T his fall, a few weeks before he left his job at Razorfish (RAZF), David Rappaport noticed a curious new co-worker. The fellow seemed nice enough and, Rappaport recalls thinking, "he was obviously very competent." Still, there was something about him that seemed a little ... off. He wasn't a fish out of water, exactly - but neither did he appear to be fully in his element at the SoHo Web consultancy. Then it hit Rappaport: "He wore a tie almost every day! A year ago we were riding around the office on scooters and wearing fat pants."
That's not to say that Rappaport, a 23-year-old rock musician who headed Razorfish's audio strategy group, left his job because it stopped resembling a playground. But the new guy's neckwear did represent a major shift in the corporate vibe. "It's the entire industry," says Rappaport, who plays guitar and sings in two bands and favors a '60s London mod style. "The owners and CEOs of all these Web companies wanted to make their offices fun places to work. But now people are coming to terms with the fact that they're delivering a product."
Rappaport moved to Elias Arts, a high-end commercial sound-design firm where he feels he can better hone his musical skills. "Razorfish is a great place to work," he insists. "It's a great one-stop, full-service company. But I had to ask myself, do I want to work at Macy's or at a guitar store?"
The story is the same across most of the Web industry: It's just not cool to work at a dot-com any more. Granted, coolness can take many forms. But lately, dot-coms have lost ground in almost all of them. As the financial bottom has fallen out, cash woes have dampened the cool quotient of the dot-com. What's more, businesses have been forced to become a bit more businesslike; no more nap rooms or hordes of yapping dogs in the office. Finally - and inevitably - it seems that the fad phase of the Internet revolution has run its course. It's a matter of simple arithmetic: The aura of coolness dissipates when the Gap (GPS)-clad masses outnumber those who wouldn't be caught dead in khaki.
The early days of Silicon Alley, on the other hand, were a veritable procession of pierced noses, dyed hair and tattooed torsos. Even CEOs felt free to show up for work looking like they were ready for a night of Ecstasy-fueled revelry. If such an atmosphere made clients uncomfortable, it was their problem. They were simply stuffy, stubborn and about to be left behind. The Internet was going to change the world by changing the way business was done. Companies would soon be freed from priggish obsessions with balance sheets, pressed pants and corporate hierarchies. Instead, the workplace would be a citadel of creative enthusiasm replete with Eamesian curves, daily snack service and Foosball tables. It would be the capitalist answer to Marx's workers' paradise: From each according to his ability, to each millions and millions of stock-option-contingent dollars.
But today, with Web consultancies racking up layoffs and old-line consultancies (even - gasp - accounting firms) proving to be formidable competition, hipper-than-thou business neophytes trying to preach to their old-economy elders are starting to look less refreshing and visionary than naive and blind - and definitely uncool.
For many, of course, big bucks, not creative freedom, was the thing that made dot-coms cool. Just as it had for artists-turned-entrepreneurs, the boom promised coolness - albeit a variety pegged entirely to the bottom line - to this assortment of Wall Street transplants, wanderlust-afflicted lawyers, MBAs sprung from McKinsey and frustrated hackers who might otherwise be making ends meet as bike messengers. But again, when the bubble burst, the hip factor disappeared quickly, too. At the height of the Internet boom, say current and former dot-commers, telling a stranger about their place of employment elicited envy. Recently, though, the typical reaction has been pity. "You used to hear, 'Oh! Can you get me friends-and-family shares?'" recalls one Silicon Alley refugee. "Now it's more like, 'Oh ... are you all right?'"
Not that dot-commers have lost all of their cachet. "Before, working for a dot-com was like wearing an Armani suit," says Bernardo Joselevich. "There's nothing to say about it; people just gasp in admiration. Now it's like wearing something a bit more risqué. Or like having wide lapels or something. It's still fashionable, but it's more eccentric."
Joselevich knows what he's talking about. In March, he was offered $2.5 million for DutyFreeGuide.com, an online shopping venture he founded. But the deal was withdrawn as soon as Joselevich accepted, thanks to the Nasdaq's plunge in March and April. Joselevich was left, he says, keeping his company alive "on artificial respiration."
