Quitter

At every company, I’ve learned a number of things, often things not to do, but in some very special cases, I’ve learned what really works. To protect the not-so-innocent, I won’t actually name names here. I will raise names of those that I actually admire, because they deserve the recognition.

Most of my experiences have been with startups, but I’ve been acquired by larger companies three times. I’ll name the larger companies when it’s important; they’re large bureaucratic entities and their affairs are fairly public, and often the issues present in their workings are not the fault of any one person, but are rather the result of a company growing to such a size as which demands a bureaucracy that almost precludes any sense of sanity.

For the startups I’ve worked for, since they are much more closely tied with individuals, I will refer to them by a fake name, created from radio call signs. My first job, Raytheon, will remain "Raytheon", since I've already outed it, but the website consulting firm, my second job, will be “BravoCom”. This will allow me, I feel, to discuss fairly revealing observations on how companies have been run, without (hopefully) pointing fingers at specific individuals. Perhaps you’ll know who you are; I can only hope that perhaps the people I used to work for/with are actually reading this. The objective here is not to complain about specific people or companies, but rather to distill examples of what I’ve found to often taint the work experience, and in some cases, examples of how to run a business into the ground.

I had originally thought I’d write this book in chronological order, each chapter covering my experiences at a different company, but I don’t think that’s actually as interesting or as useful, as actually writing each chapter to focus on what I feel are the successes or failings of the groups I worked with. However, to get a sense of where I’ve been, and where in time those experiences landed, I do feel I need to convey what I’ve gone through. Here’s a (redacted) version of my resume:

My first job was with Raytheon, as described in the prologue. I was officially a “Member of Technical Staff”, but basically a peon, entry-level. I wasn’t even given any kind of real development to do, I was given maintenance tasks, garbage nobody else wanted to do. I was there from July ’95 to January of ’96.

BravoCom was a website consulting firm. It was privately owned and privately funded (no venture capital). In 1996, the web was still fairly new, and most larger companies didn’t already have the technical staff to even do HTML. Here, I grew fairly fast, going from just a software engineer to a key software engineer, working on some of the largest projects for the largest customers. It was a good time, we were a bunch of out-of-college people, all green, none of us knowing better. The company was sold off at fire sale prices, and picked up by CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation) in early 1998, which was when I left; I didn’t stay on long enough to really work within the CSC world, although I vaguely remember my last two pay stubs bearing the CSC logo.

Disgusted with how the sale of BravoCom went (I’ll get back to why it was bad in a later chapter on “Acquisition”), I decided to leave the east coast, and my job search ended up taking me to CharlieNet, on the San Francisco peninsula. Here, I was working for an online community site, focused around video games, and I thought I was going to be in heaven. I gave notice to BravoCom (maybe it was “BravoNet” at that point, because of the acquisition), and in May of 1998, flew west to start my new job. It was probably August of that year that I realized I was screwed. I managed to suffer through 13 months, leaving in June of 1999, just until I was no longer liable for the relocation “bonus” they’d given me.

Delta Systems was a very small dot-com startup with venture funding. I was employee number 25, and one of three initial engineers. The company did really well, and in late 1999, we merged with our major competitor; instead of each of us having 47% of the marketplace, the combined company, (DeltaTech) then had about 95% of the market, and shortly thereafter, in the summer of 2000, we were acquired by a very large and well-known internet company (Delta Networks) for a significant valuation. Delta Networks didn’t allow all of the engineers to continue working on the product, although they offered jobs to just about everyone; unfortunately (see later), I was not one of the engineers allowed to continue working on the product, and I was very dissatisfied working on the product they assigned me to, and I left in December of 2000 (also taking out all my stock at that point, which had dropped to about 20% of its value during the acquisition).

Echo Communications was a cell phone hardware/services startup. I started January 2nd of 2001, and left in May of that same year, extremely disappointed in what had occurred in those short few months, going from being extremely happy in the first two months to extremely peeved the last two months. I decided to take some time off, a simple go-nowhere, do-nothing vacation, where I simply didn’t work, until I’d drained the bank account.

I joined Foxtrot, Inc. in August of 2001. I had been hoping to move to the Seattle area around this time, because I was looking to buy property, and the San Francisco area was simply insanely priced. I found this company had opened a Palo Alto office, but they were headquartered in Seattle. I thought this would be optimal, I could run out my apartment lease at the local office, and then transfer to Seattle. Six months later, after being forced to renew my lease anyway because a transfer wouldn’t be possible, I was told, I quit in disgust because it was impossible to get anything done (see “Management”). A friend of mine from a previous company had an idea for a startup, and I thought, this would be a good time to try my hand at that.

