One Startup’s Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
It was an unseasonably warm December, and somewhere nearby a rising tide in the San Francisco Bay was lifting all kite-surfers, but Nick Edwards and Chris Monberg were crouched at opposite rented desks in a shared coworking space near the Caltrain station in SoMa wondering if, by the middle of February, they would still have a company. At the moment Boomtrain, as the startup was called, technically had something like negative dollars, because it owed the state of New York a $30,000 fine after its payroll company had been six weeks late in telling them about a $400 unemployment-insurance bill for one of their remote engineers. Boomtrain also had no revenue, though that was hardly a hurdle to raising investment capital in Silicon Valley. Somewhat more problematically, it didn’t have a single customer, though there were several pilots in the wings. Almost inadvertently, Nick and Chris had found themselves building a business of enormous complexity—a personalization engine, based on machine-learning algorithms—and they were in over their heads.
Neither man was having an easy time keeping it together. Chris was waking up every morning at 5 am grinding his teeth, and Nick’s belt was clearly two notches tighter than usual. They had not taken paychecks in months; they’d be lucky, in fact, if they ended up paying themselves $30,000 apiece for the year. Nick was making ends meet by Air­bnb-ing out his apartment a couple of blocks from their office and commuting an hour each way from his girlfriend’s place in Petaluma. Chris was leaning hard on his indefatigable wife. For this they had upended pleasant lives, and they could no longer quite remember why.
Nick, 32, has sandy hair prone to straw-pile disarray; he speaks in quick, tremulous bursts, and holds himself with a schoolboy’s fretful defiance. He and his girlfriend have a lithe golden retriever, Emmy, and Nick often seems less like Emmy’s owner than he does her bewildered, affectionate older brother. Chris, also 32, is a calmer presence, with sunken eyes, a shaved head, and a slow, soft, pressurized voice. His mien is both monkish and military, as if he ought to be wrapped in a dark tailored cloak.
They had about a month to raise $1 million—or they would no longer make payroll.
Anxiety, as it had mounted steadily through the fall and into December, drove the two friends along opposite trajectories. Nick had become jumpier, more spastic, with the light threat that he might roll his eyes back into his head and faint; while the more out of control their circumstances seemed, the deeper and slower and more effortfully controlled were Chris’ voice and bearing. High-stakes entrepreneurship is an exercise in restraint, and Nick and Chris gave the impression of suppressing different things. Nick seemed as though he might at any moment unravel into fear; Chris, into anger. When Nick began to mutter imprecation—“fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” it went, almost Tourettically—Chris folded him into a stern bear hug. Nick is a fidgeter, constantly moving his cursor with his arrow keys and tapping his foot underneath his desk. Chris believes that what saved their relationship was moving to a carpeted office.
Silicon Valley is not a place where one is invited to show frailty or despondence. It is, as Nick puts it, “the place where everybody is killing it all the time.” This might seem peculiar, given that the lot of the small-business founder has always been a fragile one. But in recent years the Valley has successfully elaborated the fantasy that entrepreneurship—and, more broadly, creativity—can be systematized. This is the basic promise of accelerators (Y Combinator et al.), that success in the startup game can be not only taught but rationalized, made predictable. Starting a company was once an urge felt only by the blindly ambitious and slightly unsound, but in the Valley it’s been ostensibly transformed into a scheduled path one can simply elect and apply for, rather as one might choose law school or Wall Street. And the promise of professionalized entrepreneurship has had a particular allure in recent years, since finance has been tarnished and a career in law made increasingly uncertain. Starting a company has become the way for ambitious young people to do something that seems simultaneously careerist and heroic.
This daydream of constant killing-it has made it difficult to talk about how fearful and distraught the life of the founder can be. But over drinks with close friends—on that rare occasion when an early-stage entrepreneur has time to have a drink or see a friend—almost any founder will tell a story that much more closely resembles Nick and Chris’ than it does the story of your favorite billionaire, reverse-engineered to seem a neat matter of destiny. This is especially true today, in the era of what observers have come to call the “Series A crunch.” Due in part to the rise of startup accelerators like Y Combinator, as well as to the surplus capital washing around the Valley from recent IPOs, it has never been easier to raise a small amount of money. And it has never been easier to build a company—especially a web or mobile product—from that small amount of money, thanks in part to the proliferation of cheap, easy development tools and such cloud platforms as Amazon Web Services. But the amount of “real” VC funding (i.e., Series A rounds) to be allocated hasn’t kept pace. The institutions that write the big checks, those that might support and sustain real growth, can survey what a hundred companies have managed to do with a small check and put their real money on the propositions that promise the greatest yield and bear the least risk.
