From The Industry Standard Top News

December 11, 2000

The New Life of Leisure

The recent wave of layoffs is the perfect opportunity to reinvent yourself – or just goof off.

By Sherri Eng

Jeremy Kwit didn't shed a tear when he got a pink slip last month from AllBusiness.com. He had one thing on his mind: surfing. Kwit used his six-week severance package to buy a couple of used boards and a plane ticket to El Salvador, where the 28-year-old now plans his days around wave breaks and tide changes.

Gone are the endless meetings with advertisers and business partners Kwit endured as a business development manager at the small-business services site in San Francisco. "Frankly, I was hoping I would get laid off," says Kwit. He had heard that 16 people would lose their jobs after AllBusiness.com's merger with Bigvine, an online barter marketplace. "For months, I had been dreaming of buying a VW Westphalia and bouncing around the U.S."

Instead, he headed to La Libertad, a small seaside town near San Salvador, known around the globe for its waves. Next, he plans to check out the surf in Peru before settling in Lake Tahoe – just in time for the ski season. Spending as little as $25 a day, Kwit figures he can easily live off his savings for the next six months.

Despite the massive layoffs ripping through the Internet industry – more than 30,000 over the past year, according to some estimates – many burned-out workers are neither upset nor alarmed by their sudden unemployment. Those workers without families to support or mortgages to pay are in no rush to return to 12-hour days in a cubicle farm.

Before getting laid off from her job as research director at online marketplace services site eFrenzy.comin San Francisco, Sara Edelman had already made plans to take a two-week backpacking trip to Burma in November. But with her one-month severance package and savings in the bank, Edelman decided to extend her journey by a week and plans to relax for a few months before looking for work.

"I don't want to be tempted to go back to work so quickly," says the thirtysomething Edelman, who doesn't expect to have much trouble landing a job. Even if the current downturn continues, she figures she can always work as a contractor.

While Edelman says she'd be willing to work for an Internet startup again, others – such as Bjorn Foster, 27, and Kim Heilman, 28 – have no plans to return to the dot-com world. After losing their jobs during layoffs at GreatEntertaining.com in May, the couple visited family and took a three-week vacation in Europe. Now, they plan to start their own Web design and development firm in San Francisco.

"It's very discouraging when you're an employee and you're undervalued, and the only thing you have are [stock] options that are under water," Foster says.

Michael Krasman is using his time unemployed to tend to some unfinished business. Three years ago, the 24-year-old left his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan to launch Versity.com, an online lecture notes site, with three college buddies. The company was acquired by CollegeClub.com in April and was slated to go public. But the market turned south, and CollegeClub laid off 80 employees in August, including Krasman.

Even though he did not receive a severance package, Krasman decided to use some of his savings to travel around California and Mexico for a couple of months before beginning his last semester at Ann Arbor in January.

If nothing else, the dot-com shakeout has reminded workers that there are other ways to define success and happiness than by striking it big at an Internet startup. Kwit, who plans to start a travel adventure business when he joins the working world again, observes: "I'm just not convinced that I want to spend my life being drawn toward the big green magnet of money."

Additional News & Analysis from the Industry Standard

• Has the Net Stopped Growing
• The Layoff Payoff
• Not Your Father’s Radio