It’s Alive! Start-ups and Old Monster Movies

In the movie Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s novel, Dr. Frankenstein attempts to create human life by sewing together disparate body parts. Only, none of it works until there is an electric storm, whose lightning bolt gives off the spark of life. Parallels can be found in the quest to build a successful startup, and in the relation between the surgical systems approach and what I’ll call, for a lack of better terminology, “the spark.”

A systems person wants neither drama, nor surprises. Skilled professionals in the start-up business optimize, customize (and improvise) a foundation of systems that worked well for them in the past--whether in sales structure, HR, finance, executive recruitment tactics, R&D, marketing etc. To make those systems work they look for teams with proven track records in the field. And, with a bit of luck, all this may be imbued with the spark—that rare zeitgeisty combination of the right idea, the right people, the right time.

A company could be a perfect system if it wasn’t for the messy, but necessary, “Human Element”—comprising the entrepreneurs, the artists, the “emmerdeurs,” the friends, the enemies, the relatives, the apparatchiks, the mercenaries, the visionaries, the small-minded, the amateurs, the pros, the traitors, the lovers, the people with the big goals, the people with the little goals, the advisers, the investors, and, oh yes, the customer. In short, what the French call “The Human Comedy” or “La Comedie Humaine.”

The spark without the system dissipates; meanwhile systems without the spark are empty vessels.

Whether the spark is a bolt of lightning striking some random unsuspecting dumbass, who wakes up to find himself plonked on a pot of gold, or the collective will of sentient beings, with objectives of their own, sparks do happen.

As for what happens from there, nothing is certain once the Creature shambles down the hill towards the unsuspecting and soon-to-be terrorized villagers.

PR and the Girl

One of the fringe benefits of co-founding a company is giving yourself any job title you want. By the time the company was big enough to hire other people to do things like setting up trainings, billing/accounts payable, legal review et al., I had settled on Director of Communications.

While the only thing I've ever been able to convince anybody to pay me for in my professional life has been writing, my interviewing experiences, when we first moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1997, convinced me that PR was not for me.

The founder of one boutique tech agency asked me a series of validating questions along the lines of “Do you have many friends,” and, as I became progressively more self-conscious, she concluded “it’s obvious you are very ill-at-ease”--a doubtful prognosis, I imagine, of my ability to handle journalists.

My other interview was with a manager for a white shoe, pre-March 2000 “We-only-work-for-equity-thank-you-very-much,” plus enough retainer to keep its female staffers in Manolo Blahniks type firm. I read an interview with one of that agency’s founders, where she proudly mentioned how many software execs marry their PR girls, citing Steve Ballmer as an example. I considered the promise of “If you do well, you too can marry a future CEO.” I thought for a few seconds about Steve Ballmer. The monkey dance video (Developers, developers, developers!) hadn’t yet come out, but already the intimation of so much agitated, perspiration-drenched corpulence was there. I decided there were other professions where I could earn a living with writing.

I’d like to mention that I married the CEO BEFORE he was the CEO, six years before. When we did start JBoss, we were living at my parents’ house, and the only entity who even remotely reported to us was the family dog.

Ironically, I was once "Almost Featured in Rolling Stone." I had just graduated from Wellesley with a degree in English Literature. My success in getting interviews, coupled with equal success in remaining unemployed brought me to the attention of one of their writers doing a "getting the first job" profile for a series on Gen-X'ers. I am slightly embarrassed to say the prospect of anybody flying down from New York and paying attention to me quite went to my head. The article never got published, but we dined out on Rolling Stone's dollar (it was 1994, I was unemployed and Marc was a Ph.D. student), on stories of my unsuccessful interviews and bathos like "I used to write about Personality and Artistic Theory; now I write about evaporators and batch digesters." I even stooped so low as to play the Southern card, sharing some insight from my grandmother and her friends: "Honey we don't know what to tell you. After we graduated from college, we just joined the Junior League and started playing bridge."

So, it’s funny when some journalists tell Marc that other people in the industry ask about getting the JBoss treatment, like it was some option you could sign up for like PPO vs. HMO on your insurance coverage. ‘Cause I would imagine that to get the JBoss treatment, you’d kind a sorta have to be JBoss, or the people affiliated with JBoss, and there definitely were two sides to the treatment we got. If there was any defining insight in our communications strategy, it was the oh-so novel idea of saying exactly what we thought. As for communicating our thoughts credibly, you’d actually have to have done the things we did and lived the quirky experiences we lived.

You Better Shape Up!