Nick and Chris no longer cared about “killing it.” They were too honest and too tired for that language and that posturing. At this point they just wanted to survive. They had about a month to raise $1 million or they would no longer be able to make payroll.
Welcome to Hacker House
“It’s a story out of Dreiser,” said the intellectual historian Fred Turner, referencing the late-19th-century novelist who bleakly chronicled the exploitative early days of American industrial capitalism. The Dreiserian was a particularly strange mood to reconcile that day, given that it was winter and, on the way into Turner’s office on the Stanford quad, I’d picked one kumquat from a heavy bunch on a laden tree. “In Dreiser’s day it was the same,” he went on. “New York didn’t care about Chicago, but Chicago was where the hogs were being slaughtered. Now New York doesn’t care about San Francisco, but today the hogs are being slaughtered in San Francisco.” What Turner meant is that these are the charnel grounds of the new economy, and that there isn’t anything all that new about the new economy. Turner’s work, most notably his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, has described the contemporary ethos of the Valley as a synthesis of Cold War defense research and the ’60s spirit of New Communalism, creating—in theory—a nonhierarchical, networked approach to business. But in practice, business in the Valley continued to run in a familiarly exploitative way. The Valley might not actually make much in the way of tangible goods, but like industrial centers before it, it’s the place where the astounding success of the very few has been held out to the youth in exchange for their time, their energy, and—well, their youth.
For that mild month of January 2014 I’d been renting a pallet at one of San Francisco’s many “hacker houses,” so that I might meet some of those hopeful youths and see how they felt about their odds. On Airbnb and craigslist and Facebook there are at least half a dozen of these shared living spaces, advertising themselves as frictionless on-ramps to Valley glory. “We’ve got guys from every great startup here,” the guy who ran the place said on the phone. “Square, Lyft, Uber, Dropbox, Twitter, Apple.” Securing a bed there required no fewer than three interviews over Google+ Hangout—one of them a “technical” assessment—yet somehow he couldn’t find a way to email a photograph of the available room. I arrived to find I was paying $1,250 for a mattress on the floor, behind a panel of imbricated torn shower curtains, in an unheated rabbit warren of 20 bunk beds under a low converted-­warehouse ceiling. Unmarked from the outside, it was located on a deserted block in the vaguely disreputable neighborhood west of SoMa and south of the Civic Center, separated from the Mission by little tent cities under the highway. To get inside, you had to pass through a bolted air lock piled with trash.
Silicon Valley is where the astounding success of the very few is held out to the youth in exchange for their time, their energy, and—well, their youth.
My cohort hailed from all over: Mumbai, Sydney, Hamburg, Appalachia. They’d been in San Francisco two days or two weeks; the longest-standing resident had been there about four months. At least at first, people referred to each other by vocation. There was the iOS developer from Houston: a shy, gangly, endearing kid just a few months out of an Ivy; he’d stayed for his degree, which he worried might seem démodé, but he was only teased a little by the higher-status dropouts. There was the bitcoin guy, wide-eyed with a bowl cut, who’d never before left his Appalachia backwater. And the Australian engineer who was starting an engineering employment marketplace when he wasn’t engaged in Tinder encounters.
