Synchronicity

Over the years, I’ve caught bits of the movie Startup.com here and there, but never sat down and watched it end to end.

Each time I’ve seen these bits of it, I’ve gotten some sort of nugget of inspiration, seen something pertinent to my experience at the time.  So when I recently watched a part of the movie again, I also set the show to record on my DVR.  I’m planning to watch it soon with all the undivided attention I can muster, given my current life’s engagements. 

Hopefully I won’t be disappointed when finally I see the full movie in context, end-to-end.  That has happened to me with movies before.  But I digress.

For those who don’t know startup.com, it’s a movie about a well planned and funded startup of the late-last-millennium, leading up to the famous dot com bubble burst of 2000.  The once-thriving young company, loaded to the hilt with venture capital and great ideas, went down in flames along with so many other dot.com wannabes. 

The dot com-bubble-burst impacted the team that I managed at my prior job profoundly.  A well staffed team that was developing some rather sophisticated integrated marketing applications was on the chopping block entirely.  But at the morning of the cuts, I had ten team members.  By the end of the day, I had five.   It could have been worse.   We provided enough value to the company to remain in place, though dramatically altered.  So while my team’s personal experience in totality, was not a happy story, it was certainly a happier outcome than the ultimate collapse of govWorks, the company documented in Startup.com.


Anyone who has seen a movie that somehow resonates with them, and have watched this movie at different times, will understand how each watching can reveal new truths as your perspective grows with experience.  How it can help reveal the sort of synchronicity that can mark points on a life’s timeline like cities marked on a map used for a long distance voyage.

In 2000, when the dot com bubble burst, I had perspectives that related to the events laid out in the movie based on some startups I had dealt with, and based upon a certain perspective on the business world.

But now, in 2014, I am in a true startup, in many ways, like the company in the movie.  I’ve watched the venture capital process, and how the power of the board influences the vision of the entrepreneur who started our company.  As my life has changed to this “insider view” this new perspective makes me able to see things in the movie, and in life, as I never saw before.  As I watched the characters, dynamics, and interplay within the movie, I more personally relate to the tensions that lie behind the many changes.  I see the tip of the iceberg, but knowing a little more about what lies under the surface, I have a sense of the cold that is unseen.

Some of this synchronicity is a comfort.  Some is not.

But such is the reality of life general, and such is the reality of the startup world, for an old school guy like me.  Maybe that is, in part, why there are only a handful of us that are over 40 in the startup company I am with now.

The only thing I know for sure, is I have no regrets in moving to Silicon Valley, the most fertile soil of the startup, despite the cautionary tale of Startup.com.

This adventure continues, and promising results in Q4 of 2013 at the company I work for bring many, many new challenges in 2014. 

So I’ll watch this movie, now in its entirety, regard both the caution and hope, and continue starting up.

Taking Chances

For years, I watched a company, where I had worked for many years, shrink.  The big old converted warehouse, which had once had problems fitting all of its employees, now had huge, empty rooms as far as the eye could see.


The possibility that they would close the offices I was working in had steadily grown to a sure bet.  Still, I had held onto the hope that this company would be the place I would retire from.

I finally had to be realistic about what my future might be.  I had to become one with the odds that today would be the day they called me into personnel and say, "sorry, we won't be needing your services," or possibly, "we'd like you to move to our New Jersey offices."

Neither of these prospects thrilled me.  And this isn't a dig against New Joisey, I just can't see living in the New York metro area. Just not my kind of place.

I knew many who had been part of the systematic diaspora that the company I was working for had created over the years.  Through them, or a kindly recruiter, I could find a company where my years of experience could be leveraged so I could continue to the end of my career on “cruise control.”  Certainly, I could find a job where all of my experience would put me in a nice, cozy office keeping a company’s marketing and merchandising aspirations growing.  Meanwhile, I could continue to channel the ambition that still remained in me toward my creative loves of writing and music and art.

