After the second startup I'd worked at (NYC based, founded by ex colleagues of Bezos from DE Shaw) started burning out in early 2001, I worked for a consulting

After the second startup I'd worked at (NYC based, founded by ex colleagues of Bezos from DE Shaw) started burning out in early 2001, I worked for a consulting company. One of our clients were the shady founders of CyberRebate, who no doubt saw the writing on the wall and were looking to put their capital into a backup product. Their idea was a "plugin" that users would install on your computer, which would proxy all internet traffic - swapping out ads for their own. In return for running it, users would earn coupons and points. Of course, CyberRebate crashed and burned in May 2001, and that contract dried up with it. I vaguely remember a horrific architecture involving EJBs (session beans perhaps) running on WebSphere - a scarring enough experience that I studiously avoided J2EE (although stuck with JVM languages) since. After that gig fizzled up, I moved to the bay area (in the midst of the tech drought) and did construction gigs sourced from craigslist to pay the bills while attempting to start a brick & mortar retail business. Eventually tech picked back up and I got back behind a screen.