Then there was the doctor, who slept on the other side of the curtain from me. A heavyset guy of 23, he’d woken up in Mumbai one morning and could not bring himself to clock in at the large municipal hospital where he worked. He’d always been a coder but had obeyed his parents and gone to medical school. By 9 am India time he’d completed the flophouse’s technical interview via Google+ Hangout and bought a ticket leaving for SFO that night. His parents said, “Why today? Why not tomorrow? Or next week?” But he knew if he waited even a day he’d never go. On his second day ever in America he had an informational interview at Google. He seemed disoriented but in good spirits. He slept without a blanket and with three different devices charging beside him on his bed, lined up like kittens sleeping at the teat. His girlfriend always seemed available for videochat sex. He was really considerate about the whole thing. He usually waited until he thought I was sleeping, and even then he used headphones. All I could really hear on his end was his muffled instructions, along with profuse apologies that he couldn’t be any louder. It occurred to me that his girlfriend was quite a good sport, since in India it was midmorning. I could tell he really missed her.
All these kids, who didn’t yet know what it was like to have a company of their own, or wind down a company of their own, or work for a giant company and ride the bus, seemed certain of one thing: that the longing for total revolution that had for so long been the hallmark of youth was, at last, about to be fulfilled. The only thing they could count on was that they were going to be the generation that partook of the process by which all would be rendered irrevocably different. It didn’t seem to matter what the difference was, or whom it helped or hurt. It just mattered that things in the future would be unlike anything we’d seen before. And that, in the process, they were sure, many of them would get very rich.
How The Game is Played
On January 3, Nick and Chris met with two investors, Bobby and Ullas, part of a group of superangels centered—somewhat improbably—around a rug store in Palo Alto. How rug merchants got into tech investing is a long and complicated story, but the short version is that people who buy expensive hand-sold Persian rugs over mint tea in Palo Alto happen to be profitable people to know. The group had been involved in a lot of impressive early-stage deals, among them Uber and Dropbox.
Nick and Chris had drawn up revenue projections, compared those to a burn rate based on the engineers they knew they had to hire, and concluded that they needed a runway of about $1 million to get them to strong revenue growth by Q3. Bobby and Ullas thought that they could reach out to their network and assure a commitment in the $700,000 to $900,000 range. They wanted to see at least $200,000 in commitments from other investors to close out the round. While they didn’t have to make this explicit to Nick and Chris, it’s standard practice for early commitments like this to be contingent on filling out the rest. All Valley offers are provisional until the money is actually in the bank, and if Boomtrain couldn’t find another big investor, the rug guys might very well back out. Also, Nick and Chris clearly hoped to have a big, recognizable VC firm in this round—both for the credibility, which would go far toward their ultimate success, and for the head start it would give them when they needed to try to raise an A round, perhaps in a year’s time. Still, even this soft commitment from Bobby and Ullas was great for morale. What they needed, perhaps even more than money, was a sense of momentum.
They also had a promising lead on the hiring front. It’s extremely difficult to hire talented engineers in the Valley unless you’ve got incredible PR, can pay a fortune, or are offering the chance to work on an unusually difficult problem. Nobody was buzzing about them, and they had no money, but the upside of having a business that relied on serious machine learning was that they had worthy challenges on the table. On January 4, they made an offer to exactly the sort of engineer they needed, Tevye. He had a PhD in AI from MIT. Just to contextualize what that means in Silicon Valley, an MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million. Nick and Chris had gone to good schools of modest profile—Nick to the University of Puget Sound, Chris to the University of Vermont—and while Nick also had a Harvard business degree, both were skeptical about the credential fetish of the Valley. They were happy to play the game when they could, though. They invited Tevye, along with a few technical advisers, to their shared office space for a Saturday “immersive,” or strategy meeting. Nick and Chris fetched paleo plates for the tech advisers, and everyone gathered around a giant butcher block in front of a whiteboard.
Chris convened their meeting by saying, “We have 10 companies waiting to work with us, and we’re about to close a round of funding.” These statements weren’t strictly true, but one couldn’t hire engineers without projecting a sunlit-uplands future. As Chris had put it to me, “Lying your way along puts you in a bad place. But you do have to balance transparency with optimism.” And Tevye would be a real boon for the company, exactly what they needed to close their deals. The only reason he was considering joining Nick and Chris was that he’d once thought of founding a similar sort of venture. He’d be taking a 40 percent pay cut to join them, but he would have his hard problem and would get to run his own data-science team. Nick and Chris had allotted an equity pool that was larger than average, and they were making Tevye a generous offer—in a highly theoretical sense. San Francisco was full of people walking around with their pockets stuffed with 1.2 percent of nothing.
