I've always wondered what it would be like to work at a start-up. For other people who are out there wondering if it is really as interesting and dramatic as it seems, here is my account from start to finish - that is, from my start to finish, not the start-up's.
Last year, while I was still arranging my move from Texas to California, I posted my resume and portfolio wiith a California zip code, in hopes of having a few interviews to greet me when I arrived. There was so little interest in my talents as a Visual UI / Web Designer in Austin (I never even got a permanent position there) that I was truly astonished to almost immediately begin receiving about two calls a day from the Bay Area. I remember one was from eBay, one was from an advertising agency (that was my background), one was from Motorola, one was from PayPal, and one was from this start-up.
The ad agency needed someone to start a week from the date of contact, and I wasn't going to be there yet. The start-up was very interested in me, but the Product Management director who was talking to me was also anxious at the thought of waiting an extra week for me to start. I had been living in South Carolina for ten years and thought, "What's the big deal? It's SEVEN DAYS!"
At first I wasn't very interested. I wanted to work on a lot of websites, like I had always done, and not just one website all the time. But the more I talked on the phone with the hiring PM director, the more I was intrigued at the idea of total ownership of the website's developing look-and-feel and brand. After a conversation with the VP of Marketing, I began to realize that these were very nice people who really liked my portfolio and thought I was The One, and that had a wonderful effect. I was reluctant to say whether or not I had actually left Texas yet, but firm that my arrival date could be no sooner than a week and a half from our conversation.
After agonizing about the week's delay, they hired me. In the verbal conversation where the PM director offered me the job, he asked me what I was making. In Texas and SC salaries are much smaller, but I was honest about it, although I also gave him the cost of a moderate house for comparison and remarked that I could easily afford a house, a car and my horse on those salaries. I also mentioned the numbers that had been mentioned by Motorola and PayPal.
I had been praying for a job that was with a small company, of under 25 people, within the Campbell-Menlo Park 280 corridor, that would pay at least X, where I could grow as a designer. Motorola and PayPal payed X plus some. This PM director offered me X plus a lot. What he offered me was, in fact, a bit more than I had said I would take, and that really impressed me. The entire arrangement in every way fulfilled and exceeded what I had prayed for.
My Mom flew out to drive back with me. As a side note, this also was an answer to a prayer. My parents had been extremely hostile to my religious beliefs, and had told me not long after my conversion that I was not welcome at home. Now I was not only welcome, my Mom was coming out to drive back with me! It was miraculous.
We really hustled, driving ten hour days in extraordinary heat, and arrived at home just 36 hours before I was due at the front doors of the start up. So, basically one day later, there I was.
They didn't have a computer for me yet. That was really funny. They had been so aghast that I wouldn't be there seven days sooner, and look ! They didn't even have a way for me to start work! I went to Fry's and bought a computer (now this one, my home computer) with my own money, brought it to work, and spent a day loading up 30-day trial versions of all the software I needed. I also bought, with my money, $2000 worth of software for when the trials ran out. Then I got to work.
I was a little stressed out at that time. My horse had arrived from Texas while I was still on the road. He was stressed out too. I heard later he had tried to jump out of his stall! My crippled little kitty was a basket case from the extended journey by car, and his new home. I was trying to hold it together, but it's not easy to change so many things all at once. Also, I was living with my parents while I recovered financially from the move, and that was a big change too. I love my parents and it was really nice to live there, but it was also really hard to go from having lived alone for ten years to living with other people who saw me as a new form of entertainment and who really liked a lot of conversation... EVERY time I walked into a room. I felt like I had to be "on" - all the time. It was hard to relax.
The start up was close to launch. In the first few weeks, I had big projects (marketing event materials, website registration UI) and small projects (buttons, icons, formatting issues).
I was astonished to realize something really great about the start-up. I had worked for big corporations in the Bay Area in the 1990's, and it was brutal. You had to project an inhuman amount of confidence and success, and you had to be willing to endure inhuman expectations for performance and overtime. Initially, I thought everything was still the same.
