My Dream Job, The Layoff, and That Pesky NDA, Road Trip Here We Come!

This episode is the true story of how modern streaming took shape inside a beat-up warehouse in Deep Ellum and how a corporate layoff pushed me into the most important reset of my life. I take you back to the early days of AudioNet and Broadcast dot com, the forgotten brilliance of Chris Jaeb, the Cuban takeover, and the crazy aftermath when the dot com bubble collapsed and all those overnight millionaires discovered how fast money can disappear.

I share what it was really like inside Yahoo during its slow decline, how I forced myself to learn digital content production from scratch, and what happened the day security walked me to the door in 2009. Then comes the rebuild. Cross-country road trips. Bonnaroo two years in a row. A return to my BMX roots with a camera in my hand. A freelance career built on grit, skill, and the determination to stay relevant as the media world changed around me.

If you have ever been laid off, burned out, or stuck in a life that no longer fits, this episode is a reminder that you can always reinvent yourself. Sometimes you have to lose the job to find the life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Deep Elum, Bonnaroo, and the art of the Gen X pivot. You don't always realize you're living through the beginning of something historic until years later, when the dust settles and you look back and think, man, we were right there, right in the middle of it. That's how I feel when I think about my early years at Yahoo in Deep Ellum. Inside a converted warehouse where half the windows didn't close right and the parking lot doubled as the set of a low budget crime movie. I saw a guy lose his pickup in broad daylight once. Just walked inside for tacos and came out to an empty space. That's the kind of place Deep Elum was. And that's where streaming was born. People imagine streaming began in a polished Silicon Valley campus decorated with reclaimed wood and artisanal coffee taps. Nope. Dry cracked concrete floors, old wiring, cigarette smoke, and racks of equipment that hummed like they remembered better days. That warehouse was the birthplace of AudioNet, and the guy who first lit that spark was Chris Jabe. He's the forgotten one, the Richard Hendricks of our story. Awkward, smart, and ahead of his time. Then Mark Cuban walked in, back before the suits, the courtside bravado, or shark tank, and you could feel the gravity shift. Cuban had that particular grin he still has today. The one that tells you he's already 10 moves ahead. He took Jabe's idea, threw gasoline on it, and broadcast.com became a phenomenon. Yahoo paid billions for it. Cuban hedged every last share and laughed all the way to billionaire status. And Jabe, he got written out of the legend, the way soft-spoken innovators often are. By the time I arrived, almost a decade later in 2006, the glory days were already fading. But the bones of that old dream were still visible. The satellite dishes on the roof were still pointed at NASA TV, NHL feeds, and overseas news channels. The old broadcast.com equipment, the actual hardware, was still running in the background like relics from a digital museum, some of it literally held together with duct tape. I walked into a world that felt half documentary, half comedy, something in between a tech startup and an HBO parody of one. I started as a broadcast engineer, which sounds fancy, but mostly meant I lived in the guts of the operation. The wiring closets, the racks, the dark rooms where machines hummed and fans screamed. We streamed with Windows Media Encoder on PCs that sounded like leaf blowers. We encoded live sports in press conferences by hand. We diagnosed problems with flashlights between our teeth, and somehow, some way, millions of people watched those streams. The people I worked with could have stepped straight into the cast of Silicon Valley. We had the Ehrlich Bachman types, confident, chaotic, brilliant when they needed to be. The Gilfoil types, dry humor, black hoodies, staring into terminals like they were decoding the Matrix. We had the big head types, floating upward for no logical reason, and more than a few managers who were who absolutely channeled Gavin Belson, asking completely unanswerable questions like, does our transcoding align with our core brand initiative? Sure, Gavin, whatever helps you sleep at night. And then there was me, the guy who got hired because the Yahoo managers loved the ticket. That was my golden ticket, pun intended. If you could run a Comrex remote in the rain for the hard line without panicking, you're apparently qualified to help Yahoo run a digital media empire. Two years in, I realized something important. If I stayed in engineering, I'd grow comfortable but not valuable. The real future, the portable skills, were in content production. So I made the jump, and it was rough. My new boss Russ did not like me. He didn't trust me. He didn't want me there. And the learning curve was steep. I had come from UNT's linear editing world. Beta SP decks, jog shuttles, timecode that fought you at every turn. Yahoo handed me a Mac Pro and Final Cut Pro and basically said, good luck. We were still getting EPKs on Beta SP, so my days were spent manually capturing tape, editing in Final Cut, and then rendering out in multiple bit rates. 56K, 256k. I mean, if you're a really fancy 700K, all of it painfully slow, and all of it prone to crashing at the worst possible moment. It was humbling, it was frustrating, and it was one of the best professional decisions I ever made. During that time, on the side, I started building my freelance career. I bought a Canon HD camera I couldn't afford and a Mac editing rig that definitely should not have been put on my credit card. But that's how you did it back then. You couldn't shoot cinematic content on a BlackBerry. You needed gear, knowledge, and stubbornness. I went full Kevin Smith and clerks, charging equipment to plastic because I believed in myself more than my bank account did. And when Yahoo did finally hit that iceberg, when the layoffs came and I walked in with my messenger bag and walked out with a severance package and a non-disclosure agreement, I remembered the advice I'd written in that 2009 blog post. Aged pretty well, if I do say so myself. Don't panic. Get a grip, take some time off, and get some rest. And that's exactly what I did. I hit the road like I was 20 again. Dallas to Nashville to New York City to York, Pennsylvania. I bought Bonnaroo tickets the day after my layoff, and ended up going two years in a row to Bonaroo. Bonnaru was like hitting a reset button on my soul. Dust, sweat, music, community, and that sense of being wildly gloriously alive. You don't forget experiences like that. They change you. And then something even deeper clicked into place. My old BMX roots came roaring back. I had grown up idolizing guys like Mark Eaton, Eddie Roman, Spike Jones, Stacy Peralta, the pioneers, the filmmakers, the storytellers. So I threw myself into producing BMX content, traveling to contest, filming the culture, reconnecting with a part of me that used to ride until my legs shook. The Matt Hoffman bicycle stunts series, the boom boom hock jam energy. I lived inside that world again, camera and hand, and it felt like rediscovering a piece of myself that I didn't know that I'd lost. That whole period, the road trips, the festivals, the BMX shoots, the rest, the reflection. It did more for me in my career than any corporate training ever could. It taught me how to pivot, how to adapt, how to survive a layoff without losing your identity. I mean, Yahoo was my all-time dream gig. That stung. I got escorted out of the building by security. Basically, uh, hey, get your shit, come with us, pack it up quick, and get out. It taught me how to build a career around resilience, not titles, around curiosity, not comfort. And looking back now, all these years later, the advice from that original article still stands. It isn't dated. It isn't naive. It's wisdom formed under pressure. Take time off, breathe, travel, reclaim the things you love. And when you're rested, build something new. Even if you have to put it on a credit card, even if it scares you, especially if it scares you. Everything I do professionally today, the moderating, the video post-production, the voiceover, the ability to keep a live production from falling apart, all of that came from that Yahoo era, from that warehouse, from the duct taped encoder and those satellite dishes, from those late night renders from Bonnaroo from BMX contest, from the layoff, from the reset, from the rebuild. This is what a Gen X pivot looks like. You get knocked down, sure, but you don't have to stay down. You reinvent, you evolve, you stay hungry, you stay curious, you remember who the hell you were before the corporate badge started defining you. You take that road trip, you hit the festivals, you chase the sparks, and when the dust clears, you're standing somewhere new, stronger, sharper, and ready for the next chapter. So if you're living your own iceberg moment right now, just know this. You're not stuck, you're not finished, you're just between chapters. Take the time, take the trip, reset your soul, and when you're ready, start building again. Keep looking up, keep the wheels on. The paper millionaires and the dot com hangover. You can't talk about broadcast.com or any early streaming startup without talking about the guys who became millionaires overnight on paper. And I say on paper because that's the part people forget. That in the Wild West of the dot com era, being worth seven figures didn't mean you could actually afford a sandwich.

