This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  “Well, I’m thinking about $1 million to start, in increments of $100K,” Don would answer.

  “Sounds about right.” Nick would nod. “Who else are you thinking about approaching?”

  “Well, I thought I’d talk to Ted, maybe Ken.”

  “Yup, makes sense. I know Ken is looking around, so your timing’s good.”

  And that was that.

  Of course only a small portion of these dollars went to actual product development. Our investors told us we had to exploit our “first mover” advantage, to spend big marketing bucks to carve out our niche as not just “the first online community software and services company for business,” but as “the online community software and services company for business.” So we auditioned for several marketing communications firms, pulling out all the stops to prove that we were worthy of their talent and their willingness to accept our money.

  Led by a stubble-cheeked, black turtle-necked Steve Jobs wannabe

  named Miles, the team we ultimately hired spent several days interviewing our clients, our prospects, and us; researching our potential competitors, and then weeks devising logos and taglines. When I objected to their proposed logo because I thought it illegible, Miles patiently explained that logos are to be recognized, not read. “They’re iconic,” he instructed. “You don’t actually read IBM.” (Ibim, I thought instantly.) “No, you recognize the brand; you take in the gestalt.”

  Miles hired naming specialists to help us come up with a better corporate moniker. After spending two days brainstorming verbs (“Is ‘zoom’ a verb?”), adjectives (“Which is hotter—’hot’ or ‘cool’?”), adverbs (“Anything ending in ‘ly’ is lame”), and then in stringing them all together in different combinations (“Green Light Express?” “Daily Zoom?” “MindPartner?” “PartnerMind?”); after scouring the web and discovering that every good domain name had already been taken and was either in use or for sale for some ridiculous sum; we ended up once again deciding on Coopernation. But this time, with conviction.

  This process of redefining ourselves, or rather, of burnishing our definition to more brightly shine in the marketplace, took months and burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars. But meanwhile, we were doing real work as well—developing and testing software, implementing it, and learning by doing.

  Much to my own surprise, I was fired up as never before. We were preaching what we practiced, marrying technology with mutual respect, honest expression, and an appetite for learning. Our quest was not only to live the values of cooperation, fun, and irreverence, but to prove the financial merits of those values. I was, for the first time, allowing myself to believe that it was possible to create capitalism with a human face, a face with middle-aged wrinkles and laugh lines. And though I tried not to, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I’d get rich.

  November, 1999

  (1 Brattle Square, Cambridge, 2500 sq. ft.)

  In which we meet Jennifer, who is the Real Deal

  With that first infusion of cash, we also hired Cheryl to be our CEO, and within months she had raised $10 million in venture capital to fund us in transforming our slides and wireframes into a working online environment where people could come together to have discussions, brainstorm ideas, and share pictures and documents.

  In her mid-forties, Cheryl was smart, charismatic, and driven. She was flirtatious with men and women alike, seductive in her ability to elicit and listen, and to create the feeling that you shared a common sensibility and set of goals. She intimidated me, but I couldn’t dislike her and I absolutely couldn’t disrespect her.

  Six months younger than me but lifetimes ahead in terms of business knowledge, she was something of an anomaly in the boardrooms of the venture capitalists. She was not some would-be-Internet-millionaire-before-the-age-of-thirty. She was not like my husband’s former boss, the bright but oblivious twenty-seven-year-old man who, when asked how he felt at the end of the day on which his company went public and earned him six million dollars in eight hours, had the stunning audacity to say, “I feel vindicated. I feel just fine. After all, I poured two years of my life into this company.” No, Cheryl was a grown-up, and she recruited salespeople like herself—smart, informed, straight talkers, who were relentless in pursuit of the right sale, but willing to walk away from the wrong one. They had integrity.

  Cheryl had worked with Jennifer at a prior company and lost little time in hiring her to bring the same skills and Rolodex to Coopernation. Based in Atlanta, Jennifer came up to Boston for several days of meetings and training. Having expanded as a company from ten people to fifty over six months, we’d outgrown our conference room, and our Tuesday morning staff meetings had become hot, crowded, standing-room-only affairs.

  But Jennifer was cool bordering on frosty, all five feet of her; with glossy blonde hair pulled back in a simple hairband and cascading almost to her waist, she stood before the group, seven months pregnant with her second child, firing off as many questions about the business model and technology as she was answering about herself, taking copious notes about current and potential competitors, and generally impressing the hell out of us. At the end of her last, long training day in town, a few of us took her out for dinner, and I tried to get to know her a little better.

  She shared her professional history, but only in headlines. She’d worked her way up in the world, from a clerk at United Parcel Service to the director of sales at a multinational training and organizational development firm. Somewhere along the way she’d married and had a child, but the references to her family—indeed, to anything personal—were rare. Finally, in an attempt to make some sort of a connection, I asked, “Do you have a picture of your son?” I never particularly liked looking at pictures of other people’s kids. But Jennifer was such a cipher, a cool, dark, granite wall reflecting only my own image back at me, that I was looking for a way in.

