Post by Jaga on Sept 6, 2007 18:08:37 GMT -7
In California even millionaires have to work very hard
scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1267342007
Millionaire geeks work overtime to make ends meet
GARY RIVLIN IN MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
BY ALMOST any definition - except his own and perhaps those of his neighbours here in Silicon Valley - Hal Steger has made it.
Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2m. The $1.3m house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific is paid off. The couple's net worth of roughly $3.5m places them in the top 2% of families in America.
Yet Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls "the Silicon Valley salt mines", working as a marketing executive for a technology startup company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7am. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.
"I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard," Steger says. "But a few million doesn't go as far as it used to. Maybe in the 1970s, a few million bucks meant Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous, or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not any more."
Silicon Valley is thick with those who might be called working-class millionaires - nose-to-the-grindstone people such as Steger who, much to their surprise, are still working as hard as ever even as they find themselves among the fortunate few.
Their lives are rich with opportunity; they generally enjoy their jobs. They are amply cushioned against the anxieties and jolts that worry a vast majority of people living pay day to pay day.
But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth - often a lot more.
When chief executives are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year and a hedge fund manager can collect $1bn annually, those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes.
"Everyone around here looks at the people above them," says Gary Kremen, the 43-year-old founder of match.com, a popular online dating service. "It's just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7m wondering what's so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars."
Kremen estimates his net worth at $10m. That puts him firmly in the top half of 1% among Americans, according to wealth data from the Federal Reserve, but barely in the top echelons in affluent towns such as Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton.
So he logs 60- to 80-hour working weeks because, he says, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.
"You're nobody here at $10m," Kremen says earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upmarket wine bar.
Not every Silicon Valley millionaire, of course, shares that perspective.
Celeste Baranski, a 49-year-old engineer with a net worth of around $5m who lives with her husband in Menlo Park, no longer frets about tucking enough money away for college for their two children.
Long ago she stopped bothering to balance her chequebook. When too many 18-hour days running an engineering department of 1,200 left her feeling burned out and empty, she left and gave herself 12 months off.
Yet like other working-class millionaires of Silicon Valley, she harbours anxieties about her financial future. Baranski - who was briefly worth as much as $200m in 2000 but cashed out only $1m before the collapse of the technology bubble - returned to work in March.
Along with two partners, she founded a software company, Vitamin D, and already she is resigned to the sleepless nights and other stresses that await her.
"I ask myself all the time," Baranski confesses, "why I do this."
This article: scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm
scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1267342007
Millionaire geeks work overtime to make ends meet
GARY RIVLIN IN MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
BY ALMOST any definition - except his own and perhaps those of his neighbours here in Silicon Valley - Hal Steger has made it.
Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2m. The $1.3m house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific is paid off. The couple's net worth of roughly $3.5m places them in the top 2% of families in America.
Yet Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls "the Silicon Valley salt mines", working as a marketing executive for a technology startup company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7am. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.
"I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard," Steger says. "But a few million doesn't go as far as it used to. Maybe in the 1970s, a few million bucks meant Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous, or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not any more."
Silicon Valley is thick with those who might be called working-class millionaires - nose-to-the-grindstone people such as Steger who, much to their surprise, are still working as hard as ever even as they find themselves among the fortunate few.
Their lives are rich with opportunity; they generally enjoy their jobs. They are amply cushioned against the anxieties and jolts that worry a vast majority of people living pay day to pay day.
But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth - often a lot more.
When chief executives are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year and a hedge fund manager can collect $1bn annually, those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes.
"Everyone around here looks at the people above them," says Gary Kremen, the 43-year-old founder of match.com, a popular online dating service. "It's just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7m wondering what's so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars."
Kremen estimates his net worth at $10m. That puts him firmly in the top half of 1% among Americans, according to wealth data from the Federal Reserve, but barely in the top echelons in affluent towns such as Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton.
So he logs 60- to 80-hour working weeks because, he says, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.
"You're nobody here at $10m," Kremen says earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upmarket wine bar.
Not every Silicon Valley millionaire, of course, shares that perspective.
Celeste Baranski, a 49-year-old engineer with a net worth of around $5m who lives with her husband in Menlo Park, no longer frets about tucking enough money away for college for their two children.
Long ago she stopped bothering to balance her chequebook. When too many 18-hour days running an engineering department of 1,200 left her feeling burned out and empty, she left and gave herself 12 months off.
Yet like other working-class millionaires of Silicon Valley, she harbours anxieties about her financial future. Baranski - who was briefly worth as much as $200m in 2000 but cashed out only $1m before the collapse of the technology bubble - returned to work in March.
Along with two partners, she founded a software company, Vitamin D, and already she is resigned to the sleepless nights and other stresses that await her.
"I ask myself all the time," Baranski confesses, "why I do this."
This article: scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm