Peter Principle

A recent NY Times article interviews millionaires in Silicon Valley complaining about how they “almost made it”. These poor saps now  listlessly manage their investments, sit on company boards, and window-shop for sports cars. All the while glaring jealously at their buddies who became … billionaires.

In Web World, Rich Now Envy the Superrich

Envy may be a sin in some books, but it is a powerful driving force in Silicon Valley, where technical achievements are admired but financial payoffs are the ultimate form of recognition. And now that the YouTube purchase has amplified talk of a second dot-com boom, many high-tech entrepreneurs — successful and not so successful — are examining their lives as measured against upstarts who have made it bigger.
Some find inspiration in others’ success, while some spend tremendous amounts of psychic energy worrying about how rich their friends are.

In the midst of all that hand-wringing, I find my old school buddy PZ, now at Harvard!

Envy can even affect relationships among siblings. When he was growing up in Winchester, Mass., Peter Pezaris told friends and family that he planned to become a millionaire by the age of 30 and a billionaire by 40.

“I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, sure, right,’ ” said Mr. Pezaris’s older brother, John, a computational neuroscientist at Harvard.

True to his word, in 1999, Peter Pezaris sold his two-year-old business, Commissioner.com, to CBS SportsLine for $46 million, three days after his 30th birthday. (The proceeds were shared among five partners; his brother was not among them.)

Peter Pezaris, 37, who is now based in Boca Raton, Fla., said he still believed that he had “plenty of time” to become a billionaire by age 40 with his new start-up, Multiply.com, a social networking site.

This time his brother is paying closer attention. John Pezaris had helped informally with the first business; now he programs for Multiply in his spare time and has a formal stake.

“I wanted to codify something for his second one,” said John Pezaris, who is 43. “So we came to an arrangement.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Silicon Valley, Tech Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.