I’ll call this startup attempt as Golf, Inc., even though I don’t think we ever even really incorporated. Starting in March of 2002, we spent several months working on some prototypes and talking to investors and other CEOs, before we gave up on the idea in July of 2002.

I landed a job at Hotelecom as a result of having talked to their CTO during our startup attempt. This was probably my third favorite job, lasting almost two and a half years, and I still hold the CEO up as an example of how to be a fantastic corporate leader. I was promoted fairly quickly, within the first year, to software architect, and took on the role of coordinating development between our product managers and our engineers, and I think I did a very good job; we were releasing our new products much closer to our original deadlines. A few cracks started getting on my nerves, but the real reason I left this company in September of 2004 (making this pretty much tied for the longest stint of my career) was because I had the opportunity to become the first (and, it turns out, only) employee of a new company, founded by the same guy who founded my favorite employment, Delta Systems. It’s just unfortunate that Hotelecom wasn’t acquired by Cisco for an insane amount of money until about two years after I left; at the time I left, I was not in a good financial position to buy up my options – if I had, I would’ve made out very well when the Cisco acquisition went through.

India, Inc. was my second favorite job. We had a virtual office, I worked out of my house, and we met for lunch once or twice a week to talk. In February of 2005, Company I was acquired by a second-tier internet services company for a fairly small amount of money (compared to the acquisition of DeltaTech, which went for a half-billion dollar valuation). Having only been there a short while, I did not receive an insane cash drop, but it let me take the summer off; I left IndiaTech in July of 2005, frustrated with how it was dealing with integrating us. I quite enjoyed doing nothing for several months.

Juliet.net would be an India, Inc.-like startup; founded by two recent Stanford MBA grads, they needed an engineer who could make their dream a reality. I signed on, discussing with them the idea that I would be effectively a third founder, and that I wanted to be heavily involved in the business side of things. I worked on contract at first, starting in late October of 2005. I soon found that these guys had no real desire to involve me, and despite the fact this was their first startup, appeared to have no appreciation for the startup experience I could offer them. I became a salaried employee in December, when my two-month contract was up, hoping that maybe then I wouldn’t be considered so much of an outsider, but two more months of frustration, and I left, having delivered to them all the software architecture they needed to launch their website a month later.

It took me a month to land a job at KiloByte, and that only lasted four days. I started on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 and was told I was fired when I walked in the door the next Monday. It was the first time I’d ever been fired before, but to be honest, if they hadn’t fired me, I would have quit before the first month was up; it was really that bad.

I started at LimaCom the first week of April. A sad state of events, I came down with mononucleosis the second week, and was entirely out of it for several weeks. I offered to go on unpaid medical leave, because I was obviously going to use up almost an entire year’s worth of paid leave in my first month of employment, but I was told not to worry about it, and to just “get better”. I thought this was a great sign that the company would be a good fit, but it wasn’t. Two months after I returned from feeling like death warmed over, I was fired, apparently for bitching on my personal blog about our CTO (more details on that later), even though I never named names. My extensive vacation debt was forgiven, and I was even given two weeks’ severance. I had an interview the next day already lined up, and I started there, Mike Corp, a week and a half later – actually getting paid double, effectively, for those first few days.

Mike Corp was a hopeful situation. I was learning a new technology, which unfortunately I didn’t come up to speed on as quickly as I’d hoped, but the team was fun to work with. Unfortunately, events conspired to run us out of money, and although I survived the first downsizing, being the last man in, and commanding a considerable salary as a senior engineer, I didn’t survive the second round of layoffs, where the company moved to a skeleton crew. Funny aside, the company was eventually acquired, about four months later, by one of the companies that had already acquired me! The acquisition was done as a fire sale, though, so it wasn’t like I’d missed any great chance at making a ton of dough with options.

I had just had lunch with my friend from the failed startup (Golf, Inc.), and he was now CTO at a startup in the city, and said he’d love for me to come on; he was the only engineer at the time, and needed someone to help build out the team. I actually interviewed a week or two after being laid off from Mike Corp by the other engineer that they’d hired. I took the job, because the industry definitely money flowing through it (something a lot of startups can’t say), and it was very young; I ended up being the third engineer, and before I left six months later, in May of 2007, we’d only hired on a VP of sales, and an accounts manager.

At the time of this writing, I have no idea where I’ll work next, but I figure this gives me a chance to reflect on my wild career, and attempt to distill those things I’ve learned about how to run a company, and how to destroy one.