Time was, I thought about this stuff all the time. I mean Silicon Valley and the venture capitalists who invested in its startups, and the financial analysts who promoted the companies its investment banks took public. I thought about it because from 1996 to 2002 I was the editor of Red Herring magazine, sometimes called the "bible of the boom." It was an entire world, one that today seems to me as antediluvian as Noah's seaside villa.

I thought about Pip Coburn pretty often, too, because he was the managing director of the technology group of UBS Investment Research, an investment bank, in charge of its 120 technology and telecommunications analysts, and thus a considerable man in the New Economy. But I also thought about him because he wrote a column for Red Herring from late 1999 until shortly before the magazine's collapse in 2003. (The magazine has since been relaunched, in more modest form.)