David Rosenblatt
[New York Magazine, 20 April 2009]

As told to Richard Morgan

After I finished business school, I got a one-bedroom third-floor walk-up on Thompson Street. I got a job at DoubleClick, whose offices were on 26th and Madison. Netscape had recently gone public, and that really heralded the beginning of the boom. We were growing so fast that after just a few months, we had to set up desks in our elevator lobby. The company was growing to 2,000 people, and the average age was 27; a third of us were paper millionaires. We had an office basketball court, a sales conference in Paris, all that. It was intoxicating. Everyone felt like we were building history and facilitating a brand-new world that would change how everyone lives. And in all this giddiness, everything made sense. It made sense that you could break the rules and succeed, made sense that we’d all get rich quick. We knew everyone in Manhattan who had an e-mail address. Unlike San Francisco, where everyone was an Internet person, we would socialize with people who were totally separate from our world. It made us feel that much more like we were radicals, this chosen race, these new prophets. There was a huge billboard near Madison Square Park that said, “DoubleClick Welcomes You to Silicon Alley.” We were this unavoidable presence.

–David Rosenblatt, Former DoubleClick CEO, arrived 1997

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