The Great E-scape

“The pro-leisure circuit” is what the post-dot-commers call it, and Monica Lee has been working it for more than a year. Snow-cat skiing in Canada, surfing in Fiji, abalone diving in Mendocino, snowboarding in Tahoe, salsa-ing in Havana--and that’s just the last four months. When she and her partners sold their Internet auction site, the only question was what the Harvard- and MIT-educated Lee would do next. The answer: recreate as she’d never recreated before.

The answer for Varsha Rao was to go climb some mountains. When her online company was bought only to be shut down in November by its new owners, the co-president of Eve.com swaddled herself in Gore-Tex and set off for Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park. Spectacularly remote, it seemed the one place she could escape from the Internet rat race. She was in a gale on a boat in a glacial lake when she realized that she’d gone to the end of the Earth, only to end up with . . . other escapees from the Internet rat race.

“My name is Richard Titus, and I just left a company called Razorfish,” the young guy next to her in the cabin offered as their vessel pitched under a wall of water. “I’m taking a break for a few months.”

Alex Jarotzky was laid off with two months’ severance and a pile of worthless stock options from a health care “dot-bomb.” Some 33-year-olds might have looked for a new job. Jarotzky put himself on a budget and went hiking on Mt. Shasta. “That was in June,” he says. “I stayed out for six months, and not once was I lonely. I know probably 20 people who aren’t contributing to the gross domestic product but are just taking time out just to ask, ‘What do I want?’ ”

Dot-com mania has given way to a wave of dot-com decompression, and from Tahoe to Tierra del Fuego, oases of leisure are swelling with idled refugees from the new economy. To be sure, most in the battered Web sector are just trying to secure paychecks now as layoffs and shutdowns continue. But a sizable number have chosen--either because of the uncertain job market or early windfalls or sheer exhaustion or mere denial--to temporarily check out while they plan their next move, and leisure destinations worldwide are feeling the impact.

“There’s a whole subculture out there,” says John Challenger, chief executive of the Chicago-based private job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which has tracked dot-com layoffs. Recruiters “run into it now all the time.”

Hard numbers are elusive because not even Challenger tracks voluntary timeouts from the high-tech job market. But the evidence is inescapable in hip vacation spots, where Web veterans on hiatus are lining wilderness ski slopes, tripping over each other in Third World outbacks, crowding bohemian cafes and flocking to laid-back beach towns.

Some locals complain of rising costs and crowding, others that they’re being overrun by driven overachievers so determined to unwind that they’ve turned even inner peace into a competitive conquest.

“This place,” sighs Norm Sayler of the Donner Ski Resort, in the Sierra 90 miles east of Sacramento, “used to be a way of life. These people have just turned it into another form of entertainment. Used to be, you’d practice for years, just getting to know the mountain, just to get on a chair lift. With these Internet people, it’s ‘Get picked up, go to the bottom, OK, check that one off, what’s for lunch now?’ Just ‘Ho-hum, is-that-all-there-is?’ ”

For others, though, the battle cry is: If you can’t beat ‘em, exploit ‘em. Richard Schmidt, who runs a large Santa Cruz surfing school, for example, says Silicon Valley executives now make up about a third of his enrollment, up from about 10% three years ago. (His acceptance of newcomers has not been universally viewed as good news--at least two middle-aged long-boarders were punched out last year near a popular beginners’ surf spot after local surfers mistook them for invading dot-commers. One convicted assailant told the local paper that he resented Silicon Valley “kooks” with “their nice BMWs or whatever” who “come over with an attitude.”

Cox & Kings travel, which specializes in luxury tours of the Third World, also has begun courting regrouping ex-dot-commers. Nathaniel Waring of the agency’s Tampa office recently planned a trip to Cuba for Monica Lee and a group of young Silicon Valley professionals, and he’s booking two more tour groups from a Silicon Valley networking club Lee formed. On deck for this year are a sand-surfing expedition to the dunes of Namibia and a Patagonian trek. Waring says his clientele until recently was overwhelmingly made up of retirees, but he expects tech sector sabbaticals to make up 10% to 20% of his business in the next couple of years.

