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meredith tanner

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Rum, Sodomy, and the Cash

Every morning, South of Market reeks of burnt coffee. People have tried to tell me the smell comes from the Capricorn Coffee roastery over on 10th street, but I know better. Roasting coffee beans smell good. This is the smell of a hundred pots left on the burner all night because nobody remembered to turn off the Brewmaster. There's a lesson there, you know. Something to do with follow-through -- or, more correctly, the lack thereof.

You may know South of Market better as "Multimedia Gulch" or "SoMa", but like the venerable "Frisco", nobody who actually lives here says that. It's a trick we use to identify tourists and reporters. (If anyone asks, you didn't hear that from me.) Either way, this is the place to be if you're 20-something and think you're too hip to go on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". This is the pit of primordial slime from which all those dot-coms you've been hearing about lately have emerged. I don't know why everyone is so surprised to find that they have about the same survival rate as fish with legs. For each one that evolves into a successful money-making venture, there are a hundred more that waddle squinting into the light of day and end up flopping around helplessly in the dust, gasping for venture capital.

Newsflash: the mere presence of a ".com" on the end of a company name does not necessarily guarantee success. If you must pour a river of cash down the gullet of every Internet startup to come along, don't come running to me when it chokes on its own spew like a junkie rock star. Would you be so eager to invest in a company run by spoiled 22-year-olds fresh out of college if it manufactured toilet paper? After all, everybody needs toilet paper, right? Sounds like a sure thing to me.

I work for one of the more successful fish with legs. I won't tell you the name, but I will say that it has a lowercase vowel stuck on the front, not that that narrows it down much. As startups go, we're relatively well-organized, with a fairly solid business plan, lots of investment money, and high-profile strategic partnerships with several major companies. We have all those perks you've heard about -- arcade games, pool table, catered lunches, friday beer bashes, the occasional company-wide offsite at a ski resort, and of course those all-important stock options.

We're also a literal sweatshop; there are so many people crammed into this building that the upper floor always reeks of body odor. We're probably in violation of the fire code, not to mention the ADA. We have more than 150 employees, and there are maybe as many as 10 legal parking spaces in a four-block radius -- and probably 10 other startups, not to mention the warehouses, furniture stores, restaurants, etc. There are other parking options, of course; I pay $125/month for a space in a garage six blocks away. It's okay, though, I need the exercise to burn off all that free food. Others park in two-hour zones and move their car several times a day. My boss optimistically parks at the one-hour meters (all marked MULTIPLE TICKETS ISSUED), hoards quarters like they're Beanie Babies, and runs outside every hour to sacrifice at the altar of the parking goddess.

Oh, the humanity!

I'm not whining. I know how lucky I am to be right here right now, unlike, apparently, the majority of my alleged peers. I'm just astonished (and vaguely ashamed) by the decadence and bizarre priorities I see all around me. Almost every startup has free food and free alcohol; I saw a news piece on a local dot-com that has its own oxygen bar. What's next, in-house vomitoria? All these luxuries make work more "fun", which is supposed to make people feel enthusiastic about their jobs. But is free beer rally more conducive to productivity than a professional environment with spacious, comfortable work areas?

Well, no, not really -- but who cares?

At my previous job with a large Internet software company, every employee had a 10'x10' cubicle and a place to park their car. Beer bashes were only occasional, and while coffee and sodas were free, we had to pay for our own food. Being at work felt more or less like being at work, and a lot of work got done. Admittedly most of us were overworked and some of us were underpaid, but in the Bay Area's job market, no one has to be underpaid for long.

At my current office, desks are about 8" apart and there are no cube walls. This is intended to create an open atmosphere that fosters communication. Instead, everyone wears headphones all the time, and some people use AOL Instant Messenger to talk to the person who sits next to them. It doesn't feel like being at work. I'm not sure what it does feel like, but it smells like a locker room after football practice. The "fun" atmosphere and free food are intended to keep people in the building as long as possible, but by 7 pm the office is a ghost town.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd rather have less fun and more parking. Perks do not necessarily equal paradise. Nevertheless, it takes more than inadequate parking facilities to bring down an empire, no matter how decadent. And if there's anything internet startups have, it's More. More, more, more.