But gradually, I realized that other people were looking at me funny when I tried to over-achieve. At the start-up, these were good people who all wanted to do a good job, and they didn't expect any more from me than that I would do a good job too. They didn't question that I was competent - that had been settled when they decided to hire me. And they didn't expect me to slay myself on the altar of the Impossible Demand. This was a real revelation for me. Once I had it, I began to act like a real, normal person.
At the same time, I had been hired as a contractor and a Vice President didn't want to make me permanent. She was a different Vice President than the nice one. This VP was, in my eyes, an overly-assertive and under-effective Big Name from New York. She seemed to have no idea what good design was composed of, yet no one ever questioned her and bad decisions were always pushed through with little mitigation. She had disliked me on sight, (maybe, if I am honest, because
my first reaction to
her was that unexplainable, but obvious dislike that one is so unprepared for, that one can not suppress it in the milli-second it takes for it to show) and had opposed my hire because I had not worked on a website as large as the one she had managed in her previous position.
We had very minimal interaction, but it hurt my feelings and made me feel like an outsider to continue as a contractor when I was obviously doing what everyone agreed was an excellent job. I wanted to be an employee, like the rest of the team, with whom I was beginning to feel very bonded. The VP was a short, loud woman who read stacks of fashion magazines and had a small, shrill dog that urinated all over the office and barked incessantly when she went to lunch. She also had a way of looking at people as though she was thinking, "You're nobody." It was very hard for me to try to be friendly, but maybe she had to try hard to be friendly with me, too. She actually wasn't in the office that much. The company paid for her expensive condo in SF and constant air travel to and from New York, where she still really lived.
For six months, everything went wonderfully well for the start-up. We launched with a splash, and the Web 2.0 community took notice and gave us tons of praise. Our product really was the best that was out there in the space, and we experienced a stunning climb in traffic that seemed like it would never end. We started to run out of money, but our CEO, who I liked very much, got us $15 million in funding just as things were about to get tight.
Our SEO traffic made us dizzy. I remember the warning from one of our newest PM's as she argued with a director about some of our SEO strategy decisions that were probably going to lose, not enhance, SEO. The director got his way, and shortly after that we lost our SEO traffic.
After a few days of panic we got it back and sighed with relief. It was clear that SEO traffic was accounting for up to 100,000 hits a day.
Without it, we got less than 5,000 hits a day. But we still took our traffic for granted, and made a huge release that completely restructured many back and front end elements of the site just after the SEO returned. This time we were blacklisted from Google. Google's robots do not like to find constant large changes to the structure of the sites they crawl. This was right around my 6th month.
The loud VP left around this time, which was her year anniversary. "She just put in her year," was the saying whispered around, which suggested that she only wanted to vest her stock options, and implied that she never really had much personal interest in the company.
The same day she gave notice, my PM director made me permanent. My salary was 10% less, but I was thrilled about the 10,000 stock options. A week later I was horrified to see that now that I was paying taxes from my paycheck, it was almost
half of what it had been when I was contracting. This caused an immediate crisis, and I had to move my horse to a barn with fewer facilities. Right around this time, we moved into a less expensive building that I chose the color scheme for in a much more exciting area of Mountain View.
Everyone was really happy. Our SEO problem didn't seem very serious, as it had only been a little time since we lost it and everyone assumed it would come back soon. It was very near this time when another employee, one of my good friends, wanted all of us to go out for drinks.
I remember driving behind another one of my friends as we made our way to the Castro Street bar. We had left early from work with the blessing of our manager. I felt awesomely good. I loved my co-workers and friends, and couldn't believe my luck - I was making good money, for a job that I liked, in a new technology that was exciting and interesting, for people that I truly admired and liked to work with! Everyone liked me! I had friends! I was a success! Even Forbes had complimented our website design, and we had won awards! I was living a wonderful life, especially since I had now gotten myself a lovely rented townhouse in Cupertino. Even my cat was happy and relaxed. It was a lovely, sunny afternoon, and I was going out for a drink with my closest, nicest co-workers. Happiness and gratitude suffused my heart.
