Holding up the rear

Where did all that start-up money go? Clue No. 1: Today's dot-com auctions are flooded with opulent Aeron chairs.

By Amy Standen

Aug. 7, 2001 | By the time the dot-com economy had begun its quick and dirty descent, Jack Lewis was working as director of development for a large game company in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Lewis, an experienced programmer born and raised in San Francisco, could probably have made more money at a start-up, but the game geek and former punk rocker was unmoved by the new industry springing to life around him. "I kinda looked down my nose at it," he says.

Lewis doesn't want his real name used. He worries that describing his investigation into the plush world of high-end office furniture, conducted during working hours, might give the impression that he and his friends were slacking on the job. Now that he's a freelancer he has his reputation to consider. It's only after having detailed the grueling days and the nights spent curled up in a cubicle at his old workplace that Lewis is willing to admit that he and his co-workers needed a break. "When you're working 12- to 14-hour days, you're trying to break the flow. You'll build weird little abstract hobbies."

Lewis' particular weird little abstract hobby involved an expensive piece of office furniture called the Aeron chair. Renowned throughout the office universe for their ergonomically correct luxury, Aerons represent a cubicle worker's most cherished fantasy. When Lewis and a co-worker saw that some Aerons were being auctioned off by a failed dot-com, they swooped in for a cheap score. And then discovered, to their dismay, that even at auctions, Aerons were still retailing for absurdly high prices.

Denied a chance to indulge himself in what Lewis calls "butt pedestals," he decided to investigate just how prevalent Aeron addiction had been in the dot-com world. "It became this casual thing that we could do in our spare moments, you know," he says. We would "check into the auction sites and see what was available, and sometimes we could track down a phone number and ask a few innocent questions."

"How long you guys been in business," Lewis and his friends politely inquired. "What happened? And do you have any Aeron chairs?"

In the process, Lewis discovered that Aerons could be seen as a potent symbol for the entire dot-com boom and bust. Lewis' desire soon morphed into derision. The chairs, he and his co-workers decided, were like "stupidity barometers."

"Any place with more than 10 of these things," he says, "automatically went into the 'stupid' stack."

The investigation found a B2B company that bought 83 Aerons just before closing shop in early 2001, and an open-source start-up whose 110 Aerons were auctioned for $350 apiece after the company shut down in March. Though not exactly scientific, it pointed an accusatory finger at dot-com excess. At a time when venture capitalists were sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into Net start-ups, promising tenfold and 20-fold returns to their investors, a lot of those companies were blowing that money right back out the door on Aeron chairs. Out of overconfidence or hubris or just sheer excitement at so much money so easily acquired, many dot-coms were redirecting significant portions of their first rounds of funding to Herman Miller, the 77-year-old Michigan design firm.

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