The Silicon Valley Internet Summit was a huge, three-day party for tech nerds, and it was held in a giant hall in Los Angeles.
The room was buzzing with excitement. On one side, you had the giant, rich companies like IBM and Microsoft, with their fancy, polished booths.
On the other side, there were over 750 new, smaller internet startups. Their founders were running around, talking super-fast, all hoping to get the attention of the 3,000 investors who were walking around with checkbooks.
Zane moved through the crowded hall, his eyes wide. He was taking it all in, just trying to find a good idea. He stopped to listen to a man in a blue suit who was making some really wild claims.
"...and we believe we will be the next Cisco!" the man declared. "No, we will beat Cisco!"
Zane listened for another minute and had to stop himself from laughing. This guy is a total fake, he thought. The things he's promising won't even be possible in the year 2020!
He expected the crowd to laugh with him. But to his shock, a dozen investors ran up to the man after his speech, all wanting to give him their money!
This was Zane's first big lesson about the dot-com "bubble." It wasn't about what was real. It was about who told the best story. People were so excited about the internet that they were throwing money at anything that sounded cool, even if it was impossible.
Zane shook his head, a little worried. He knew he wasn't a tech genius. He couldn't tell a real, smart idea from a fake one. His only advantage was that he knew the names of the companies that would win in the end.
But he had a problem. The big, famous companies didn't need his money. And the future big winners were still too small and unknown to even be at this party.
At the end of the first day, he spotted a familiar face: a man named Jeff Bezos, who wasn't bald yet. He was standing at a tiny, quiet booth for a company called "Amazon.com."
Zane knew this man was a real genius. He was a super-smart guy who had been a big shot on Wall Street.
"Mr. Bezos?" Zane said, walking up with his most polite, charming smile. "My name is Zane Blackwood. I'm an investor and I also own a movie company in Hollywood. I just wanted to say, I'm a huge admirer of your vision for e-commerce."
They shook hands. Bezos smiled, but it was a very polite, "I'm busy" kind of smile.
"Thank you," Bezos said, "but I'm not here to look for money. I'm just here to... observe." He cut Zane off before he could even start his pitch!
Zane walked away, feeling a little frustrated. Ouch. It was one thing to be ignored by a fake, but it was another to be politely turned down by a real genius.
Zane was used to being the one with all the secret answers (knowing the future), but Bezos... he was the one actually building the future. It was a little humbling.
The second and third days of the summit were a total bummer. It was just a blur of crazy-sounding fakes, weird ideas, and more polite "no, thank yous."
Zane started to feel really down. His special knowledge felt useless. He felt like a guy who knew the names of a dozen future kings, but he was lost in a crowd of a thousand jokers and couldn't tell who was who.
On the final afternoon, he left the big hall, feeling defeated. The whole trip had been a complete waste of time.
He was following the crowd to the exit when he heard three young men talking in front of him. They sounded so excited and full of passion.
"I'm telling you," one of them said, "when our ICQ is released next year, we're going to be as successful as Microsoft and Netscape!"
The name hit Zane like a jolt of electricity.
ICQ.
He stopped. Right in the middle of the hallway. The noise of the crowd just faded away.
It wasn't just a name. It was a memory. It was the world's first giant, global instant messaging program. It was a huge part of the early internet.
He had spent three days searching for a little bit of gold... and just as he was giving up, he had accidentally stumbled over a mountain of diamonds.
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