Design Intelligence was formed in the middle of the dot-com boom. D.I. was something of an anomaly in that dot-com bubble. . .software was blase. Everyone was doing a dot.com, and if you weren't, well, you and your company were schlubs. Even the most gossamer and flimsy crackpot schemes were nailing down fat first and second rounds of serious capitalization. Some of the kookiest web sites were even going public (like the sock monkey site and a web site that sold dog food). People were streaming into Seattle faster than in the Yukon gold rush of '97.
Design Intelligence was a well-funded startup poised to create a Pagemaker-slayer. It would be the first commercial software with a web-based browser interface. Design Intelligence
had serious artistic underpinnings; they liked to think of D.I. as a heroic foray by artists into real software. A lot of time and money was spent nailing down patent rights to the underlying technology. A lot of time and $$$ was spent on green crystals [1] and the U.I. while the guts of the project languished. Between securing patents, trademarks, and copyrights, and mounting a glitzy and facile marketing campaign, people sort of forgot about the software we were supposed to create.
On the face of it, the software was exciting because it used "design intelligence" to create good looking print and web pages. The user did not have to be a designer. We did all the thinking for you and then formatted your input into a gorgeous document! It looked like a license to print money. I wanted on the gravy train.
Working there combined a bunch of things I liked: art and photos, typography, book and document making, publishing, story-telling, internet linkage, and software. In the end, the designers and powers that be decided we couldn't do all the thinking for you, and rather than doing the designing for you, we reverted to the old dreaded mode of garbage in, garbage out. . .e.g., if you didn't know what you were doing, your output might look terrible. This is exactly what happed like SALSA!, it was impossible to protect the end user from themselves (without spending a lot more money), although the marketing blather never told you that. Because you could not protect end users from themselves, it became a power users tool and anyone less than a power user would just have to pound sand. Alas, the power users who could create gems with iPublish wouldn't use it; it didn't have the power user features they needed because it was designed to be used the average Joe.
The enterprise was shrouded in a mantle of secrecy. There were paper shredders all over the place. I remember specifically being urged not to discuss anything with my family.
My nominal boss was reluctant to hire me (wisely as it turned out for him). But I wanted in and I called them, and emailed them and "pinged" them daily. They finally relented. I took a huge pay cut, and jumped from being a senior manager at a public company to an individual contributor role in a startup. I was stuck in a dark room with two other bizarre testers and one normal one (Mark Ferkingstad).
It wasn't long before I realized it was all a cheap facade. Once you stepped behind the painted stage flats, they were inventing it as they stumbled ahead. The people who weren't just blowhards were locked into seriously delusional thinking.
They built the company using every bad consultant, corporate leech, huckster and flim-flam man you'd ever met. They talked about who knew whom, regaling each other with past war stories and blew smoke up each others asses until they all believed they were about to change the world. It was an exercise in mass delusion . . . guys pulling down six figures dropped by a couple days a week to pontificate about typography, or about their multi-tiered marketing scheme. vPeople smelled money and everyone was searching for their piece of the pie. The rest of us hoped to get through it, and maybe even cash in some of our modest stock options, if we ever did succeed in pulling it off (which was still up in the air). It was not easy to drink the Kool-aid tm.
Everyone was half as smart as they thought they were, and in particular, me. I had walked away from another project with many of the same delusions and organizational insanities. I couldn't see the handwriting on the wall; I didn't want to see it. So I hopped on board.
As is often the case in a startup with grand plans, there was not nearly enough money to accomplish what we set out to do. So they decided to put out something that would pretty much work, and really make it good in version 2 (Software Startup Delusion No. 5). Version 1 either so damages your reputation so badly that you can't possibly recover, or it it stiffs and you are left with no money.
I bailed right after they released Version 1. DI offered more stock, money, and a promotion two bumps up the ladder. It was like being handed the helm of The Titantic an hour after they hit the iceberg. It was everything I wanted, a year too late and with no possibility of changing anything. I headed for greener pastures.
[1] OXYDOL: Detergent w/ green crystals. One of our marketing people at SALSA often told the story of Oxydol...a detergent that sold poorly until they added those famous green crystals. The green crystals had nothing to do with laundering clothing...they were nothing but some harmless material colored bright green. We had to be ever alert for our own green crystals. I never actually heard the marketing guys ask for or think about features in i-Publish. They just wanted to identify the presence of green crystals and then flog them in the marketing materials.
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1 comment:
You got it half right. I worked there too Jack, or John as you were then called. It was way worse than this.
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