Tevye signed up. He asked to begin on January 27, roughly two weeks before Nick and Chris’ money was set to run out.
Now that they had an engineer, Nick felt pretty good going into his meeting on Sunday, January 5, with what would, with any luck, be their first paying customer. He met the general manager of a small property that was part of a giant media concern. The GM knew how the game was played: He was happy to be a “customer” in exchange for a deep discount. He looked over Nick’s fee schedule and selected the service he thought his company would need, then negotiated a 75 percent discount for a three-month trial. It wasn’t much in the way of revenue for Boomtrain but it was something, and if it was successful they could expect the parent company to be a great channel partner, maybe—who knew?—bringing them into their other properties across the board.
On Monday morning, Nick and Chris took stock. They had one customer, a big name who was paying them almost nothing. They had one new engineer, sterling of credential and reputation, but in 25 days they might have no money to pay him. They had a syndicate of investors, who had soft-committed on the basis of revenue projections they feared they might have to downwardly revise and who might back out if they failed to secure a meaningfully large check from an unconnected, well-known, preferably institutional party.
Chris pointed at Nick as though he weren’t there. “He’s 75 percent sure we’ll pull this off.”
“I’m 99 percent sure we’ll pull this off,” Nick said. “But then again, I’m the delusional one.”
Chris, for all his outward placidity, was the pessimist. “That’s why we work so well together.”
Where Boomtrain Came From
It was hard to imagine that Nick and Chris, coarsened and scarred by the gauntlet they’d endured, had ever partaken in the hacker-house dream of total disruption. But in fact Boomtrain had begun with a very different, and similarly transfor­mational, vision for what it might do. They had friends who were making videos, young filmmakers shooting web shorts on a shoestring. Meanwhile, lots of people were looking for things to watch online. But the online video marketplace was fragmented and liable to the power of moneyed interests. There was stuff on Hulu and stuff on Netflix and stuff on YouTube and—most important, to them—stuff being made here and there by aspiring amateurs. What the Internet needed, Nick and Chris reflected, was a clearinghouse to help make sense of it all. It would be good for the makers and good for the consumers.
Nick and Chris met 10 years ago in Seattle, just after college, where Nick founded a magazine of international politics and Chris, who had graduated with an engineering degree, was working at a digital ad agency. On one of their first outings together they took to the water. Nick grew up sailing and had just bought a junky little boat for a few hundred dollars, around which Chris raced—in a boat he’d dipped into his savings to buy—in mocking circles. From those very first days they talked about founding something together. At first, this was a form of courtship. One would say, “I’d really like to start a business with you one day,” but for a while it was just a way to communicate warmth and trust. Over time they grew close; Nick’s sister became inseparable from Chris’ wife, Chris got along famously with Nick’s college friends, and so on. It was as though they starred in a sitcom that lacked a budget to pay extras.
Nick went away to business school at Harvard; afterward, he turned down offers from Google and Wall Street and went to work for a medium-size technology company. Chris, meanwhile, worked his way up to running the interactive division of the digital agency. Both were comfortable but longed to run their own shop, and to do so together. On a sailing trip in the Sea of Cortes for Nick’s 30th birthday, they filled a yellow legal pad with ideas.
They settled on that grand vision for Internet video, a social-discovery engine where all the fragmented content could be aggregated and then recommended based on algorithmic processing and social data. If it worked the way they wanted it to, they could help small-budget producers circumvent the existing system’s gatekeepers. On the strength of an unsteady, ill-lit two-minute video they shot on a webcam, they were accepted into AngelPad, a local incubator run by an early Google employee. Within eight weeks of their graduation, they’d collected $450,000 on a convertible note. Chris showed me a picture of Nick’s hand, purple and swollen like a bony eggplant from the high five they’d given each other when they got their first commit.
A few months out of AngelPad, however, they “pivoted.” They’d learned, in part from investors they’d met and in part from just trying, that marketing a site to consumers is just too hard, at least if you don’t have a fortune to begin with. Selling to business customers—a structured, repeatable process—would be a lot easier. You need 10 customers, 100 customers, rather than 1 million or 10 million users. And your investors can introduce you to potential customers, because they are already investing in many of them as well.