SPEAKER_00: 8:37

When Yahoo bought broadcast.com for billions, the hype was biblical.

SPEAKER_01: 8:42

I wasn't there yet, but the ghost stories were still floating around when I joined Yahoo in 2006. These guys, most of them barely out of their twenties, had suddenly became tech royalty. The startup was a rocket, and they were strapped into it, screaming into the sky. A lot of them didn't handle it well. You had dudes who had never balanced a checkbook buying Ferraris with payments bigger than their rent. Guys who grew up on robins suddenly dropping cash on penthouses, boats, ridiculous home stereo setups, and all the toys you can imagine. They spent like the bubble would last forever. Spoiler, it didn't. The tax bills came due the next year like a horror movie jump scare. I heard stories, real ones, about guys who had to sell their cars, their houses, their toys just to pay the IRS. Some of them didn't have the financial literacy of a middle schooler. They didn't understand that worth a million didn't mean have a million. Meanwhile, Mark Cuban did the smartest thing you can possibly do in that situation. He hedged every last share of Yahoo's stock, locked it in, protected it, immune to the implosion. The man didn't just make money, he engineered a lifetime supply of it. Cuban walked away untouchable while everyone else went down with the ship. By the time I got there, the aftermath was everywhere. The formerly rich guys were now veteran engineers with haunted eyes and stripped-down lifestyles. Most of the money was long gone. But the stories weren't, and the old broadcast.com hardware was still running in the background, literally held together with duct tape and a prayer. It felt like standing inside the ruins of an ancient civilization, one that rose too high, too fast, then crashed into the earth, leaving behind empty stock certificates, faded photos, and racks of equipment that should have been put in the Smithsonian. And that was the cautionary tale for the rest of us. You're not really rich until the check clears. You're not really stable until the tax bill hits and you can pay it. And you're not really safe in tech unless you hedged like Cuban. Everyone else, we're just living in the aftermath taking notes.

SPEAKER_00: 10:50

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