So here's where we are in the saga of my brief affair in the high tech startup world: After moving back to the burbs I got a job as Director of Development at Nestling Inc (this is just a name I made up to protect the innocent, or guilty, depending upon your point of view), a small software startup that had been in existence for a year or so before I joined the company. It seemed like a good fit to me. I felt like it was the ideal job. I was learning new things by working for a small company and I felt that I was contributing things I had learned from years of developing software in a large company.
Of course the problem with startup companies is that they are kind of like hatchlings. A lot of them make it out of the egg but only a few survive. I knew that when I took the job but I didn't realize at that point how close Nestling Inc was to falling out of the nest.
Although Nestling Inc had been around for awhile by the time I went to work there, it had yet to produce a product or sign up a customer. All of the money that was used to run the business at that point came from private investors. After I joined the company I discovered that it had burned through almost all of the initial investment capital and the company coffers were nearly empty. For that reason one of the things we spent a lot of time doing was talking to potential investors to try to generate the cash we needed to deliver a product that we could install in a customer account ... when we got one.
The problem there was that most potential customers wanted at least a beta version of the product to try out before signing on the dotted line and most of the venture capital firms and private investors we spoke with didn't want to invest in a company that hadn't delivered a product and didn't have at least a couple of customers already on board. Catch 22.
We did have a couple of potential customers interested in the product we were building but they needed something they could install in a test environment in order to commit to an order. So we were working heads down on the delivery of an initial version of the product, which in software development is called an alpha version. This is where we began to run into trouble with design on the fly. The programmers wanted to make a technology change at the very time we were trying to deliver something that might allow us to get a customer or two to sign on the dotted line so that we could get some new investors on board. The management team didn't want to make a change like that at such a critical time, but with money for salaries rapidly running out, they didn't want to alienate the software engineers either. So things got pretty interesting.
Very quickly the company reached the point where there wasn't enough money left to pay the rent on the office space we were using or the salaries of the folks who worked there. The founders' response to this was to use the last of the money to throw a party at a local brew pub and try to convince the programmers to work on the project at home with salaries temporarily suspended until we got another infusion of cash. The company officers promised to help the programmers find other employment that would leave them some spare time to work on our product. All of the programmers agreed to this plan.
I was ready to bail out at this point and try to find some other work but the founders asked me to stay on without pay and help them try to raise some cash to get back into full operation again. I was reluctant to do that, so they verbally agreed to increase my stock options to the same level as theirs. Even though I was way old enough to know better, I let myself get seduced by the chance that my share of the company might some day be worth some big bucks and I agreed to stay.
During the next month or so we ramped up our efforts to attract investors, visiting every venture capital firm and angel investor that would see us. The range of people we talked to was eye-opening. Some were formal venture capital firms that wanted to take over the company and drive it to an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. We didn't really want to do that but we were desperate enough to agree. However, there was that little problem of no product and no customers. The venture capital firms we spoke with were only interested in companies that were already making money so that didn't work for us.
The angel investors offered a better opportunity to get the company solvent. Angel investors are people who have some money to invest and want to get in on the ground floor of startup companies. In return for their investment they get a piece of the company and, if it becomes successful, they stand to gain a very high return on their investment. They are a diverse group. Many of them are entrepreneurs who have started one or more successful companies of their own. Others have inherited wealth and are interested in building it up. All of them are highly individual. About the only thing they have in common is that they are "wild and crazy guys" who are willing to take a big risk if there's the potential of an even bigger payback somewhere down the road. One of the investment angels that we met with was a bigger-than-life individual who had inherited money and built his fortune up from there. He dressed in Western wear, had a custom pickup and lived in a big house that was decorated with cattle horns and the heads and body parts of more animals than I could identify. The house was in an exclusive area with guards to keep us common folk out. We tried really hard to interest him in Nestling Inc and we were pretty sure that he wanted to buy in to the company. Unfortunately his investment adviser was much more cautious and had more of a venture capitalist view of the world. We couldn't convince the money man that Nestling Inc would be a good investment so our pickup driving angel turned us down.
Things went on like that for four to six weeks. We couldn't find an investor and the programmers were all busy working on their new jobs and weren't able to devote much time to the Nestling Inc project. Finally we all agreed that the company was buzzard bait and we went our separate ways.
I was sorry to see Nestling Inc turn belly up, but I did learn a few things about retirement jobs from the experience. One of the things I learned was that a retirement job can be a lot more fun than the career you've had for most of your life, even if it is similar to what you have been doing for the last twenty or thirty years. Assuming your previous career has left you with enough income to live on, you can take a retirement job that pays a lot less than what you earned before you retired. That allows you to concentrate on finding something that you enjoy doing without worrying so much about the salary.
Another thing I learned was that years of working for a large corporation had made me kind of naive about protecting myself as an employee. If I was going to take a fling at a job with a startup company again I would check out the company's financial position before I ever agreed to work there. In addition, I would not accept verbal agreements or deferred written agreements regardless of how small and informal the company was. I would insist on written agreements for everything up front and I would have my own lawyer go over them before signing.
The whole Nestling Inc experience was a whirlwind affair for me. I didn't get rich. In fact, I think I only got paid for a month and a half and my stock options just evaporated. Never-the-less I had a ball. It was such a different experience for me from working in a large company, as I had for my entire adult life up to that point, that I found it exciting and satisfying. I've had several retirement jobs since my Nestling Inc days, but if we could have gotten even one more investor to sign up I probably would be working there still. Of course, it would have turned from a retirement job into a second career, but that's not a bad thing.
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