Joel Downs

Harvard-Westlake School, Attended 1988 - 1992, Class of 1992

UC Berkeley

University of California - Berkeley, Attended 1992 - 1996, Class of 1996, Bachelor's Degree, Mechanical Engineering

Entrepreneur

Business, cars, hard rock, blues, billiards, racquetball, video games, not working, networking with friends on slow, bug-ridden web sites, complaining about slow, bug-ridden web sites

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Crime and Punishment, The Grapes of Wrath, Dune, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Coercion, Brand Asset Management, How to Lead a Coup in a Middle Eastern Country Without Really Trying, SCCA Rulebook

Clerks, Die Hard, Fight Club, Bowling for Columbine, Memento, Space Balls, Blues Brothers, Airplane, American Pie, Lord of the Rings

Tool, Deftones, A Perfect Circle, Soundgarden, Staind, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughn

24, Family Guy, Simpsons, Twin Peaks, Keen Eddie, Big Cat Diaries, Any American Idol where they show the really bad singers

Scorpio

I am the quintessential dotcommer. I studied to be a
mechanical engineer at Berkeley, and then gave it all up
for the glitzy dot-com startup life which started at a
$500/mo salary. The company eventually raised several
million dollars, blew it all on hookers and coke for the
CEO, and laid off everyone. But hey, where else could I
get that kind of experience? No MBA will teach you that.
Unless you go to Stanford.

One of our advisors told us that we made every mistake
possible, so I figure that, going forward, if I just DON'T
do anything we did in the first company, I'll be fine.

I'm now working on Answerbag (http://www.answerbag.com), a
user-generated, peer-reviewed, compilation of questions and
answers about any topic you can think of. Stop on by!