Obviously I can't speak for all startups, but at my company, the casual atmosphere seems to encourage a cavalier attitude. No one wants to have to make any decisions, so everyone defers to everyone else in a game of musical buck-passing where the one left holding the bag gets to chase down the cat and stuff it back in. The "we're all pals here" philosophy leaves room for personal disagreements and otherwise unprofessional behavior. Cliques form. It's almost like being back in high school, only in high school the first person into the building didn't have to shoo the homeless guy out of the entryway.

Okay, that last part isn't actually true. The security guard makes sure the homeless sleep somewhere more appropriate, like the doorway of the warehouse across the street. God forbid anyone here should be reminded that not everyone is young, rich, and beautiful like them.

It's not surprising that cliques do form, I suppose, because despite the popular belief that internet startups are staffed by computer geeks with no social skills, most of my co-workers look like they walked out of a Gap billboard. Some of them can barely understand Windows 95, much less grasp difficult concepts like telnet and ftp. These people spend their weekends skiing in Tahoe, not watching Star Trek marathons. They like to think of themselves as computer geeks, but if they're geeks, I'm a tiara-wearing debutante.

Welcome to the Internet generation. They got MIS and IT degrees instead of CS degrees, and did it not because they were fascinated by technology, but because they heard that was where the money was. Now they're appropriating geek culture for themselves -- when was the last time *you* saw an actual nerd wearing "nerd" glasses? -- while those of us who really are geeks and nerds are slowly crowded out of our own subculture and left to wonder what happened.

Think about your classic computer geek vs. the internet startup image for a moment. Since when do computer geeks throw beer bashes and go skiing? Startups aren't geek playgrounds, they're corporate frat houses. The companies who get the venture capital aren't run by smart people with interesting ideas, they're run by hip people with cool ideas. Most of those ideas aren't going to fly in the long run, but who's in it for the long run anyway? We're all here for one reason, and one reason only: we're hoping to become IPO millionaires. No one cares whether the company is destined to be a bird, a dinosaur, or an evolutionary dead end.

And that, I think, is at the root of the problem. The people who made the computer industry of today possible were serious geeks. They had nothing better to do than stay up for three days drinking Jolt Cola and coding like maniacs. They did it because it fascinated them; they envisioned a utopian future straight out of their favorite science fiction books.

They got their utopia, but it wasn't the one they expected. They didn't get transporter beams and cybernetic girlfriends, but they did get rich beyond their wildest imaginings. Computers became interesting to the rest of the world right about the time they started to smell like money. The pioneers of the computer industry made it possible for anyone with a neat idea and net access to strike it rich. And hey, when you can get rich, who cares about the neat idea, anyway? Milk it for what it's worth, and when it runs dry, come up with an even neater, more lucrative idea.

This is why I liken South of Market to the Roman Empire. Rome was founded on enlightened ideas borrowed from the great thinkers of ancient Greece, but it ended with fat, power-hungry rich guys stabbing each other in the back. This time instead of fat guys who wear sheets, it's 20-somethings who wear khakis. The only future they envision is one in which they have a million-dollar house in Pacific Heights and a shiny new Mercedes. And I can't claim to be much better than the rest of them. I sure as hell don't want to stay here any longer than I have to. I'm only in the Internet industry to make enough money to get the hell out of the Internet industry. I have a three year vesting schedule, and I'm not sure my self-respect will survive even that long.

I console myself with the idea that I'm somehow more virtuous because my goal is to open a book shop in Virginia, not to build a second pool for swimming because the first one is full of hundred dollar bills. Meanwhile, I'm forgetting what few social skills I ever had because I can't stand to talk to anyone I meet here for more than five minutes. I'm vaguely nauseated by the relentless hipper-than-thouness of my own alleged peers. So far, the person I like most that I've met in California is in *sales*. I can't believe it's actually come to this.

I can't be the only one who feels this way, but in the long run, it doesn't matter which bad attitude you have. It all comes down to selfishness and apathy. With this philosophy, is it any surprise that most startups are too disorganized to have much chance of long-term success? A cool idea will only take you so far. Then you need a real business plan and the willingness to change with the company as it grows. And it has to change. Like it or not, a 1000-person company can't afford to be as "fun" as it was when it was 100 people in a sweaty loft. If anyone was planning to hang around that long, maybe more of these companies would age gracefully, but what do you expect from people who can't even be bothered to turn off the coffee machine?

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