Though I didn't know it yet, the start-up had already had a turning point, composed of several terrible decisions in addition to the loss of our SEO, that would seriously cripple it.
My friend wanted to drink because the CEO had hired a new VP who was awful, and she had just experienced her first day reporting to him. She told us all about it at the bar. This may sound insignificant in terms of what it meant for the business, but it wasn't. It was a demonstration that our CEO was willing to hire an obviously unqualified person, one who was also openly cruel and manipulative to his suboordinates, for two extremely superficial reasons: One, that the former VP had recommended him; and, Two, that he had business contacts that it could be to our start-up's benefit to mine.
The VP never understood that his only real job was to hook up contacts, or perhaps he didn't really know the people he said he knew at all. But he wreaked havoc on the company, and especially on my friend. Without accomplishing anything beneficial or even seeming to have ever actually tried to use our site, he alienated every employee, was absent for days at a time with no explanation, and gave my friend a lifetime's worth of stories to tell about the dreadful things he said and did.
At this time, the CEO also hired two other VPs, one of whom also had been recommended by the ex-VP in New York. Both were seriously incompetent.
One, a man, did not seem to belong to any particular department. But he rhapsodized about what we came to call "the Fad of the week", which means that although he seldom demonstrated any real business planning ability, he created an unbelievable amount of work by proposing and pushing for quick fixes that would supposedly bring back our traffic. One week our site's look-and-feel was the problem. He wanted it to be completely redesigned to look and feel like a small competitor. The competitor was sold a few weeks later at fire-sale cost, but he still pushed the idea.
Our business goal, I was aware by then, was not to make a good product, but to be bought by Google, Yahoo, Amazon or eBay.
Another week, our problem was that we weren't in Facebook. Facebook got so much traffic, he argued, that any presence there at all would be good for us. Some of his ideas had merit, but they never had a real plan behind them. If you tried to nail him down on a plan, he would propose a lot of A/B testing. This didn't make our tiny, understaffed UI Engineering department happy. They had to create and re-create everything several times.
The other new VP was a woman. Her job was to create traffic from partnerships. Although nice to speak with in person, very sociable and friendly, it was immediately clear that she too had no clear understanding of our site's strengths and weaknesses. She was flighty, inconsistent, and utterly unable to understand our site's technology. Her department trembled every time she talked to potential partners, and one person in particular had to cover for her in every meeting. Whatever could chase a partner away, that is what she would talk about. Whatever a partner really needed to know, she was unable to talk about. She would harrass our overworked PMs about the implementation status of partners who were only going to bring us 200 hits
a week, and one week she bragged about getting her son's elementary school signed on as a partner. Our UI Engineers were particularly frustrated. Without ever asking them how anything worked, she would promise whatever a partner asked for within a few days. Worst, the partners she was pursuing, though they were big names in their business niche, were in the niche that we were least able to serve well.
In short, three key, high-level positions had been filled with people who were all but actively obstructing beneficial development of our business.
Finally, the dreadful VP who my friend reported to was fired. My friend was fired, too. I heard our CEO's strategy for doing this described later by my PM director as "one of the ugliest things I have ever seen in the business".
Basically, the CEO didn't want the VP to sue him, so he "eliminated the department". He announced this in a company meeting when my friend was off site, and told all of the employees not to tell her, as she would find out the next week when she returned. However, she found out that day when she noticed that her email account had been terminated, and all of her vacation pay had been deposited into her account. It truly was ugly. There was no severance pay or anything. My friend had made many huge contact wins during her position, while her overpaid VP had made none. But she was fired as if she had never even been valuable.
At that moment, in our small company, our CEO lost many of his employees. They still worked there, but they didn't respect him any more. Meanwhile, our SEO remained at 3,000 or less. It had not, as we expected, magically returned. Google's SEO algorithms are mysterious. Many people admit that no one really seems to know how they work.
My friend found a job at another company only a few weeks later, but things were getting tense at the start-up.
