__ Episode 3: Loserfriendly __
Even if a Silicon Alley company has a good plan and good prospects, chances are it is staffed with a fair number of very young naïfs who don't know the first thing about business. This, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing, because these are the sort who are willing to work long hours at very low pay, which is an important criterion when you are searching for (a) people to write code or (b) people to do you're-not-quite-sure-what- but-you-need-them-in-the-office-to-impress-clients. Both types are prevalent down here.
But there's a third species in the genus Naïf that is less benign. These are the losers. While they're mainly harmless (if you're standing in the midst of a money storm, does it really matter if the guy next to you is carrying an umbrella?), I've run into a few who can sink a company. If you've got one on staff, fire him or her today. Any delay could be fatal.
And I know - from personal experience - of at least one loser of McGwirean stature inevitably available to infiltrate your ranks. In honor of his archetypicality, I call him The Loser. The Loser has this uncanny knack: If he works for a company, it goes out of business. He has brought this skill to start-ups and multinationals alike; his batting average for successful failures is about .800. He worked at my agency when I first got there, and we're the only company on his CV to avoid the inevitable.
The Loser is the most purified form of a class of washouts who tend to assemble on the fringes of the Alley. There's another guy who reminds me of Badluck Schleprock on the old Fred Flintstone and Friends series. An emaciated beanpole with really big ears that stand way out from his head, he's socially maladjusted, and his specialty is saying whatever comes into his head at any given moment. In some circles, of course, this is regarded as the comportment of visionaries. Schleprock does his best to promote this angle by never, ever holding back.
I run into him from time to time at industry conferences, most recently at a confab on the future of ecommerce. For some reason, Schleprock, who works at a lame, two-man consulting shop, had actually been asked to speak at this gathering, in return for which the organizers had agreed to pay his expenses. At the opening-night cocktail party, while one of those organizers was standing having a beer with a group of big-time sponsors, Schleprock made his move. "I always believe in business before pleasure," he said, cutting in on the group, "so can we take care of my expenses before we start drinking?" It emerged that the hotel had asked Schleprock for his credit card when he checked in. The conference dude was speechless; his big-time sponsors were not amused. And Schleprock - well, I doubt he'll be invited back.
He's a real loser. But he's not The Loser.
I vividly remember a presentation The Loser put together for himself and one of our VPs to give at a pitch meeting. New to the company, I was to come along to observe how it was done. My first clue that The Loser was someone special came at noon, the hour at which the pitch was scheduled to begin at the prospect's uptown office. We were still downtown. The Loser and the VP were yelling at each other, because the acetate slides (The Loser didn't know how to use PowerPoint) weren't printing out properly. With the slides finally in order, we took off in a cab, all four of us (another new guy was along as well) crammed into the back seat.
The prospect's office was nice in that uptown, carpeted, established, conventional, air-conditioned way. We were immediately out of place in our downtown, cyber, don't-really-own-a-decent-suit, 12-people-in-the-company-a-third-of-whom-are-here-at-the-meeting way.
The prospect had a lot more titles floating around than we did - about a half-dozen VPs, SVPs, and EVPs introduced themselves. I began to notice these people shifting uneasily in their chairs shortly after Bill, our VP, started his presentation. One glance up at the slide show explained why: Nothing added up. We had all sorts of market-sizing charts and profit projections and detailed explanations of how the client was going to get great ROI. But none of the figures actually computed to the sums that were listed at the bottom of the columns or alongside the pie charts or over the bar graphs. The Loser, it turned out, had put the slides together only the previous night.
My vague sense of impending doom turned into an acute case of terror as Bill sloshed bravely through the fatally flawed pitch. Then, when he finally stammered to a halting conclusion, the client uttered words that still ring in my head today: "When are you going to get to the stuff we asked you to present? You know, the online-games stuff?"
At every horrible meeting there are levels of embarrassment. This meeting had the full, Dante-esque spectrum of the echelons of hell. Bill was humiliated. The Loser was looking a lot at his shoes. I and the other innocent observer were shaken just to be associated with this bullshit. Our client contact was more mortified than anyone; she had brought us in to pitch. Her boss was chagrined simply to be linked with her.
By the time we had slunk back to our miserable warren downtown, the client contact had already made the kiss-off call. Oh, well. In the grandest Silicon Alley tradition, we immediately repaired to Match on Mercer Street and started drinking. I tried my best to keep up with The Loser, who outweighed me by 60 pounds. We didn't do the three-martini thing like the uptown agencies. We're cyber, after all. We did the seven-drink, posthumiliation happy hour. I threw up on my suit.
The Loser left our company shortly after the incident, which probably spared us. He landed at a large, well-funded European Internet deal, which went dark shortly after he joined. And then at the MCI/News Corp. Internet venture, which (as everyone knows) also shuttered. I suspect his most recent company, an online-music thing, will cross the river Styx before too long, just because he's on the raft.
How does a killer sap of this magnitude keep finding fresh hosts? Headhunters can help. So can the appearance of scarcity (when in fact the opposite is true), and therefore desirability. An executive at a tiny (eight-person) but growing interactive agency in Silicon Alley told me recently about how a headhunter found him what was described as a hot candidate. But the executive admitted he wasn't convinced until, at a subsequent NM party, he ran into a top guy at a midsize (50-person) interactive agency who also happened to be this candidate's boss. When they shook hands, the big-agency man held on to the small-agency guy's for a fraction too long, looked him right in the eye, and hissed, "I heard you called one of my people." The hot candidate was offered the job the next morning. Even if he's a loser, he'll probably be headhunted again before anyone finds out.
This affair with mediocrity is a far bigger problem in the Alley than the Valley. California has its share of misfits, but at least they have EE degrees from Caltech. The equation there is something like four or five engineers for every media or marketing clown. Here, the metric is reversed. The high concentration of people who have just fallen into the scene further contributes to an oversupply of losers. And since these losers are often the front men for an enterprise - no one would dream of letting an engineer out in public in New York - their impact is perversely severe.
Then again, sometimes even they can't kill a good thing. While most of the companies down here won't be around in six months, some of them (like mine, I hope) will hit, and that will just fuel more momentum and investment and attention and new employment opps. That is how success stories are made. Even losers sometimes win.