Extreme skier Scot Schmidt (no relation to Richard Schmidt) says demand for name-brand coaching in his sport is so high among young tech entrepreneurs that he and a group of celebrity surfers, rock climbers and mountain bikers have launched their own guided-sports-tour company. In January, the Bay Area firm--called GowithaPro--booked two groups of dot-com refugees for a back-country skiing trip with Scot Schmidt to Canada’s Island Lake Lodge. In February, the company will send a group of venture capitalists to Costa Rica with its director of surfing, Robert “Wingnut” Weaver of “Endless Summer II” fame.

Meanwhile, demand for vacation retreats has gobbled up beach houses in Southern California and spawned a building boom in the Sierra Nevada. Kirkwood, a resort near Lake Tahoe so remote that it has to maintain its own supply of electricity and water, recently installed state-of-the-art fiber optic cable and wired most of its homes and all of its public buildings for high-speed Internet access.

“Seventy percent of our homebuyers come from the Silicon Valley, and a lot of them like to telecommute,” says Tim Cohee, president of the Kirkwood Mountain Resort. “The whole place is wired now.”

‘I Thought, “This Isn’t the Life I Want.”

At the crux of the trend are people like Aimee Rosewall, who checked out of the Internet party early last year. A veteran of five tech start-ups, she had put in six years of seven-day workweeks that routinely started at 6 a.m. and often ended well after the late-night news. Shortly before her 35th birthday in January 2000, she looked around her apartment and realized that it was too tidy, the way apartments get when there’s no time to actually live in them.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t the life I want,’ ” says Rosewall. “I mean, I didn’t even have plants.”

She wasn’t wealthy, but having no personal life had made it easy to save money. Also she was single and childless. She took a deep breath and quit. First, she did about three years’ worth of spring cleaning. Then she went to the dentist, which she’d also been putting off for years. Then she sat around in cafes, reading the paper. Then she went to Europe with nothing but a little pocket atlas to guide her. By the time she got back to the Bay Area in November, the whole dot-com scene had soured and maybe a third of the colleagues who’d questioned her sanity for quitting were on hiatus themselves.

Over vegetarian chili recently, she gestured around the Grove cafe in San Francisco’s Marina District. It was well past the lunch hour, and the fern-laden coffeehouse was packed. “See those plugs along the wall?” She pointed to a row of Craftsman-style tables equipped with discreetly placed outlets. “You can plug laptops into them. People used to sit here all day writing business plans.”

The plugs were empty. There wasn’t a laptop on the landscape. Then Rosewall pointed to a woman at a corner table. “See her? She’s been off for months now, and--”

She suddenly saw an old dot-com colleague and waved. “I thought that was you! What are you up to?”

“Not much. Just got back from Europe,” replied Scott Duffy, a 30-year-old former vice president at NBCi who, at 2 p.m. on a workday, was lolling around in a hooded sweatshirt, writing in his journal. “I’ve been off for 10 months now,” Duffy confided in what seemed, at that moment, to be the mantra for half of San Francisco. “I really, really needed a rest.”

Part of that need has to do with workplace tradition in Silicon Valley, where four- to six-week sabbaticals have been an employee retention device for some years. Dave McMurtry, a product development manager at Intuit, says that in the early 1990s, software production cycles were such that a new product would typically take a year of intensive work to develop and market. Tech workers would put in 80-hour workweeks to meet deadline, then decompress with an extended vacation. An avid traveler, McMurtry, 34, says he used the time to work toward his goal of visiting every one of the world’s approximately 313 countries by the time he’s 50. (He figures he’s about two-thirds of the way there.)

Moreover, until this downturn, he notes, demand for skilled tech workers and executives was so fierce that “there has been no doubt in anyone’s mind that if you were in this industry and you walked off the job today, you could get a new one tomorrow.” Even now, laid-off workers in the Bay Area typically express optimism about the size of the job pool--this despite the fact that a recent UC Berkeley forecast estimates the area will lose more than 23,000 jobs in the next two years. Every person interviewed for this article had been approached in the last month by multiple employers, most of them established tech businesses or old-economy firms.

