Editor’s Note: After graduating from MIT, I spent eleven years in Silicon Valley at Oracle, Visioneer, and Latitude Communications. This is the story of how those three jobs wore on me, and why by 2001 I was ready to leave all of it behind. I will cover what actually leaving looked like next week in a follow-on post I plan to call “Not Forever, Just for a While (Part 2 of 2).”
By early 2001, I didn’t feel like I was succeeding at anything. I wasn’t really making money, moving the industry forward, or even having as strong a family life at home that I wanted. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and I couldn’t have written that as clearly then as I can now looking back. All I knew then was that something wasn’t working for me. The feeling built over eleven years in Silicon Valley and through experiences at three different companies, Oracle, Visioneer, and Latitude Communications. Each one added something different to the feeling.
Oracle and office politics
On paper, I think my years at Oracle (1990-1993) looked like they were going well for me. As a fresh graduate from my master’s program at MIT, I soon got promoted out of the cubicles into an office of my own, next to the VP’s. I was the product manager responsible for the most successful initial product launch on a single platform in Oracle’s history at the time (Oracle Data Browser V1.0 on Windows). I won an internal company award for my tour of 13 US cities and 5 European cities as part of that launch. On a lot of levels, I was actually having a good time.
On other levels, the internal politics wore on me constantly. My product, Oracle Data Browser, spent a year in alpha and a year in beta, not because the product itself wasn’t ready, but because it was built on shared libraries utilized by many product teams. The owners of the shared libraries were in the unenviable position of juggling priorities, and they solved it by fixing a handful of bugs for each product team, rather than wrestling any one team’s needs to the ground. The situation got serious enough where Larry Ellison’s chief of staff had to step in and create a “Product of the Month” club, where every open bug for one specific product had to get fixed before the shared libraries could move on to the next product’s bugs. The good news is that my product was first on that list. It just took longer than a month per product, but the products all eventually shipped.
At the time, what I learned was that I wasn’t happy to be in an environment where getting anything shipped required “winning” an internal political argument first. I got in my own head an idealistic view that by leaving for a startup, everyone would be on the same team. This was the first time I tried to change jobs to fix what was wearing on me.
Visioneer and executive misalignment
I joined Visioneer as employee #20 and its first product manager in 1993 at age 26. Candidly, I didn’t really pick Visioneer with much of a plan behind it. All I really understood about Oracle was that I wanted out of a really political environment, and the only alternative I could picture was a startup before the product had shipped, when everyone was supposedly still on the same team.
What I hadn’t figured out yet was that the moment a startup actually ships something, the same competing interests show up again, with just a different look. Our own executive team had been pulled together from a handful of different worlds, and nobody was fully reconciling those different visions across competing desires to target corporate end customers, OEM providers, consumers, or just tech early adopters. This lack of alignment left plenty of room for our lead Series B investor (Kleiner Perkins, as I wrote about previously) to end up dictating more of the strategy than any of us did.
Like my days at Oracle, some of the Visioneer experience was genuinely fun, if only in small slivers of the volume business. For example, I did enjoy the product evangelism. Local computer user groups were still a real thing in the mid-90s, and I often got tasked with traveling out to the bigger ones to do the 90’s version of influencer marketing. I’d present to the user group members, showing off the product like a Ginsu knife demonstration and offer a $100 discount on the spot for those who bought right then in the room. I would come home from these events with a pile of checks!
That said, most of my hours went into the daily grind of running product for a startup, on top of everything else the job required. The hours could be pretty bone-crushing. It probably wasn’t sustainable, though a company layoff kept me from ever finding how long I could have kept it up.
I found out I was being laid off while on a business trip to a Novell user conference, where I was scheduled to speak as one of their ISV (independent software vendor) partners about our integration with Novell GroupWise. I returned a voice mail from my CEO when I arrived at the hotel. When discussing my dismissal, I let him know I’d still give the talk and fly home afterwards to deal with actual termination paperwork. I didn’t want to tip off the market that Visioneer was going through internal turmoil. The CEO seemed genuinely moved that I chose to depart that way, and he treated me very well on my way out.
Silicon Valley turned out to be smaller than I expected. A recruiter who’d once worked for my boss heard about our layoff the day it happened and mentioned it to a mutual friend, who shared the news with a different friend of mine who was employee number 11 at a company called Latitude Communications. That friend also left me a voice message before I’d even made it home from that trip and encouraged me to interview there for a product manager position they just opened.
What actually convinced me to go with Latitude over my other job offers was watching how well its executives already understood each other. Most of them had worked together before, back at ROLM in the 1980s. When the CEO talked about a sales forecast, the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing already understood what he meant. When he talked about a product plan, the VP of Marketing and the VP of Engineering did too. Visioneer’s executive team had been assembled from a variety of different backgrounds instead of growing together. Each executive team member individually was generally very talented, but I often felt the impact of their tendency to talk past each other despite that talent. Latitude looked like it had the fix for exactly that problem. Of course, that fix wasn’t enough to result in sustained success.
