I did,
and what's a swag of options worth in a company that doesn't yet operate? This
is hardly a great time for coining it--and I'm not Li Ka-shing. I'm sure the
company I joined will not get a waiver from the stock exchange to cash our stock
out just six months into its young life. And no, I'm not writing this wireless,
poolside from my Andalusian villa. Nor am I ever likely to be.
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INTERACTIVE |
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Ticked off at Asia Buzz? Turned on? Talk back to
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Indeed, the day I formally signed, I woke to a headline in the newspaper that
said, "Dotcommers Re-think Shift to New Economy." Great! It's been a nice
anecdote for the dinner party; or rather, will be when I can afford to throw
another one. And it doesn't look like the market will be coming back any time
soon. It's pretty hard for the types of investors who ran Internet stock up to
where they did two months ago, to enthusiastically return to the same sector,
when they've been savaged by 80% to 90%. Day traders approach such companies as
might package tourists Angkor Wat; been there, ruined that.
O.K., so why? I'm reminded of why I became a journalist, 18 years ago. I was 20
and full of idealism as one is supposed to be at that age. I wanted to help
change the world, educate it, inform it. That sounds pompous but I remember
there was a truth there. All my mates were becoming bankers and brokers--this
was the beginning of the Reagan/Thatcher yuppie years--but I yearned to have
been born a few years earlier when there was something "big" to get angry and
excited about. Like Vietnam, or conscription. But my callow youth was locked in
the intellectual limbo-land of the '70s--South Africa and apartheid came later,
as did nuclear disarmament. Sure ABBA was an outrage, but it was hard to protest
against something Swedish.
So maybe at 38, with most ideals I had obfuscated by two decades of becoming
blasé, there's some unfinished business. Along comes the Internet, transforming
the very thing that I did for a living. "Eat lunch, or become lunch," as the
glib line goes. I am a media junkie and the other day I looked back at something
I wrote 13 years ago, a questionnaire for a Hong Kong magazine which was
interviewing foreign correspondents. The question was: "What is the best thing
in the world?" My answer was, "the crisp promise of an unread newspaper on my
doorstep in the morning." Blechh!
How things change. Today, I can go a week without reading the printed word.
Maybe this is because I now live in Singapore, where what's printed in the local
press and what happens in life are sometimes two different things--another
reason why I decided to change jobs. After nearly a decade in Asia, I saw the
way the world was changing during my three years in San Francisco. California is
famously the world's social and economic laboratory. I had left Asia midway
through '96 when it was the center of the world. I returned to Asia last year,
and felt like I had gone back in time, and it wasn't just the lingering effects
of the financial crisis. It still feels like that, and that means there's an
opportunity there.
As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said this week,
the so-called New Economy is largely a myth outside the United States. It won't
be for long.
That's why.
Eric Ellis is the Southeast Asia and technology editor of web-based finance
portal AsiaWise.com
Ticked off at Asia Buzz? Turned on? Talk back to TIME
Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com
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