As my children returned to school last week, I felt the need to share some advice with my sister whose oldest child just started kindergarten: “Don’t be fooled about that homework your daughter comes home with. It’s not her homework, it’s your homework."

I don’t know if it was the eighties or just my parents, but they had a very laissez-faire approach to homework and grades. As long as my sister and I didn’t dip below B-/C+, the typical response to a lackluster grade on our report cards was “Did you try?” Or “Did you do your best?” to which we inevitably answered “Yes, I sure did,” translated to “I sure did try real hard to open that book,” and “I did the best I could considering I didn’t open it…”

Never having had real homework until third grade myself, and not having bothered to do any of it until fourth or fifth grade, having children in a school program where they feel the need to send you two or three email updates a day, where each of my children comes home with a notebook for communicating with their teachers daily, homework that needs to be personally supervised and checked daily and mothers who get into smack downs over who gets to be the “grade level rep” or what the annual fund-raiser tee-shirt will look like (“Really, Rose we all know you just want the bigger logo on the front to call more attention to your boobs”—and, no, I am not making this up), I felt like a total outsider, a feeling that was further compounded back when I was a working mother.

Just try doing homework with a tired child at the end of the day, when you are tired yourself. That was how I landed in so much trouble two years ago, along with a Georgia Tech Math professor and my husband, when we finally snapped and started an email thread expressing our feeling that with two Ph.D.’s, a Masters and a professional university teaching career among us, might it be a little excessive that none of us could figure out what our children’s First Grade homework assignments were.

Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis

When the ghosts come out to taunt you and dance a jig on your tombstone, hopefully you’re not there. There was a time, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when it felt wrong and on a good day you could get paid to be wrong. Manifest Destiny was on your side. These days, it’s like re-watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. Somewhere, along the way, after all the excitement and adventure, the Ark of the Covenant got lost. They tagged it for inventory and wheeled it off for storage in some anonymous government warehouse. And that’s when it hits you. The bureaucrats and accountants have won. You’ve grown up and they’ve won.

It’s like going back to one of your favorite haunts from the past and finding it under new management. They’ve redecorated, something to do with a cultural revolution or the curious ascendance of Shelob, but, damn it all, nobody knows where a bunch of high-altitude aerials of the San Francisco Bay and salt flats shot by a descendant of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, one-time President of the Republic of Texas, can be found.

Even if you did read Alexis de Tocqueville’s “De la Democratie en Amerique,” predicting the rise to power of complacent mediocrity, you never were quite prepared for the inevitability of the sock puppet figure bearing the title of Commander in Chief of the Greatest Power in the Free World, the man who happened to sit on the winning lottery number, but gradually came to believe himself to be solely responsible for the country’s success. If a doubt ever plagued his mind regarding this success or his competence to be where he was, he consoled himself with the thought that "God was on his side."

"Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis,"translates, "A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy," M B Lamar, in a speech to Congress.

Grammar was her downfall

I was not so shocked, shocked to learn that Forbes editor, Dan Lyons, onetime voice in the outcry against anonymous blogging tactics, went from a defensive treatise against the Dark Arts to dabbling in them. Apparently, CEO blogs containing such compelling insights as "...coaslesce your unstructured data with our modular design for business processes based on a service-oriented parkitecture," inspired Mr. Lyons to take up the voice of Fake Steve Jobs.

As others have pointed out, Mr. Lyons' official "Floating Point" and his FSJ jollies blog coverage of Open Source were quite consistent. He sought to disabuse his readers of any illusions they might harbor on the topic. The salient aspects of the movement--licenses, products, business models--did not interest him so much. Why would they? If Open Source is successful, it would all be controlled by IBM anyway. As FSJ, adding "freetards" to the "long-hairs" and "sandal brigade" repertory for describing the delusional pissants afflicted with the highly contagious social disease was perhaps his most lasting contribution to the debate on Open Source.

The ramifications of the Lyons' j'accuse are portentous and terrible indeed. The FSF and Groklaw PJ get money from IBM? It's not enough that the FSF goes out of its way to alienate every other corporate entity that could keep the lights on for them, they've got to let go of IBM too? As for PJ, isn't an ongoing obsession with chronicling every legal brief coming of the SCO case a hard enough cross to bear? Or, you're only a credible Open Source advocate if the compulsion leaves you penniless and starving? As for Richard Stallman, the guy may be a raving pinko Commie, but he works out of the William Gates, III building at MIT, after all. Isn't that poetic justice enough?