  “No,” she answered. “I always think it’s tacky to pull out pictures of your kid, don’t you?” A small, tight smile came and went. “Say, do you think I could have another Diet Coke?”

  Then she said something to Cheryl, indicating that our conversation was over. Okay, I thought. A pregnant bottle blonde who has Diet Coke for dinner isn’t exactly my soul mate anyhow. She’s smart, she can sell. It takes all kinds of people to make a business work.

  February-September 2001

  (1 Arsenal Place, Watertown, 15,000 sq. ft.)

  In which we acquire ample office quarters but meager revenues

  The company quickly outgrew our space, and after briefly subletting a grease-infused, bug-ridden office over a Chili’s restaurant, we moved into our new quarters—a parking garage that had been converted to open plan offices. The place was huge—far too big for us—but given the extraordinary demand for commercial real estate, we were confident that we’d sublet half the floor in no time. With its psychedelic color scheme and foosball table in the cafeteria, it had all the accoutrements of dot-com culture, which I viewed with a mixture of pride and unease. Pride, because I wanted our company to be egalitarian and irreverent; unease, because I struggled to see riding scooters around the office as anything but an affectation.

  In February, at the end of her maternity leave, Jennifer returned to work. A month later, Wall Street came crashing down from its Internet high. Despite everyone’s best efforts, revenues were paltry and our now panicky investors, the ones who’d told us to go ahead and rent our capacious, barely furnished office and to spend, spend, spend, now told us, “Cut your burn rate by fifty percent in the next month, reduce your COGS, and grow your top line faster.” I quickly learned that this was financier-speak for laying people off, lowering the Cost of Goods Sold (the labor and dollars we invested in order to deliver the product and service that our clients purchased from us), and increasing our revenues.

  This was our first major test, and true to our principles, we did not do the standard
pack ’em up and move ’em out. The management team did not hole up in a room, assemble a list of names, and then lay-off half the staff and escort them out of the building in the course of a single bloody morning, as had become the norm. Instead, we called a company meeting. Cheryl distributed the cash flow spreadsheets and explained them. She illustrated all the ways in which we were hemorrhaging money—the unleased office space, the payroll that vastly exceeded revenues. Then she asked everyone present to volunteer for salary reductions or cutbacks in hours worked.

  “Don and I are not going to draw any salary for the next six months,” she announced. “We don’t expect that everyone can do the same, but we are asking you to take a hard look and tell us what you can afford to do.” Then she looked around the hushed room, and with a trembling voice said, “You are the most talented, committed group of people I’ve ever worked with in all my years in business. There’s nobody in this room who is dispensable. But the fact is that we’re not going to get out of this without some layoffs. If we all put our hands in the center, if we all pool our creativity and our willingness to sacrifice, we can save some jobs. And with each and every sale we make, we’ll be able to save more jobs down the road.”

  People filed out of the conference room—the first room we’d ever had that was big enough to hold all of us—and back to their desks to talk to their spouses on the phone, to run numbers, to group in small clusters and frantically devise job-sharing schemes. And when the management team reconvened on Thursday, we learned that forty-nine out of our fifty employees had volunteered payroll and time cuts that in aggregate would save us close to $100,000 per month. Two programmers had independently approached Cheryl and offered to be laid off if it would save the job of a third, a recent immigrant whose wife was eight months pregnant. Another two people had volunteered reductions in hours, finding a grimly silver lining in the fact that this would give them more time to spend with their recently laid off spouses. All told, the voluntary cutbacks had saved twelve jobs.

  The next day, we laid off eight people and explained that if sales didn’t pick up substantially, we’d have to repeat the process in three months. “So this is it for now,” a pale and subdued Cheryl told the staff. “Go back to work if that’s what’ll help you feel better. But my suggestion is that you just take some time to be with the colleagues we have to say goodbye to today, and then go home to your friends and families. Let’s not pretend this isn’t wrenching. But let’s come back to work on Monday with renewed energy to make this company work.”

  That week, the honesty and decency and self-sacrifice that pervaded it, fueled my commitment to the company like nothing else ever had. This wasn’t about the business, I told my husband that night, holding back the tears. It was about making room in this world for new, more humane, more mutually responsible forms of organizational culture to take hold. I was in it for keeps.

  Meanwhile, on the sales front, Jennifer was leading the charge. She was tireless and we at headquarters responded in kind, forming a short-lived SWAT team to help her close sales with several prospects, all of whom were on the brink of signing.

  It seemed to pay off. By September Jennifer had brought in signed contracts totaling $598,000—not bad for six months’ work. But on Monday, September 10, as we reviewed the numbers at the start of our sales meeting, it was clear that we were still about $200,000 shy of our goal for the quarter that would wrap up in just under three weeks. Our investors, Cheryl informed us, had made it clear that another round of financing—a round we could not survive without—was contingent on us making our targets.

  We fell into a grim silence that Jennifer finally broke by saying, “Well, you know we salespeople don’t like to talk about anything before it’s real for fear that we’ll jinx it, but I’m actually expecting delivery of a signed contract from Delta tomorrow.”

