Voyage to the New Economy

Until March 1999, Shaun Holliday knew exactly what he wanted in life. At 41, he was a fast-track executive at the Guinness brewery division of Britain's giant Diageo conglomerate, overseeing more than 3,300 people and hoping to become a big-company CEO someday. When Holliday was a teenager, his father had nudged him in that direction, encouraging him to get an MBA and then to work for a major chemical company. In his first few jobs after business school, Holliday found mentors at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and at Frito-Lay Inc. -- mentors who also pointed him toward a classic, big-company career.

But in the midst of a Colorado snowboarding trip -- without telling his bosses, his mentors, or his father -- Holliday strayed from the trails to attend a meeting, arranged by a high-profile headhunter and venture capitalist, with a casually dressed 28-year-old bursting with big ideas. His name was Andrew Busey. He was the cofounder of living.com, an Austin-based company that planned to sell furniture online. The three-month-old company had no revenue, barely a dozen employees, and no chance of turning a profit anytime soon. Nonetheless, Busey believed that living.com could transform furniture shopping into a faster, easier, and more efficient experience for everyone. All he needed, Busey said, was the right CEO.

As the two men talked over breakfast, Holliday's initial skepticism began to melt away. This was a remarkable opportunity, he told himself. It might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Yes, there was a risk that Busey's vision was just a mirage -- and that living.com might not make it. But that sense of danger was exhilarating. "I could have played it safe," Holliday recalls. He could have stayed on the career track that he had chosen two decades earlier. But, he thought, wouldn't he regret, 30 years later, having turned down the chance to be a pioneer in the Internet era?

When the men parted four hours later, Holliday knew what his next step would be. He hadn't quite said yes to Busey's overtures, but he was headed that way. That afternoon, he asked his wife how she would feel about leaving Ireland and moving to Texas. Two months later, he informed his boss at Diageo that he was about to walk away from an enviable career to see instead what he could do at a brash Internet startup. Then, in September 1999, Holliday began his new job. Standing on a tattered gray chair in an office corridor, addressing the few dozen onlookers who constituted his entire workforce, he explained why he had left Guinness and why he believed that together they could make living.com a great company. It was the first day of his voyage to an uncharted land.

Across the United States, thousands of executives are making a similar voyage. They are abandoning prized jobs at famous companies, walking out of corner offices at the likes of Avon, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Knight Ridder, and leading law firms and consulting shops. In doing so, they are jettisoning career assumptions and personal values that were cherished a generation ago -- being part of a mighty, entrenched, time-tested corporation -- for something utterly different. The new goal: to prove your merits at an Internet-oriented startup with no real assets or heritage but with huge ambitions.

The phenomenon has become so big, so rapid, and so relentless that it's the business world's equivalent of past Great Migrations. Indeed, many of the people who make this dramatic career leap invoke metaphors from history -- of Puritans crossing the Atlantic four centuries ago to make a new life in the New World, of millions of immigrants streaming to the United States 100 years ago and gazing in nervous wonder at the site of the Statue of Liberty. In a prophetic 1996 essay, Tom Ashbrook, then an editor at the "Boston Globe," explained his decision to embark on a new career helping to build HomePortfolio.com by declaring: "Some part of the urge to jump feels almost genetic, a seed of history and blood just waiting for the climate that calls it up. In all my life, I never felt closer to the experience of immigrant forebears than I do now. They sailed from old world to new. Now it's my turn."

The voyage is not always metaphorical. For hundreds of thousands of people from countries such as Israel, Russia, and Taiwan, migration to the new economy is a literal description of their plane flights and ocean crossings to Seattle and Silicon Valley. For the current fiscal year, Congress has authorized 115,000 H1-B visas, which are awarded chiefly to high-technology experts who aren't U.S. citizens. That is nearly double the quota of a few years ago, yet it still isn't enough. This year's batch of visas was exhausted in less than six months. Now efforts are under way to raise the quota to up to 195,000 visas. For these new immigrants, Starbucks may be a more appropriate symbol of America than the Statue of Liberty, but the voyage to a New World is just as awe-inspiring, just as nerve-wracking, as it was 100 years ago.