It's worth noting that Sun Micro-systems is pretty far up the corporate ladder and likely had the resources to prove the candidate was irreplaceable during that time. This might not be the same for OP.

That is a good note. But Sun circa 1987 (the year they introduced Solaris) was not exactly the household name that you remember from the dot com era.

True but that was a year after the IPOed, they were pretty wealthy at the least.