I always get reflective when I watch the Olympics. I remember where I was the last time there was an Olympics, who I watched it with, what was going on in my life at the time. Like a lot of other people, I bet, I also remember my own experiences with the sport as I watch.

It’s always the Summer Olympics that stir up the most memories for me, and this Olympics in particular provided a number of fun flashbacks.

Swimming was a huge part of my childhood, and I was on multiple swim teams at any given time. I was on a dive team for a while as well….although, I guess a more accurate description would be that my swim team wanted a dive team, and a few of us tried it out. But as soon as a friend of mine did a face plant into the board during a backflip (ala Greg Louganis), we were told to stick with swimming.

I was a damn good swimmer, if I may say so, although how I did depended on which team I was swimming for. At summer camp, I pretty much always placed first. At home, I swam for second, no matter what event it was. Relay, solo, I always placed second to someone on my own team. Nice that my team always went one-two, but still… The only time I placed first at home was in butterfly (which is an evil evil stroke that I think I was only forced to swim because I was the only one who could do it), but I was disqualified for having a “left inverted pinky toe.” I didn’t understand what it meant then, and while I kinda think it had something to do with my foot pointing the wrong way, I still don’t get the inverted toe reference now.

I loved swimming, though, and nothing could keep me out of the pool, not even a cast on my broken wrist that wasn’t supposed to get wet. The cast sure did come in handy during camp color war, though! I looooved color war, and it all always came down to the last day, when we had a full day relay race with baton passing and all. I was given the swimming event, of course, which just happened to be the final leg. The baton caused some difficulties for other swimmers, since they couldn’t figure out how to hold it while swimming. Me? I shoved it into my cast! I did ultimately pay for swimming with the cast when I got it off (my arm was a wreck), but I don’t think I would have given up that moment for anything.

I did the AYSO (kiddie league soccer) thing, although I was terrible. I may be the only goalie in history to score a goal for the opposing team by drop kicking the ball straight over my head. Still not sure how I lived that one down…if I ever did. But every time I see a goalie kick a ball away in a soccer game I remember that moment.

Basketball, well, I’m tall, and my dad loves basketball. Wasn’t it a given that he would be my basketball coach when I was a kid? I hit high school, played one year on junior varsity and quit. Wasn’t my thing.

But volleyball? That was my thing. I still wasn’t very good - the only sport I was ever really good at was swimming - but I was decent enough to play. And I’m competitive as hell. My volleyball team had a pretty fun rivalry going with another school, and when we met at tournaments, it was a crazy thing. Spikes to the face, the whole bit.

(here’s where I date myself) I was in high school, playing volleyball, the last time the US men’s team won the gold. My team became obsessed with the Olympic team. Every day, we would charge into practice, all excited to emulate those amazing men. We would be slightly bleary eyed from watching a match live the night before - from Korea - but we were still driven to be like those guys. We even dubbed each team member with a counterpart on the Olympic team. Me, I was Steve Timmons, although I had a crush on Karch Kiraly. The men won the gold, and we beat our rival team. It was a great year.

The men won the gold again this year, and all the games were narrated by none other than Karch Kiraly. It was a blast to watch, and the memories came flooding back. I’d watch someone spike, remember someone else who’d done that. Watch another person set a ball, think back to our setter (who was, without a doubt, the best player on our team. She was awesome.). Watch someone serve a ball out, remember myself doing that. Hey, I said I wasn’t very good.

I loved everything about sports then. Winning, obviously, was best, but even practices could be fun if you were in the right mindset. Those practices during the Olympics are probably my fondest memories of volleyball. Swimming endless laps in a pool gets boring. But pretending you’re an olympian? Now that’s fun.

I may not be Michael Phelps, but I still have a huge box full of ribbons and trophies all my own. And every four years, it’s just fun to look back.

This blog entry is in response to this article from yesterday’s Boing Boing, where Josh Harris, founder of Pseudo.com (the startup I worked at for four years), called the company fake. An experiment in performance art.