  The next morning’s meeting started routinely, with updates on the testing of the new software release (“Only about seventy-five bugs, which isn’t as bad as it sounds,” our chief technical officer announced) and the quest for tenants to share the costs of our newly leased space (“Maybe we should rent the office out for children’s birthday parties,” I suggested).

  Then, with a Cheshire Cat grin, Cheryl innocently asked, “Any sales updates?” and Jennifer casually tossed a FedEx envelope on the table.

  “Just this little contract from Delta Airlines for two customer communities amounting to $178K,” she said quietly.

  We burst into applause. Cheryl pulled a shiny gold Burger King crown from her briefcase and ceremoniously placed it on Jennifer’s head. Sandy handed her a small packet of glitter (“Fairy dust,” she said with a big smile), which Jennifer regally scattered around the table. Then, sitting upright at the head of the long conference table, Jennifer held a pencil up like a scepter, the oversized golden crown surrounding her gleaming blonde head, and we all scraped and bowed in mock thanks and supplication at her feet, frozen in the pose until the flash of someone’s digital camera flared twice.

  We resumed our seats and had begun to circulate slices of coffee cake when someone came into the conference room and handed Cheryl a note. She read it with a puzzled look, then announced, “Apparently there’s been some sort of accident. A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.”

  “God, I sure hope it wasn’t a Delta plane,” someone murmured.

  October-December 2001

  (200 Talcott Ave., Watertown, 3000 sq. ft.)

  In which we learn how to live under water

  In the dazed horror and economic paralysis following September 11, most of our new contracts stalled and our pipeline—the pool of serious prospects who were close to signing—dried up. Sales still had a long gestation period, and those that Jennifer had made in the last quarter were advancing at a glacial pace. Although we had signed contracts from several of her accounts, we could not actually bill until we started the series of client meetings to plan the community, and we could not realize the revenue in our books until we’d recruited consumers and that community was up and running.

  But we were having a difficult time getting to launch. Delta, not surprisingly, was too focused on survival to have much energy for us. Jennifer’s client contact at NDC Health lost a brother in the World Trade Center and was out of commission for several months. Bell South, like many telecommunications companies, was hit especially hard by the economic decline and had put our project on hold. Then once again, at zero hour, just before the close of the fourth quarter, Jennifer finally won a $240,000 contract with Rare Hospitality, the company behind a string of steakhouse chains.

  That was good enough for our investors, who agreed to give us enough additional money to keep us afloat for another ten months. In a spectacularly non-festive company meeting in February, 2002, they sat eating pizza (no more tote bags with gourmet sandwiches, two kinds of side salads, and Belgian chocolates for dessert), and shared with us the angst of venture capital. Uncharacteristically tie-less, in a rumpled shirt, our lead investor Jim told us that we were one of the few companies they’d invested in to have grown at all in the past six months.

  “We took a look at our portfolio,” he said, “and we divided it into an A-list and a B-list. We’re pulling the plug on the B-list companies altogether.” He paused and picked the pepperoni off the pizza while letting that sink in. “You guys are still on the A-list,” he said, drawing out “still” like an executioner drawing out the plunger on his poison syringe, “because you’re making sales. You’ve got revenue coming in—not enough, mind you, but more than a lot of other companies who got off to a much splashier start.”

  In exchange for their support, they gave us a term sheet ensuring that if and when the company was sold or went public, they would receive three times the value of every share they owned before anyone else received a penny. Given that the valuation of our company had dropped from $30 million to $6 million in the past year, this meant that all
of the rest of us—the founders, the CEO, and all the employees—were almost guaranteed that our stock options would be valuable only to clean windows or wrap fish. Our bereft state, I now learned, was referred to as being “under water.” Ironically, this was the price we paid for staying afloat.

  February 2002

  (200 Talcott Ave., Watertown, 3000 sq. ft.)

  In which Jennifer redoubles her efforts, and we pull together as one

  Our rainmaker threatened to leave. Jennifer submitted her resignation to Cheryl, telling her that she wanted to be near her brother and ailing mother in Southern California. She’d been offered a sales job there with a company called Accomplish Now, who was willing to pay her more and to relocate her. Cheryl made her a counter-offer. Jennifer could open a new territory in the Los Angeles area, and Coopernation would cover her housing and relocation expenses, effective the following January.

  Jennifer accepted and we congratulated ourselves on keeping her. In fact we took her assent as a sign of confidence. I’d always been told that salespeople followed the money, so if she was staying with us, it must mean we were doing something right. Emboldened, we once again pooled our efforts to provide her with enough sales support to keep her dizzying number of prospects afloat.

  But although we could see the products of her labor—proposals, signed letters of intent, contracts, emails from Jennifer to us and our new but still unmet clients in Atlanta—Jennifer herself began to feel more and more remote to us. Like so many companies at that time, we’d frozen all but the most essential travel, and our geographically dispersed salespeople were just tinny voices coming through the speaker phone.