I've Seen a Few Before

I've been plugging away at my job in Silicon Valley for nearly ten years. By the time March of 2008 swings around the calendar will have clocked past the decade marker, and that's a long time. It's an especially long time to be working for the one employer. Sad but true, I've been slave to the will of the one corporation ever since I set food on American soil. I recently tried to change that state of affairs.

Right around Halloween, the household of The Brit, La Cubana Gringa and assorted other roommates threw a party. It was a rager, with my personal—and non-existent—costume prize going to the woman who dressed up as a box of Pocky. During the course or the evening I ran into the former Vice President of the department in which I once worked at my current employer. He departed the company under somewhat controversial circumstances, but that's a whole other tale for the telling. Anyway, he clued me into a Director of Engineering position at a startup that, unlike most startups people think of when they hear "startup", is making money hand-over-fist. They've got a staff of 25 and they're raking in annual revenues of around 17 million. What's the nature of their work? I'll answer the question shortly.

I was told by the former VP that they're carrying on like it's still 1999, and the job might well cast a lure strong enough to draw me away from a decade's worth of indentured servitude in Silicon Valley. The new job is in San Francisco, the pay very much on the high side and they're throwing all the usual and ridiculous perks once lavished upon the startups of old: massages, snacks galore, comped lunches, you name it. Colour me intrigued, I said, and then promptly forgot about it.

A couple of days later an email arrived for me. It was from the contract recruiter hired by the startup to stock the company with talent. After a brief exchange of emails we agreed to meet. The odd thing was that we agreed to meet on a Saturday afternoon at Puerto Alegre—a restaurant located near the intersection of 16th and Valencia that's well known for its margaritas. And one last thing, the company is in the porn business.

The porn business? I wasn't quite ready for that, but the more I thought about it the more I liked it. After ten years in the semiconductor trade, the thought of jumping ship for the land of boobs and balls seemed quite enticing. Instead of watching eyes glaze over as I tell people who ask that I manage a group of web developers for a Silicon Valley-based semiconductor, I'd suddenly become a source of insider information into the salacious world of shaved pubes and DVDA. Yeah, that sounds great. Now, whenever I go to Australia and hang out with my wine maker brother, I might actually stand a chance of sustaining more than a half second of anyone's attention after we're each asked what we do for a living. A Silicon Valley semiconductor manager doesn't stand a chance against a wine maker. Nobody gives a shit about electronic components, but just about everyone's got a stake in the wine business somewhere, and I'd wager nearly as many—whether they advertise it or not—have dabbled in porn.

So I met the recruiter at Puerto Alegre. He's a regular at the place and holds down the same spot every Saturday afternoon. He was calling the staff by name as he did his best to ensure that my margarita arrived promptly. It did. He then divulged the extra details about the company and not without a lot of spin. Yes, they're in the porn business but they're not a producer. They're more like a straight-up web company that just happens to have wound up a purveyor of smut. And he's got a point. The company, now revealed to be [REDACTED], has cooked up perhaps the most ingenious way of delivering video over the web. The greasy-haired producers in the San Fernando Valley supply their DVDs to VideoBox who encode the discs using a proprietary codec and then deliver the content to their fee-paying customers via a very slick Flash-based interface. The key there is the "fee-paying" part. Cast your mind back to the dim, dark, nascent days of the intertubes; it was the porn industry that first worked out how to extract a buck from the web. The porno peoples have been making money off the web for over ten years, while the major "legit" studios are still thrashing around, spewing forth failed, DRM-laden white elephants that chew through resources and yield nothing but a huge loss.

With the help of about three margaritas I managed to leave an impression. The interview was set up for the following week—the next Friday to be precise.

Clad in my ten year old suit that miraculously still fits me, I presented myself at the offices located near 2nd and Mission in SoMa. True to the words of the recruiter, the place was rockin' like was still 1999; snacks were in ready supply and the Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine languished monolithically in the center of the office, daring anyone to use it.

I met the guy running the show. He was bearded and overweight, but the beard was neatly trimmed, as if to say, I know I'm a fat slob but I still give at least a little bit of a shit about how I appear. The look of smug self-satisfaction hung on his face about as attractively as his fleshy jowls. I didn't really like the guy and I wondered whether or not I could handle working for him. He'd be my boss if I got the job.

But things brightened up as rest of the engineering team made their way into the office to meet with me. They were all smart, tech savvy and genuinely into the technology. The whole porn aspect of what they were doing was simply incidental as far as they were concerned. They were convinced that they were working a cutting-edge web startup. And I agreed. The high point of the interview sessions came when, feeling especially confident, I declared to the developer with whom I was meeting, "I've seen plenty of dicks going into pussies before. It's the technology that really excites me!"

Never again will I utter those words in an interview. It struck me only as I walked away from the building, mentally replaying the moments of the afternoon, that I'd just had a once in a lifetime moment. I suffer from social tourette's at the best of times, letting loose with all manner of inappropriate remarks under the cover of a funky accent. But in this instance the filter came off altogether and it was a strange relief.

Last night the recruiter called me. He said I didn't get the job. He said that while I was a cultural fit, my ten years of working in staid, large, corporate environment had left me ill prepared for the stress of a small startup. I agreed. During the interview it became clear that I would prefer to operate at a more abstracted level while the company wanted someone better able to stick his fingers into the code and make a mess. That's not me.

The recruiter put my name in his Rolodex and promised to call me when the next opportunity swings around.