First off. We were in no way fake, or not a “real” company. Pseudo did what we called “interactive television,” or what we now call podcasts.  We had employees, expenses (oohh did we ever have expenses), and put out new content daily. I even had a contract.

When I first started at Pseudo, we were a rather bloated company with 300+ employees running a bunch of different content channels.  Some channels did ok, like 88 Hip Hop, some didn’t really get many viewers at all. The channel I worked for, All Games Network (Wikipedia entry), was one of the top channels at the time. Live five days a week, and available on demand at any time.

My life was pretty much Pseudo. I could be found in our chatroom all day, nearly every day. I was on-air or producing 4 or 5 shows at any given time. We were a bubble startup and every single stereotype of bubble startups applied to us. A lot of work to be done by a small number of people, so everyone ended up doing some of everything.

Josh? He was rarely, if ever, in the office. He did throw us great parties, though, always with the seekrit room in back.

It was always pretty clear to us, as employees, that the company was being mismanaged. We were cool and hip with offices in an amazing location, but we had no business model.  We spent massive amounts of money on all sorts of stupid things. I remember very clearly spending one night on a business trip taste testing various kinds of sherry with a coworker of mine. Because I’d never had it before, and because I could. Loved that corporate card, and the idea of a limited “expense account” didn’t exist.

Pseudo even funded an all-female Quake tournament – Female Fragfest ’99. We flew finalists to NYC from all over the United States (one person came from Alaska), put them up in a nice hotel, took them around the city, and had our finals live in person. We got tons of press for doing it, girls playing Quake was a novelty at the time: Wired, the Village Voice, and SF Gate, among others . The tournament didn’t exactly bring in money, and it was hardly cheap to pull off.

I don’t honestly remember which happened first -  the layoffs, or Josh leaving – but it was all around the same time. Pseudo dropped to 200 employees, to 150, then finally to 75. Josh was replaced by an old-school experienced CEO from CNN.

The new CEO did his best. He reorganized the company entirely, including a really nasty round of layoffs, and changed us from lots of different channels, each with their own line up and schedule, to one channel with different shows. I became what they called an “EJ” for Electronic Jockey (get it? VJ? EJ) – and while I still concentrated on gaming, I also worked on a number of different shows, politics, wrestling, girly stuff. I filled in wherever a host needed someone to be on-air and in a chatroom at the same time.

The company still didn’t get the financial thing down, though. Kind of ironic, given that Silicon Alley Reporter was one of our shows. Instead of hunting for a viable business model, we spent a fortune covering the Democratic National Convention. It was neat, we were the only website to have a skybox at the time, but it didn’t really do anything for the company.

As with most of the bubble startups, one day we walked in and were told we could either have our final paycheck or two more months of health insurance. We were bankrupt.

It was the end of an era for us, and for many other folks who worked in startups. We had truly put our heart and soul into something we loved, something we believed in. Those of us who were still there the last day were there by choice, we’d been warned by senior management that we were probably going bankrupt months before. We were there because we believed in what we were doing, because we thought we were going to change the world, because we were young and willing to do whatever it took to make the copmany succeed.

And you know, I truly think we did something remarkable. Podcasting, ten years ago. Sure, we called it “interactive television,” but same difference. The interactivity was unique at the time, but it is no longer a special feature to create a single company around, it’s expected. No matter what you’re doing, you better have open communication.

A bunch of my old shows from AGN (the All Games Network) are still online (Real player required, because, well, that was the streaming tech available at the time). Sometimes online, anyway, they don’t always work. That was a pretty common thing at Pseudo.

The All Games Network still lives on, although it has gone through a few makeovers since the Pseudo days. And while I’m no longer part of the company, I still keep in touch with a number of people from our community then, and I imagine I always will.

Pseudo was very real and special to us. As for Josh Harris? Thanks for the memories, and good luck with your apple orchard.