“I’M 99 PERCENT SURE WE’LL PULL THIS OFF,” NICK SAID. “BUT THEN AGAIN, I’M THE DELUSIONAL ONE.”
So before Nick and Chris really had the chance to realize it, they’d “ripped out the heart” of their original idea and put it to work in the service of a new idea: a “multichannel personalized notification platform.” It was a software-as-a-service product that allowed corporations to tailor individualized recommendations to their millions of customers. It could be thought of as a Netflix-style recommendation engine that any business could plug into without building its own. There were already a slate of companies that did this for on-site recommendations, the little boxes that suggest what videoclip, magazine article, or pair of pants you might want to see or consume next. Boomtrain’s value proposition was in using the same backend to drive personalized notifications across all platforms: they could offer onsite boxes, personalized emails, SMS reminders, or push messaging.
They decided to focus first on emails, mostly because big media companies already had seven-figure line items in their budgets for the undifferentiated mass emails they were sending—for a click rate of maybe 3 percent on a good day. Their long-range plan, however (what investors in the Valley like to call the “Google-sized” version of the company), involved creating a master identity system that would recognize customers across multiple sites. It would be as if Netflix recommended movies based in part on what you’d read in The New York Times and bought at Zappos, and it would work out of the box for any site. Like any company that collected data, it would grow exponentially more powerful and appealing as it achieved scale. The more customers they had, the better their recommendations to all customers would be.
Nick and Chris would never explicitly admit it, but in unguarded moments it seemed clear that they missed their old idea, the one they’d come up with on the boat, the one that had served a broad and stately social purpose. Their moments of greatest animation were when they showed off their first demos and decks, when they seemed decades younger.
At the same time, however, one of their greatest regrets was that they hadn’t pivoted early enough, because now they had so little time. In the Valley you can raise money on promise—as they’d done once—or on results, which they didn’t have quite yet. They were left to brood over a list of if-onlys. If only they’d pivoted two months earlier! If only they’d stayed at their jobs slightly longer. If only that one VC, a partner at a large brand-name East Coast investor, hadn’t suddenly left his firm just before they were to close on $500,000, a half million that would have led, effortlessly, to twice that amount.
At this point, they were forced to play a shell game with everyone they met. Without investors, they couldn’t afford to hire the engineers they required to sell a robust product to paying customers. Without customers, they had no market-traction data to show investors. They needed investors to get customers and engineers; they needed customers to get investors and engineers; they needed engineers to get customers and investors. If they didn’t act as though it were all in place, there was no chance it would ever fall into place. By mid-February, they thought, either all their stories would come true or none of them would.
A Tale of Two Lifestyles
“Techies” often get lumped together, but the lifestyle gap between startup founders and the employees of large companies is unbridgeable. One night I escaped the hacker house to go out with a group of founders from various startups: a dating app, two food-related apps, a videochat app, something that had to do with drone deployment, and an app that was, at last, going to help all of us communicate better. At 10:30 the waitress came over to take our orders for a second round. I ordered another whiskey, but everybody else looked at their phones with muted anxiety. At 11 pm the founders rose in pairs to leave, as if they had an exam in the morning. One founder (his company was literally an app that optimized app stores for other apps), who’d ordered a water and had taken off neither his backpack nor his jacket, apologized on behalf of everybody for leaving so early.
“When you have an early-stage company,” he said, “there’s no time to hang out at a cool, trendy bar.” He was 23. The bar might have been cool and trendy in Miami in 2004.
By contrast, on a weekend afternoon I went over to find my young cousin—a talented and good-humored UX designer for Google—with his friends in Alamo Square, where they were winding down a barbecue in the January sun. I arrived late, as the fog was beginning to gather in the west over the Richmond, and the group assembled there was playing a game of mass footsie on some blankets they’d set out on the leeward slope. My cousin was perpetrating amateur reflexology on the feet of a giggling companion while she idly juggled the decapitated head of a pirate piñata. The candies that had spilled from the piñata were scattered about in the grass, glinting.
