Mark's Pages

May 24, 2003:

TechnologyLand, DotCom startup, second floor offices above a nuclear radiology lab, San Francisco, CA. Crowded U-shaped space wrapped around a foggy tar-decked porch used as a meeting room. Employees, stressed-looking, most of them twenty-somethings, carom through narrow corridors like particles in an accelerator, dodging each other and indoor potted trees and streams of bike messengers who arrive carrying nobody-knows-what. Candidate hires in dress clothes sit on couches near reception, biting their fingernails. From the engineering cubes at the far end of the U drifts the first Third Eye Blind album, loud. The energy is frantic and unfocused.

With a rumble like a heavy truck the earth moves. Eyes widen. People freeze and look around.

You laugh. California, woo-hoo! Everybody surfs, whether they go in the ocean or not. Passing reception you're calming everybody down as the next jolt arrives, carrying your CEO on its crest.

Tall man, forty-eight, thin, good-looking, expensively dressed. Rich, accustomed to success in one venture after another. He's your captain and he's promised you all wealth in reward for your loyalty and your back-to-back hundred-hour weeks, worked for months.

His eyes are big with fear. "What do we do?", he asks, looking around frantically. "Everybody down the stairs! Assemble in the parking lot!"

"Woah!", you counter. "Everybody relax." The boss is halfway out the building. "Whatever happened to the Captain being the last one out?", you say to him, laughing.

"Fuck that," comes the succinct reply.

You cool everybody down. "Walk, don't run. Go out, or stay, doesn't matter. Take it easy." You're staying, sitting on the reception desk, laughing.

There was a leadership lesson there which you failed to learn. It could have been predicted at that moment that the company would fail, as it did a year later, after blowing through fifty million dollars of venture funding spent on flash and frivolity. In your final office space 300 employees each had $900 chairs, specially upholstered to match the ceiling color. It was beautiful. But there was no product plan, and nothing for sale that anyone wanted, and an engineering group that was outnumbered fifteen to one by Sales and Marketing and Business Development.

This is what happens when the captain's hand is weak on the wheel. Life will buffet and blow you in the directions it chooses, and the place where you'll arrive will be far different than the place which you set out to reach. Watch your CEO carefully when the earth shakes, or the wind blows, or the water rises, or whatever it is that happens where you live. If he bolts, find a new job, because whatever it is your company is trying to do is totally doomed.

Always copping my truths
I kinda get the feeling that I'm being used
And now I realize that you never heard
A single goddamn word I ever said
Losing a whole year...