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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Even in the middle of the dot-com boom, some start-ups weren't just about the money.
Apr 11, 2002 | The thing that amazes me isn't that I lost a million dollars, but that I had it to begin with. My career path looked more likely to lead to a night manager's job at Border's than to financial success. I racked up a solid C average as an English major, then temped at law firms, proofread, taught English in Prague and reported for a small newswire service.
Then, one day, at a wedding, I met a technical writer who worked at a telecommunications equipment start-up and needed an assistant. My girlfriend was Catholic, my girlfriend was pregnant, and I was making $26,000 a year. I said yes.
From the beginning, the little technology start-up didn't feel like any other job. At my East Coast jobs, especially the law firms where I temped, a strict hierarchy was visible. The partners had big offices with a secretary stationed in front, the associates had little offices with no secretary, and the paralegals had cubes. Everyone wore suits or dresses.
At my new job, egalitarianism ruled. On my first day, a tall friendly guy in jeans and a T-shirt came by. He introduced himself by his first name and asked me if I needed anything. My computer seemed to be working fine, and I had already gotten into my e-mail, so I thanked him and said no, thinking this was an awfully friendly I.T. guy. It took me a few days to realize that he was my new CEO.
The cube next to me held an engineer who never said hello, wore the same faded blue T-shirt every day, and always had at least a dozen empty Odwalla bottles lying around his cube. Sometimes, this man just lay his head down on his desk and took a nap. But here the fact that this guy produced some of the product's most essential ASIC designs and worked until midnight to meet his deadlines was all that mattered.
The top guys heated their lunches in the same microwave as everyone else, and all employees, even the receptionist, got stock options. Company execs were low key and straightforward, but everyone understood we were burning through our venture capital, and this created a real unspoken pressure to deliver. If we didn't come up with a working product and sell it successfully, the only thing left of the company would be a cool logo and some empty cubes.
We were trying to build a SONET add/drop multiplexer. This is a piece of telecom equipment that helps route data across fiber optic lines. Think of it as kind of a subway station on a chip. Data comes in, gets rerouted, and goes out. There are some added complications, like the fact that data comes in at different speeds, which means that each subway car, for example, requires special, individual attention.
And the amazing thing is, we did build it. In the process we all became rich, and then poor again. So on the one hand, our story was the typical dot-com boom/bust story -- start-up flies high, and then is brought down low.
But there was a difference between us and the hundreds and thousands of other companies that were starting up, grabbing for IPOs and flaming out all around us. While so many other companies were trashing the Silicon Valley dream, substituting greed for innovation, and turning the very word "start-up" into a synonym for "investment banker scam," we were living it. We made something real, something that was better than what came before.
