Silly Con Valley Expose
By: Karen Lurie
Tags: Self Improvement, Technology News, Social Media, Silicon Valley, Business

Silly Con Valley Expose

Silicon Valley. You don’t need to be a computer geek to have visions of computer chips and deep pocket Sand Hill Road Venture Capitalists dancing around in your head. The dominant attitude in the Valley is, “If we can’t do it, no one can.” Whether it is a new module for your Handspring Visor or a customized eye shadow that you didn’t even know you needed until a gifted brand marketer or business development guru made it possible. It draws a wealth of international talent, hopes and dreams of aspiring CEOs obsessed with proving out the next business plan and taking the company public in less time then it takes to microwave popcorn. The environment is fast, paranoid and absolutely exciting in the quest for what Michael Lewis calls “The New New Thing.” You can’t speak to anyone without signing an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) which basically comes down to the James Bond mantra, that if I told you I would have to kill you! Seems a bit over the top, your right it is and it goes on everyday in that California bubble which finally popped back in December.

Any turkey could fly in a tornado

My kiss-and-tell story begins here. I left the East Coast when the calendar struck 2000 (too late to the party, but just in time to help myself to what was left on the dessert table) in hopes to cash in on the Internet pre-IPO modern day Gold Rush. Everyone and their mother had been flocking to beautiful San Francisco since the late 80s, thereby making it the most expensive city in the country in which to live. At that time, anyone with a decent PowerPoint presentation and some idea of a business plan could get funding and usually did. The unemployment rate was practically zero and the agencies claimed to be employing the unemployable. One particular VC partner remarked that “any turkey could fly in a tornado” and at this point I believe all of those people are now searching for a new tornado. I braved the “take your life in your own hands” part of the city, and proceeded in taking an executive assistant role at a start-up. Executive Assistant is just a nice way to say secretary just like flight attendant is a nice word for stewardess, but a spade is a spade. I would like to take a moment here for all those talented women who attended UMass and ended up somewhere along the way back in the old fashioned secretarial pool. I suppose employers believe that people with ovaries just type faster. If I wanted to be a support person I would have attended The Katherine Gibbs School of Secretarial Arts. Enough of that and let’s continue on with the story. The first start-up I was at burnt through 50 million dollars in less then a year. Why? Everyone had to fly Delta to increase their airmiles and stay at the finest hotels at the VC’s expense and needed to throw lavish parties to build their brand. You really don’t mind drinking the best martini in town when it is other people’s money. Did this company get a second round of funding despite practically non-existent sales? You bet. I believe the old economy’s term for it is “throwing good money after bad.” Instead of admitting that people didn’t want the product, they infused more cash hoping to prove the business plan out enough to push it over the finish line (i.e. go public) and take the money and run. I don’t blame the employees who want to stay on the payroll and toil around the clock, but the opportunity cost of not having your equity pan out when others are buying their second home in Tahoe is a bit much to take.

The Stanford mafia

The truth is most start-ups don’t make it. A lucky few will, and those that happened to be there at the right time will hit the jackpot. The Internet craze bit many people when a couple of Stanford students put Yahoo! on the map and the world got to see how these overnight paper millionaires achieved this unheard of acceleration of wealth. However, now the myth of the company in the garage story (i.e., HP and Apple Computer) doesn’t apply. Most of the people I met there expected the posh surroundings that come from an established firm with the opportunity to make loads of cash, retire at 35. Even if you have the good fortune to be part of a successful pre-IPO start-up that goes public — remember that, unless you had the courtesy to attain an MBA from Stanford and were granted Founders’ Stock (a significant percentage on the company’s equity as opposed to a small fraction of stock that vests each year made available to mere mortal employees, with a vesting schedule usually around five years (otherwise known as golden handcuffs), chances are you won’t be taking that around the world cruise anytime soon. I got a call from a woman I had met in my travels who recruited me to leave my previous position in San Francisco and move down to “the Peninsula” to assist the staffing efforts of a premier VC-funded start-up in the Valley. The first meeting involving the search consultant, the CEO and myself proved disastrous. The CEO and the search consultant were moving in two different directions while the everyday technology battle raged on outside. After a few knockdown, drag-out fights, the CEO approached me to take over the recruiting arena. The original founders (all Stanford University graduates) insisted on hiring people they knew from Stanford. It was then that I figured out how incestuous the Valley really is with Stanford University and the connection with the research and the millions in funding that are pumped into technology ventures everyday. You did get some good brains from cold climates (i.e. Harvard University or MIT), but the old-boy’s network in Palo Alto is still very strong. There were so many times I wanted to ask them if the sum of their education amounted to learning that only Stanford people are smart and then turning of their brains. Perhaps people that attend that school shouldn’t bother even graduating, because all that matters is that this particular school smiles on them and that is enough for a majority of the Valley. I consider that way of thinking provincial and not what I would expect from an area of the country known for bleeding edge technologies that incorporate a hybrid to skills from all walks of life.

Wanted: wireless wonders

During the engineering drought that plagued the Valley, finding a “wireless wonder” was no easy task. The idea of losing those unsightly wires became the Holy Grail of the inhabitants of this brainiac society. Since these products were like military secrets, it was difficult to communicate with external cyber-pimps (i.e. technical recruiters) about what precise skills we were looking to recruit It ended up being a Mexican standoff of information, as we played a game of how little we can tell you, and how much can you tell us, so we could discover what we needed to build a particular product. Embedded programmers were like needles in a haystack, and it takes some doing to bring these “wireless wonders” in to share their skills. One particular programmer stands out in my mind. He shared his vision of our future society, in which we would have wireless modules implanted in our heads. He imagined a type of embedded-conspiracy that would inevitably evolve once the technology became more sophisticated. This frightened the hiring manager, who stormed into the recruiting meeting, screaming that the candidate was “crazy,” and wanting him to leave. I’m not sure if the candidate heard what was said, but it was definitely an interview gone wrong, and no, he didn’t get the job. But if his idea eventually does come to fruition, then I wonder what platform it will run on… Windows of the Evil Empire, or the saintly Linux, which plays so nicely with everyone?

Endgame.

A new CEO soon arrived, sold off our product and laid-off two-thirds of the staff. So what happened to all those stock options? Just a song and a dance and a game show “thanks for playing” here is the door. Remember when the first snowfall would occur? Amherst College and UMass would have a snowball fight and Amherst would most often lose? The Amherst students would sing, “That’s all right, that’s okay, you’ll work for us someday”. Well, now the song should be “That’s all right, that’s okay, we will lay you off someday”. That pretty much sums up the picture of what’s going on now on the West Coast as tech workers fill the homeless shelters. As for me, I was part of grand layoff and am now back home in Beantown, living off my severance package. So if you must go west, be sure that you know how to type!