A few of them worked for Google in one capacity or another, though nobody wore the company’s logo. I asked if anybody there worked for a startup. My cousin looked around and shook his head. “Some of these people used to,” he said, and went back to planning the hourly activities of a party they’d be throwing when it got nicer out—though it didn’t seem possible that it could get nicer out, ever, than it was right then—where they’d begin one evening with dinner and conclude the following morning with brunch. They’d gotten as far as dawn yoga. It began to get cold and everybody rolled up the blankets and went back to the house, which had several terraced floors of downtown views, where the gold late light flashed off the aquarium glass of new high-rises downtown.
The entrepreneurs, if they were old enough, could perhaps remember a time in their life devoted to such extracurriculars as spare time, drinking, or mass post-piñata footsie. My cousin was having the time of his life, but a lot of the startup guys—perhaps, in part, as a defense—saw riding the corporate bus as the most dismal of failures. Even Nick and Chris, who did not know contempt as a mode, were appalled at the thought. This was a somewhat self-delusional attitude, as their second- through sixth-best-case scenarios were being acquired by one of the five giant, powerful, wealthy companies. Even if Nick and Chris survived another year, there was a good chance they’d just be surviving to put themselves in a position to get a nice signing bonus when they finally conceded to days framed by long bus commutes—just like the many other entrepreneurs who came to look at having a failed startup as an alternative to graduate school.
The best-case scenario, of course, was an IPO; it was the only way to preserve the promised autonomy of a startup, even if it meant being beholden to shareholders. The dream was for your company to be the one in a thousand that became Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, Square. They’re consumer-facing, first of all, and thus part of a celebrity matrix, and they make or enable something that people pay for. They aren’t just advertising companies, like Facebook and Google. The guy at the flophouse with the most clout was a mop-headed coder who worked at Square. One night at dinner he slyly mocked another former flop-houser, this one a newly minted UX designer at Apple. At Apple you sometimes couldn’t even work on your own bus, lest employees in different groups see what you were up to; at Square, everybody was emailed minutes of everybody else’s meetings. The biggest status play at that dinner table, and at hundreds like it, was to work at the biggest company that maintained startup cred, the biggest place you could feel as though you were working on an imaginable whole rather than a tiny part.
One day I was out with Chris picking up burritos when a car slowed and the driver waved.
“So this is your new car, eh?” Chris asked. It was his old and close friend Tony, whose company had just been bought by Dropbox. I asked Chris how he thought Tony felt, going from the anxiety of being a founder to the easy life of a 9-to-7 engineer at Dropbox.
“You’d have to ask him,” Chris said. “But I bet it feels like a big fucking relief.”
How to Answer a Trick Question
Boomtrain’s days at the office were a blur of sales calls, engineering meetings over Google+ Hangout, and pitches to investors. It seemed like an inhuman feat that Nick could keep himself awake for the sales calls, where he delivered the same pitch over and over to the same bored, nontechnical marketing people. Chris seemed to derive a lot of energy from the engineering discussions; perhaps this wasn’t quite the company they’d intended to found, but Chris is an engineering autodidact, and he drew great pleasure from the technical details of network architecture and data structure.
Nick and Chris tended to take investor calls together when they could. Nick leaned over the computer while Chris lay back in his seat. “I don’t know how fast you move,” Nick often began his pitch, “but we’re moving fast over here. We set out to raise $1 million, but we’re already at $900,000 committed. Now we’re considering letting the round get oversubscribed, so we could try to find some room for you.”
“Don’t worry,” the partner always said. “We can move fast.”
Nick had good answers to questions about what differentiated them from their competitors and convincing estimates of the market size in the personalized-notification space. Sometimes he had to scramble to look up the website of a competitor he’d never heard of, but he could usually bring that off. All invariably went swimmingly until they had to answer two questions.
The first: so, who’s leading the round? “I’m sure you’ve heard of the Persian rug mafia,” Nick would say.
“Ummmmm … no.”
“Well, they’re great investors. They were early at Uber and Dropbox.” The invocation of Uber and Dropbox perked up any conversation in the Valley, but it rarely seemed all that reassuring to investors.
The second question, always, was this: What kind of data did they have? By what metrics could they prove the value proposition of their product?