The unraveling at Latitude
I joined Latitude Communications in 1994. I was employee #30 and its first product manager. We built MeetingPlace, a data enabled voice conferencing server, years before anyone called it web conferencing. Its HQ was in Santa Clara, and ultimately, we expanded such that about half of my group went to our second office in San Francisco. We were a conferencing company, so when we outgrew our HQ building, we decided to open a second office in San Francisco to shorten the daily commutes of at least some of our employees while still keeping open the possibility of driving into our Santa Clara HQ when it mattered.
We grew consistently and became profitable. We went public in 1999, and I was an officer of a public company at age 32, first as VP of Product Management, and then as VP of Marketing also owning Product Management. That job at Latitude remains the favorite job of my career, for the culture and for the friends I made there.
Even though our product was a conference server, companies really weren’t buying just a product or technology. They were signing up to support an internal conferencing service, complete with IT deployment, help desk, and training considerations. Of course, conference calling was something that companies were previously outsourcing entirely, with AT&T being the dominant provider. Deploying our product and an in-house service had a real hard-dollar cost justification behind it, and the customers with enough scale to use it were genuinely happy, valuing the relationship as much as the product.
However, the proposition also involved nine to twelve month enterprise sales cycles, as our champions had to navigate the process of converting expense dollars into capital investments and headcount concerns. While the deals did often come in over time, errors in forecasting the exact timing of big deals could be brutal when Wall Street expected our results to be predictable one quarter at a time.
The market was also getting more competitive. Some of this was not surprising, as we expected competitive telecom carriers to compete more aggressively against AT&T on price. What did surprise us was how WebEx went after a completely different buyer. We were selling to IT and telecom departments trying to provide a conferencing service for their employees. WebEx sold directly to sales VPs who wanted to do remote presentations and demos to customers and prospects. That was a different approach and easier to absorb, with a model more similar to how companies were used to paying, by actual usage instead of hardware plus capacity-based software licensing we were selling. Ultimately, selling to interested end users with a service-based offering just proved to be a higher velocity commercial model than asking IT departments to purchase, deploy, and support on-premises conference servers.
The moment I actually realized where that left us didn’t happen at the office. It happened on a walk around Sharon Park in Menlo Park with Marsha and the kids. I’d been sitting in our executive staff meetings actively worrying with my colleagues about selling conference ports and concurrent user licenses, while WebEx executives were discussing their actual customer usage instead. Walking around that park, it was obvious to me there were two different mindsets, and theirs offered a better fit than ours to where the market was going.
I brought up this observation in our next executive staff meeting, and I got shut down. Everyone in that room was already stretched thin managing what Wall Street already knew about us, which were missed sales numbers and a stock that wasn’t recovering. There wasn’t much appetite left for changing how we would think and rebuilding the business model with new first principles. Even if we understood where things were heading, we just didn’t have it in us as a team to walk away from the model we’d already built and proven.
After missing our earnings projections, our stock went down. We had institutional investors, and there’s a mechanical cruelty to how that plays out. Once the price falls below a certain threshold, the institutions are forced sellers, whether or not they still believe in the business. A healthy share price rode down through $5, and eventually down to $1. Customers started pulling back right as the stock did, which created its own vicious cycle. We were still profitable when the slide started, but we ultimately had to do layoffs. Even though we weren’t a dot-com, our stock slide coincided with the dot-com bust, and I felt bad to have to let good people go. Of course, people eventually landed elsewhere but in many cases it just took longer than it should have just because of the timing of the dot-com bust.
What was it all for?
At this phase, I thought changing job situations would address what was wearing on me. For the first move from Oracle to Visioneer, I thought going from a big company full of office politics and many competing interests to a single-product startup would solve it. It didn’t. Then, I figured that going to a startup with an executive team more aligned at the outset would solve it. And that didn’t either. I continued feeling pretty worn out.
Also, there was a separate pattern running across the products and technologies I worked on. Oracle Data Browser, Visioneer PaperMax, and Latitude MeetingPlace all sold well for a while. Still, all three still got replaced within a few years by whatever came next, whether they took the form of new more advanced OLAP tools, multifunction peripherals, or cloud services like WebEx. It just didn’t feel like the products I put so much into were making a lasting impact.
It’s only looking back now that I can put it more plainly. So many aspects of those early job situations weren’t fun for me. I wasn’t moving the industry forward in any way that was going to last. With a layoff from one startup and a stock price of $1 at another, I wasn’t getting financially rewarded either. And then, with all the hours that Silicon Valley startups required at the time, I wasn’t running a great family life.
To net it out, after eleven years in Silicon Valley, I didn’t feel like I was succeeding at anything. I just didn’t have the words for it yet.
To be continued…
Great write up Steve.
Latitude was a great experience for me too, but nothing came easy. Whatever the last deal that I closed was, after 5+ years, it was no easier and no less time consuming than the very first. There was never really an inflection point in our business
“I brought up this observation in our next executive staff meeting, and I got shut down”
What a surprise
Awesome recap of your Silicon Valley career. It’s good that I finally know and understand what was going on at ORCL for you during our tenure there :)