Then I got to thinking, plugged in as the talented Mr. Lyons may be, he still supposedly held down a full-time job while writing FSJ. The variety and quantity of the posts as well as the direct reference in FSJ's "El Jobso Rides Again" (...Instead of just having the Steve-inator write the whole blog, VC dude says let's have a team blog...) August 2006 post hint at a collective blog. Then there is the whole issue of matching anonymous authors with their public counterparts through unique writing pattern recognition. That jogged a memory. When had I last read about the success of that technique. Belle de Jour was hotter and supposedly got a six figure advance for her book.

As for the real Steve Jobs, I have to admit, I had quite a crush on him after watching the made-for-TV "documentary" "Pirates of Silicon Valley" back in 1999...until I realized that El Steve-O hadn't looked like Noah Wyle...for quite a while.

To British Air With Love

"The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today," Lewis Carroll.

Along with certain beliefs in human dignity, the innate fairness and logic of authority, and the inalienable rights of the individual, my middle class American cultural baggage imbued childhood memories of air travel (to visit my grandparents in the seventies) with a spirit of excitement and anticipation. My mother would dress my sister and me in our better clothes (athletic shoes, sweatsuits and shorts were not expected to make an appearance outside sporting venues) and make it clear that unless we wished to forgo a thousand delights and indulgences of childhood, under no circumstances were we to humiliate her with a display of anything less than our best manners. Although we always flew coach, the airplane felt like a privileged and highly civil means of transportation.

That era fades into a distant memory against today's backdrop of the airport of the future, a venue that manages to combine the charms of a Greyhound bus terminal with triage at a low-security prison.

Have kids, will travel

Along my journey towards adulthood, I've managed to acquire four children of my own, something that has not eliminated empathy for anybody who has ever had to spend hours cooped up in a plane behind some squalling brat. I can truly say I make every effort to make sure that that child is not mine and I fully support whichever airline it was that chucked out the little horror that refused to buckle its seatbelt, along with its whiny, enabling parents. Ironically, the same litigious spirit which allows the child's parents to feel their rights had been infringed on by the seatbelt mandate, would have also been invoked against the airline had the little troglodyte been allowed to experience what it deserved--having its head bonked at the first sign of air turbulence. As for those younger children whose behavior simply cannot be helped, a mother of twins once shared with me a gracious panacea--offering the unfortunate cabin-mates importuned by one's offspring free drinks, preferably hard liquor.

Despite appearances to the contrary, parents of young children actually get few breaks in today's air travel environment. Just try getting through the carry-on luggage scanning line with an infant in a stroller. In that vein, the one travel experience, I always grit my teeth for is our annual trek, with the children, to visit my husband's family in Mallorca. Past bad experiences with Delta and Iberia and Madrid's Barajas airport led me to the conclusion that traveling with one carrier for both legs of the non-direct trip and flying through an English-speaking hub might alleviate our problems. To others whose experiences have been less than satisfactory with Spanish carriers or any elements of the hospitality industry in Spain, I have one word for you "El libro de reclamaciones," a Franco holdover from an era when individual liberties might have been curtailed but, by God, the trains ran on time, and the consequences for poor service were serious.

So how did things go with British Air the past two years: 0 for 2 and I'm thinking of going back to sucking it up with Delta.

It all started late July last year when the long arm of Iberia managed to reach out and screw us from afar. It was one of those ridiculous strikes that only seem to happen in Europe. The Iberia baggage personnel occupied all landing strips of the Barcelona airport, shutting down Spain's number two airport, costing millions of dollars, creating a security and logistics nightmare, not to mention pain for thousands of travellers whose flights had to be re-routed in Barcelona and the surrounding airspace. For some reason known only to themselves, in an era when they tell you to show up three hours in advance for international travel, British Air considers that one hour is suitable connection time between flights in a major hub like London Gatwick. On the delayed outbound flight to London, the pilot came to reassure us that he had been in touch with the Atlanta-bound crew of the connecting flight and that we should sprint out as soon as the plane landed beause they would hold the plane. I told him that I was six months pregnant and asthmatic, with three children and could they please arrange to have one of those motorized carts or at least some airline personnel to escort us.