Nick and Chris had answers only about their internal tests on clickthrough rates for their first product, the one they’d abandoned. Under questioning, they eventually had to concede they’d just finished building out the new post-pivot technology and didn’t yet have meaningful numbers to show. This was the point when the accrued investor energy began to dissipate. At times like these Nick tended to jellify, as if all of his bones had suddenly fled his trembling body, and he would look to the steely, relaxed Chris for support.
“I have to admit, I just wonder,” one investor said. “How special is the special sauce?”
“I love the product,” another said, “but I just don’t know your customers that well.”
“It’s a great team, but I worry that you guys are selling to content publishers, and I could only connect you to ecommerce customers.” “Wonderful technology, but you guys are working in ecommerce, and my whole network is content publishing.”
“You might find a hundred customers, but I don’t know if you’ll find a thousand. I can see you guys getting to $10 million in revenue, but it’s hard to see how you’d get to $100 million.”
“Why now? When I was at Yahoo in 1996, we were working on the personalization problem then.” (“Yeah,” said Chris later, “and you didn’t solve it.”)
And one of the biggest lies in town: “I love what you’re doing, but as an investor I just don’t know what my value add would be.”
At the end of these meetings, the investor would always say he had to talk to his partners and would get back to them.
“I give that one,” Nick said once, “about a 9.467 percent chance of working out.” “We just tell him,” Chris said, “that we’re focusing on product and customers for now. We’re onboarding four customers next week.” Even if they were just pilots, that was actually true, and it meant that within six weeks they’d have real answers to the metrics question.
“SILICON VALLEY IS NOT A PLACE WHERE ONE IS INVITED TO SHOW FRAILTY OR DESPONDENCE. IT IS, AS NICK PUTS IT, “THE PLACE WHERE EVERYBODY IS KILLING IT ALL THE TIME.”
“But we told him a week ago that we didn’t have any real customers yet,” Nick countered, “because we’ve had to spend so much time fund-raising.” Nick got an email from one of their earliest investors. He was writing to them to suggest that now was the time for them to get press, to push their seed round along into completion. He suggested they spin a story about their pivot to TechCrunch. “What’s the story going to be?” Nick asked.
“We had an unsuccessful business,” Chris said, “and now we have a marginally more successful business, which might be really successful if anybody trusts us enough to give us the money so we can actually stop fund-raising and focus on our product?”
“We pivoted from a business nobody’s ever heard of,” Nick went on, “to another business nobody’s ever heard of, and we have big investors we can’t name and customers we can’t mention, but trust us, we’re a big deal?”
This was gallows humor, but it meant something. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, to get your business three or six or nine months down the road by talking about your business as if it already were six or nine months down the road. The sorts of customers they were selling to, Chris explained, were big “legacy” companies that tend to move slowly and by committee, so Boomtrain could afford to make promises on delay. Push notifications, for example: That was something they couldn’t do quite yet, though they acted as though it was part of their standard package. But they could easily prioritize it and get it done in three weeks. If a paying customer wanted it right away, they could drop everything and get it done in a week. This was the accepted way. But trying to place a phony story of their impending greatness on TechCrunch felt a little sleazy to them. They had too much heart for that.
At the end of one of their investor meetings, a partner said, “If I write a check and you close this round tomorrow, and the next day you get an acquisition offer for $100 million, what do you do?” Chris later explained that this was a trick question. Everyone knows the right answer is “Hell no, I wouldn’t sell. This is a billion-dollar company!” This is the answer any flop-houser would give.
“But that’s such bullshit,” Chris said. “Of course we’d sell. We’d provide really well for our engineers, we’d get out of this impossible-seeming situation and start over with a clean slate. But you’re not allowed to say that.”
I asked what he’d do with his share of that $100 million. He didn’t hesitate.
“I’d buy a boat, and Michelle and I would take off, spend four years sailing around the world.” During the course of his career he’d canceled two vacations with Michelle, one to Turkey and one to Paris, and now that he was a founder he didn’t even bother scheduling one. Michelle had been amazing all the while; it was clear to Chris that she’d discovered vast reserves of strength she’d never known she had. “But, still, I’d just like to take her away for a while.”
Making a Difference, Changing the World