Startup.com

by Daniel in New York

Twenty-three incidents have been assigned to me between when I left last night and when I stumbled into the office today at the crack of noon. The CEO's wife is loudly scolding him in front of the entire office, again. The mission-critical database server reboots unexpectedly for the third time this week. This time it doesn't come back up. I fight to find a comfortable position in my hand-me-down office chair. I fail. At that moment it occurs to me that my chair captures the very spirit of the entire company: super cheap and gets the job done, sort of.

The chair is super cheap (in this case, free) and gets the job done, sort of. Sure, I might need back surgery in a few years but the worker's compensation lawsuit is a risk that the CEO is all too willing to take. The PC workstations? They're underpowered when they come out of the box which is to say making them last 3 years will be interesting. Sure, the time wasted by employees twiddling their thumbs waiting for their computers to catch up may outweigh any benefit of the lower price tag, but that's a risk management is all too willing to take. The walls? Painted by the CEO. You can't beat the price and the walls got covered with paint, sort of.

In my survey of the office I am snapped back to the moment by the sight of all of the worried faces staring at me. Why are they doing that? Oh, right. The mission-critical database crash. That is, unfortunately, my group's responsibility. I get down to work with a sigh, wondering how the hell I ended up here.

* * *

It's three years ago on a cold day in December. I had just quit my job working for the coke-fiend only two months prior and was doing odd-jobs until something piqued my interest. Having spent several months working from home in the nude, I thought performing these odd-jobs in a suit and tie would be an exhilarating change of pace. My clients were quite perplexed. I looked unusually professional for a computer consultant.

During lunch I hop onto the McDonalds open WiFi and stumble across a craigslist.org job posting. It says "Mobile Developer Wanted for Technology Startup." A technology startup? In New York City? Mobile technology, like cell phones? Intrigued, I send my resume. Less than five minutes later I get a response and less than two hours later I'm interviewing at Eric's apartment for the job. I didn't even have time to change out of my suit, which left him with the same equally perplexed expression as my morning clients had. I looked unusually professional for a computer guy.

Eric's Flatiron apartment must measure an entire 800 square feet, which is to say it had to have a fair market value of one million dollars. Enjoying a cup of nothing which Eric didn't offer, I learn all about Eric's dream of creating a fledgling technology company and growing it into a multi-national corporate empire. His plan is to fund this company by taking out a home equity line of credit against his million dollar apartment which had appreciated considerably during the housing bubble following the dot-com crash. In addition to his apartment, his friends and family were going to invest some angel funding too, a few thousand bucks at a time.

The dream is Social Darwinist, the premier social networking application designed for your mobile phone.

The office is his living room.

My job is developing the software that makes this dream happen. My reward will be shares of the company which, while worth little now (zero, actually), will appreciate into millions as the company explodes into an empire.

Eric offered me the job the next morning and I accepted the next evening. I had a mountain of reservations. What happens if this company flops? It almost definitely will, the success rate for startups is not great. Eric's house is on the line, how is he going to keep a level head through all of this? His friends and family are going to meddle with his business for sure. His girlfriend Leona, what's her role going to be through all of this? On the other hand, I had missed the first dot-com boom and was dying to see what life was like from the inside. I may as well give it a try. I mean, how bad could it be?