And somewhere between all that, find some space to watch my kids get their adult lives into full swing, and enjoy the company of my amazing, creative wife.

I’d worked hard for thirty years, and built up a pretty nice list of accomplishments.  I knew others my age who were taking more laid back positions as they moved into the latter years of their careers.  Sounded good to me.  I was tired.

An opportunity presented itself to go to a company that was a vendor I worked with.   They were a small company with big aspirations.  Given my state of mind, I should have had some sort of reservations.

A move across the country at the age of 51?  Uprooting everything I had known for the past 17 years with a wife who was having some major health issues?  The rigors of selling a house, buying another house?  Going to a start-up business, and the attendant risks that came with it? 

But then again, I should have had doubts when I joined the Army at the age of nineteen.  Should have had second thoughts when I married at the age of twenty.  Should never have just resigned and uprooted my family from San Diego to move back to Idaho, when I didn’t have a job lined up.  Should have played it smart, and taken a cut in pay to have a job locally in Idaho, when the company that was contracting me from afar said they would no longer need my contracted services.  I had nothing on the line at that time.

I’m not a gambler in the wagering sense.  Taking a chance on slot machines, or the cards, or the horses, or the wheel, or the dice, just doesn’t hold any appeal.  But as I look back on my life, some of the things I do seem like I’m gambling.  Certainly, some of the things I have done had a numerous possible outcomes, not all favorable.

So, I picked up the dice…

Startup

There are many startups in a person’s life.  Birth, first steps, first day of school, first day in the Army, first day on a new job.

But the startup that this blog is primarily named after is a type of business.


In December 2011, I suppose I had heard of startup companies.  I had certainly dealt with them, such as a software company in Boston that had started by a couple brilliant developers, at that time it had graduated to a beautiful office in the northern suburbs that I had the pleasure to visit.  A few years later, when having some problems with their software, we had to track one of the employees, who had scattered around the world, in Europe.

He was most helpful.


Such is the nature of many start ups.

I suppose I knew that the job I was being offered in Silcon Valley was a startup, in the most literal sense.  I’d watched it grow, as the company I was with at the time had been one of their first big clients.  The people of the startup company acted like they were big, but we knew after every meeting that at least one of the things they said they could do was going to have to be built “on-the-fly” in their offices, which were then in Connecticut.

But the owner was dynamic and charismatic, and obviously brilliant, and everything he said they could do, they somehow did.

By December 2011, I probably hadn’t ever used the word startup to describe a business, but I had an idea what it meant when the people in the company described themselves as one. 

At that time, I had a much better idea what a “shutdown” was:  A company getting smaller and smaller by the day.  A company I had been with for a quarter of a century, that at one time had revenues of near 800 Million per year, but now was hovering at around 100 Million.  I’d watched a challenging job, creating new systems and new business functions with a team of up to ten dwindle down to just me.  Me, schlepping  code, biding my time from day-to-day.

My job had reduced to maintaining what was there, and often that meant shutting down system and functions that my team had created.  I hadn’t seen a raise in six year.  I’d watched the office we inhabited empty out from hundreds of employees down to around fifty.  Walking through it every day was depressing. Over a quarter of a century invested in the company, so many good memories, good friends, good experiences, wondering if tomorrow would be the day they'd call me into the office and say I'd been "downsized."

So when the brilliant man whose company I had watched grow from afar called me and told me how much he wanted me to join him in Silicon Valley, and made me a generous offer, I knew my choice was clear.  I knew it was a gamble.

In January 2012, my wife and I boarded a plane in Baltimore on a very cold Sunday morning.  When we got off the plane in San Francisco, the weather was beautiful, and the drive down the interstate to the town of Los Gatos, CA was perfect.

This was not the first time I had changed jobs.  It was not the first time I had moved my household.  It wasn’t even the first time I’d moved across the country.  But I knew that this particular startup would be different than any other in my life.

First, I had to really come to understand what the word startup really meant...