I worked for a startup in 1996. We were desperate for cash and started sucking up to RJR Nabisco’s venture capital division. Yes, the tobacco companies were so overloaded with cash that they got into venture capital just to have somewhere to put some of it. We had some of these guys (and gals, to be fair) visit our office for a whole day. We were a non-smoking office in a non-smoking building but these motherfuckers chain-smoked in the conference room the entire time. We had no ventilation and the smoke was so thick you couldn’t see the end of the fucking hallway. I kept walking past the conference room and coughing loudly (although I was hardly faking it) and my bosses got pissed and sent me home. I wasn’t fired because I was the only person who knew how the code worked.

We got no money from them. The only good thing about this story was that probably all those RJR Nabisco vultures died horrible deaths from lung cancer and emphysema. The only Internet-startup thing we had in the office was a fucking ping pong table, which would have been great except the CEO was absolutely fantastic at it and would obliterate us while saying “good shot” and “way to go” and “almost” the whole time.