No personnel and no motorized assistance were forthcoming when we exited our plane. I did manage to sprint it out with the kids and make it to the terminal with the Atlanta-bound plane still there. So, imagine my surprise when they would not let us board. They pretended that this was some sort of formality of it being too close to the departure time (none of which prevented them, earlier, from telling a 6-month pregnant woman with three children to run through Gatwick to try and make the flight). The reality, which everyone who flies frequently these days knows-- the real truth--was that they had already given up our seats due to overbooking. What ensued was two hours with my tired kids (who had had to get up at 4am that morning to make it to the airport on time for the first flight) as the gate agent tried to figure out how to get us to Atlanta. Ultimately, the only way they could make this happen was to put us on a 5:30am flight the next morning to Dublin, followed by a noon flight from Dublin to Atlanta, putting us up for the night in some squalid, fleabag motel in the vicinity of Gatwick.

First Class All the Way, Baybee

Awful as my experiences flying have been, they have all been in Cabin Class, so I still held out the illusion that somewhere in first class people breathed a rareified air where the airline passenger is treated with something better than contempt and disdain. I am told this is true--if you fly Singapore Airlines, which sounds like a nod to the 1960s when flight attendants were hired on the basis of being young, cute and chipper. Meanwhile, on the major American and European carriers, those same attendants they hired back in the 60's are still flying and many of them ain't so elated about it.

The first thing that set me against British Air this year was that they forced us to pay over $2000 to change two business class and six coach class tickets (for the children and nannies) to fly one day earlier from Mallorca. The service agent was completely unsympathetic about our experience missing the one hour window for the connecting flight last year and refused to give any statistics on the percentage of their Palma to London flights that actually make it on time. Nope, we had to pay the full "international" change fee for all fares.

So, imagine my surprise after purchasing my tickets five months in advance and shelling out a fortune in change fees, not to mention the cost of staying overnight in London, to compensate for their ridiculous one hour layover, when we get to the airport two and a half hours early the next morning only to be told by the bubblehead in charge of issuing the boarding passes that two of our party are on stand-by. I ask exactly how they plan to sort this out since, with the exception of my husband, one of the nannies and myself, everyone else is a minor and cannot fly alone. She replies that it's not the airline's fault: they are forced to overbook or "they will lose money since not everybody shows up to fly." It must take some practice to look people in the eye and say in so many words "We're not greedy bastards trying to get an extra 5 or 10% on top of our profit margin. It's economic necessity that forces us to screw you." Because the no-shows wouldn't have to pay their fare up front like everybody else, would they?

Bubblehead assures me that we will get on the plane it is just a question of re-assigning seats because of all the people who had the foresight to check in online 24 hours in advance grabbed up all the primo seats and made it impossible for our children to sit with their sitters in the economy cabin. She implies that it is our fault for not having the foresight to take advantage of the 24 hour advance check-in, something that I have just heard about for the first time that day. This seat re-assignment apparently takes computing and logistic qualities beyond those she possesses because she taps around for an hour with no results, as my children and baby grow more and more restless. Ironically, had the plane arrived on time, we still would have missed the one hour connection window due to the overbooking saga.

During this period the kids get thirsty, need to go to the bathroom, and the baby becomes hungry. My back starts to hurt and I ask for a chair to sit down and nurse him. She says that it's not possible to provide one. That's when it hits me: the revelation of how to extract myself from this situation. Denied a chair, I pull out one of the suitcases to the middle of the Club World First Class ticketing area, glare at her and sit down to nurse my baby. I do have more innate modesty and less need for drama than the breast-feeding mother traveling Delta who insisted on flashing everybody (my experience seeing the masses of flesh roasting on Spanish beaches is that what is most exposed is usually not what you want to see). However, I can also see that plopping myself down on top of a suitcase to breastfeed, surrounded by the gypsy encampment of my children, including my eight year old daughter singing girls' camp clapping songs: "Miss Merry Mac, Mac, Mac, with silver buttons down her back, back, back" is having the desired effect. Quite simply, we are not projecting that Club World First Class travel image with which British Air like to associate themselves. Too bad we don't have some domestic animals running about or some flint and firewood to start grilling out sausages, while we're at it.

Within five minutes: the solution arrives. Her matronly appearance, grey helmet-hair and perma-scowl let me know this is the answer to my prayers, the supervisor--"She who talketh to the computers." Remember the Spacing Guild in Dune? You start out with the novices who exhibit rather standard patterns of human interaction and appearance, moving all the way up to the guy floating in an orange cloud of Spice in the aquarium? When it comes to interstellar travel, he's your man. Unlike her younger colleague, this woman's typing produces results. In 10 minutes and we are finally issued boarding passes. I have achieved another one of those life lessons. If you are denied first-class treatment, even when you've paid a fortune to try and ensure it, find some politically correct way to act like their third-world nightmare of third class and you'll achieve the new standard in airline service--getting screwed, less.