But much of the technology work force is young and unencumbered, either by memories of the last big recession or by families who might suffer from a decision to subsist on savings for a few months.

“I’m a single guy,” says McMurtry. “There’s no one to take care of. No one’s waiting for me. I don’t have kids to pick up at school.”

Last year, having earned a master’s degree in management from Stanford, McMurtry postponed his return to work to take a six-month ramble through central Asia. His exploits are documented on a personal Web site that, though intended just for friends and family, has developed something of a pro-leisure, ex-dot-com cult following. One much-admired posting tells, for example, how he finessed a bureaucrat at the Chinese border by filling in an indecipherable questionnaire with the first verse of the Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon.” Another speaks to the inner Indiana Jones of so many code-writing cubicle-dwellers:

Believe it or not, this little village has an old 486 with a phone line, McMurtry writes from a tent community somewhere outside Ulan Bator, Mongolia. I brokered an hour online and a cup of yak-milk in exchange for 500T ($.50), a pack of Marlboros and my month-old copy of the Economist.

It’s a Small World for Ex-Start-Up Employees

It’s that sort of postcard that has thrown down the leisure gauntlet to the Silicon Valley, to the point that ex-start-up employees are bumping into each other like extras in a dot-com version of “The Great Race.”

“I got off a plane in Kauai and ran into someone from work who was not only at the same little airport but at the same hotel,” said Anthony Lee, a Bay Area 30-year-old who spent six months last year recovering from 100-hour-a-week stints at two start-ups.

“I was in Prague, and I heard this voice on the street, and I said, ‘Bill?’ And it was this guy I knew from a dot-com in Boston,” said another pro-leisure veteran, a 36-year-old who is halfway through a yearlong hiatus and wanted to remain anonymous for the next six months.

“I’ve probably run into 10 Internet people, including Varsha, on this sabbatical, and three of them were on a raft on the Futaleufu River,” said Titus, the Razorfish alumnus. (His itinerary ranged from the aforementioned Andean rapids to Italy and the Sundance Film Festival.)

“A friend of mine traveling through the ‘stans ran into someone she knew from back here, totally randomly,” Monica Lee reported, using the operative dot-com slang for Kazakhistan, Uzbekistan and similarly suffixed pieces of the former Soviet Union. “And another friend went to Turkey with 20 people and ran into three other people, separately, that he knew. I was coming back from Belize? Ran into a friend from Silicon Valley. Back country skiing in Shasta? Ran into someone else in a parking lot. And you can’t not run into people in Tahoe. It’s the MBA-Silicon Valley home away from home. People stand around complaining about their stock options in the lift lines. Actually, it’s a little obnoxious, if you want to know the truth.”

In fact, Lee herself has recently begun to capitalize on dot-com decompression, using a social group she launched in 1994. She had not yet gotten her MBA and was working for a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, when she and a few friends took a rare break from work for a Wednesday night cocktail. They had so much fun that they agreed to meet two weeks later. Friends invited friends, which meant, in the small town that is Silicon Valley, that tech people and VCs mostly invited each other. Thus was born Lee’s salon, WildCard Wednesdays.

For years, the group was a sort of young professionals’ mixer, eventually burgeoning into a networking community of some 4,000 names. Then, in 1999, the company Lee had co-founded, CityAuction, was bought by Ticketmaster Online. Having put in two years’ worth of 80-hour workweeks, Lee cashed out--and almost immediately began channeling her energy into WildCard Wednesdays.

Lee e-mailed the WildCard network, soliciting for participants in adventures that interested her but were no fun to do by herself. At least 30% of the WildCard list, she says, turned out to be, like her, doing the pro-leisure thing. Outing has led to outing, and Lee says she has begun to noodle with the idea of turning it into a real business someday.

This, of course, raises the question of how much rest she’s actually gotten on the pro-leisure circuit. She acknowledges that “WildCard,” as she calls it, has her working--er, decompressing, overtime. Lately, she’s been having to take vacations from her commitment as host of the WildCard vacations. “I’m actually thinking,” she confessed wearily, “about going back to work.”