Bad decisions were being made. Now that funding was taken care of, our CEO had nothing to focus on but how he was going to report our prospects to the board - and with far less than 10% of the traffic we had once had, the prospects looked unattractive. Suddenly, our site was splattered with ads. Every bit of white space now had an ad in it. Although in focus groups our users had reacted very badly to excessive advertising, now we were going to alienate even our last 3,000 users with 4 more ads per page than
any of our competitors were using.
A new logo was proposed. There was no apparent purpose for this except to make a press announcement. The new logo soon grew into a proposed redesign. However, the CEO and the VP of marketing had completely incompatible visions for what the redesign should be. The CEO wanted an extremely simple, almost Google-simple site, and the VP wanted a graphics-heavy, consumer-friendly site. The ensuing power struggle led to an extremely frustrating process of compromise that finally ended the project. When the end result was presented to users, they unanimously hated it. A PM gave notice either on or about the day that the VP of marketing sent a screen with a Powerpoint slide that she, the VP, had put together in a panic, and now proposed we implement as a redesign, although there was now no time left to meet the deadline.
A key project was suddenly altered by our CEO to include an ad in a particularly offensive way. The ad itself wasn't so much of an issue as its placement. It was to bisect relevant information in such a way as to imply that it was not, in fact, an ad. The purpose was obviously to deceive the user into clicking on it.
Our executives were already treading gently on deceptive ground. They had bought another site at a fire-sale price in order to get press and traffic. They had implied to the press that it was a mutually beneficial acquisition, but in fact the other site was completely discarded. All that was kept was the url, which we now owned and directed to our own site. Despite the truth of the situation, the VP of marketing insisted on placing an award won by the discarded site at the bottom of the site we plugged into the url. But our site wasn't what won the award at all.
The CEO's ad project created horrified unrest within the PM team. Better solutions for ad placement were proposed. But not only were they rejected, now the requirement was that the ad should be formatted in our fonts and colors, which made it even more deceptive. One person expressed their concerns directly to the CEO, and was told that their arguments were "just their opinion." The CEO was so openly disrespectful, that another PM gave notice. The 5-person PM team was now three.
Now there was a hand-off meeting with the engineers. When the engineers saw the new ad, in addition to the other 5 ads that were cluttering up our most valuable page, there was an outburst of protest. The CEO responded with screaming. He alleged that we were "just trying new things", and "anyone who didn't want to try new things should leave."
This was catastrophically dishonest. No one was opposed to trying new things, but no one wanted to do obviously wrong things. No one, that is, except the CEO.
The PM director gave notice.
I asked to return to contractor status. I felt at that point like I was being forced to create bad work. When you are a contractor, everyone understands that you just do as you are told. I did not feel comfortable claiming responsibility for the site's new direction.
Also, when you are a graphic designer, your portfolio is your job recommendation for future employers. When you work at an agency, you just don't show work that didn't turn out to be your best. You show only the work that did. But if you work for only one company, that is all you have. I didn't want to be part of what our site was becoming any more.
Unfortunately, my request was refused. That was too bad, because I would have liked to go back to getting more money, and I now no longer believed our stock would attain significant worth. Also, the CEO felt that people who didn't agree with everything he proposed were enemies. The radical change in his behaviour during this time persuaded me of the truth of a theory I have, that you don't know anyone until you have known them a year.
I started looking for a new job. There seemed to be a lot out there, even though it was around Thanksgiving, and a lot of it paid more than what I was making. I began to hope I would be hired soon, but it was a process that took a lot of energy without necessarily going anywhere quickly.
Now we had a new "idea of the week". Fortunately, it hadn't come from the VP, but from one of the brilliant back end engineers. The CEO was anxious to get it out in order to make a big press release, and it was put together and pushed in under two weeks. It was, in my eyes, a UI mess with questionable value for our site. But it was a neat feature, and one that people seemed to like.
When the last surviving PM called the meeting to finalize it prior to the push, I was required in the meeting. This wasn't usual, but there were so few people left in PM to work on the project that I, the second person of a team of 5 from which only 2 remained, did not object.
