In the mid-2000s I spent enough time in Tanzania to stop noticing the thing a visitor notices first: almost everyone had a cell phone. Not a landline at home. Not a shared village phone. A handset, usually a Nokia, often something from the European market the US had not seen yet. There was a real secondary market, and the phones moving through it were in most ways more interesting, more diverse, and more advanced than what people in the US were carrying. A US Razr was good currency in that market, and I traded mine more than once for something better. The network was spotty, the electricity was spottier, and the towers kept working anyway because the business of getting an SMS from one person to another had already won the argument there. There was no copper to retrofit. There was no dial-up, no DSL, no ISDN, no cable. The sequence the US and Europe had lived through was not a sequence there. It was a thing that had never happened.

In 1999 I was running a web hosting business out of real server racks, selling dedicated machines to customers who mostly reached them from Windows desktops sitting on furniture. The endpoints were known. They lived in offices and bedrooms. They plugged into the wall. If you wanted to manage your server, you sat down at a desk and did it.

Netflix launched its rental service in April 1998. I was running PowerSurge at the time, deploying dedicated servers and trying to make DNS manageable for people who should not have to love raw BIND configs. We were on the same internet, building entirely different things. They were betting the network was good enough to manage the logistics of physical media. I was betting the network was good enough to run a hosting business. We were both right, and both bets worked for a while.

When I was running 5GuysTech, we had a real office, real staff, and a real pitch: the internet is where commerce is going, and your business needs to be there before your competitors arrive. We would sit across from small business owners, walk them through what a website could do for them, and wait for the moment they understood why it mattered.

Most of them heard us out. Almost none of them signed.

The objection that stuck with me was not hostile. It was calm and accurate. "My customers know where I am. They come in through the door. This is expensive." That was not denial. That was an honest description of how those businesses had operated for the entire length of their existence. The idea that someone would find a business through a search engine, hand credit card information to a server they had never met, then wait several days for something they could pick up that afternoon. That assumed a customer psychology most brick-and-mortar operators were not yet working with. Their current customers were not those customers.

They were right about the present. They were wrong about the direction.

I started working for PowerSurge Technologies, inc. in the 1995-1996 school year. I was in high school. The next year I left and got my GED, and was invited to become the CEO. I advertised JMac's CGI Archive and JMacLabs.com in my high school yearbook. It was a different time.