Halfway through the meeting, as the PM, engineers and myself tried to reduce the effect of the CEO's worst ideas with regard to making the new feature "more obvious" (for the press release), the CEO started screaming. He wanted a red icon. The icon outlined in green wasn't obvious enough. He threw a full cup of coffee at the PM, who immediately jumped up and left. The meeting ended badly and everyone disbanded.
I was now desperate to leave. The last surviving full PM (we still had a shared PM) had not intended ever to return when he left the meeting and the office, but was with difficulty persuaded to stay two weeks. I found out later that the CEO "apologized", but in a way that was no true apology. Basically, he was "sorry that the PM got so upset." In other words, the PM was the one with the problem, not the CEO.
My information was already available on LinkedIn, and several recruiters had contacted me. Also, I had directly applied for several positions on LinkedIn and Simply Hired. However, now I posted my resume on Yahoo Jobs. I was immediately innundated with inquiries from recruiters.
After an exhausting two-week period of phone calls, phone screens, emails, and interviews, I was hired by a really nice (though not glamorously Web 2.0) company with a working business model on Thursday. Friday, I gave notice. I never imagined I would be so glad to leave.
There is one lone surviving partial PM. She is looking too. The situation of the start-up is now that they essentially have no PM team, and will shortly have no Visual UI designer. If one looks superficially, what appears to be happening is a transition to Agile Development. The truth, however, is that the engineers are now operating in a vacuum.
It may not matter. For at least six months, there has been no direction for setting or accomplishing business goals for the future of the product (as opposed to creating partnerships for the site in its current state) from the executive area. Our business goal for six months has been to drive traffic by making press releases, and according to what the press wanted to hear that week, projects were quickly put together and micromanaged by the executives into poor quality features. This was of no concern to the executives, since our ultimate goal has never been to make a great product (although the excellent engineering team has created the best product of its kind in the industry), but to make something that some other company would buy.
Our situation now, as a business, is that we have a Porche engine in a cheap Chevy body. It's still a Porche, but it will never attract a Porche buyer or a Porche price. Meanwhile, the team is disintegrating. There are now two empty departments, one that got fired in one of the ugliest incidents my ex-PM director ever heard of, and one that left.
When I think of what an unbelievably talented team this company had as a whole, what an amazing resource they had at their hands, and how it has been completely corroded and wasted, I could cry.
But it's been, overall, a very positive experience. I really did grow as a designer, and I learned a tremendous amount about really powerful new technologies and everything Web 2.0. I learned how to create table-less CSS layouts, how to work with back and front-end engineers, and how to brand a web-based business. I learned how to be myself at work. I had, for the most part, a really good time and I made friendships that I hope will stay with me for life.
I still haven't paid off my move from Texas (should have stayed a contractor!), but I'll be making more in my cool new job.
Here is a synopsis of the history of the start-up.
2004-2006: Engineers start modifying an existing product in a powerful new way and obtain funding to start a new business, $10 million (I believe).
2006: Due to conflict with the executive team, all of the UI engineers leave and are replaced. Product is prepared for launch. Most of the non-engineering team is hired. I come on board. The product launches. It makes a splendid splash and gets SEO.
2007: The site is redesigned to accommodate new features. Traffic continues to explode, but money is running out. It loses SEO just as it gets more funding ($15 million). Three VPs are hired. All product-related projects are scrapped and replaced with SEO projects. A department is fired. A PM leaves, then one more PM every three weeks until only a partial PM is left of a team of 5. I give notice.
Oh, I almost forgot. We did have afternoon parties with wine and beer about 5 times, but those were small catered events during the work day that never fit the description of the crazy Web 1.0 beer bashes. Also, it's true that almost everyone wore jeans almost every day. Some people dressed up now and then ( I did just so I could remind myself that I knew how ) and also some days some of the engineers wore shorts or sweats and thongs. All of our back-end engineers were from India. The latest I ever worked was 11:15 pm, but some of our UI engineers often worked all night and came in right before lunch. For the most part, I probably worked an average of less than 8 hours a day.
I'll keep posting about the fate of the start-up. It has been a very interesting experience.
