re: Silicon Alley Webcos, avoiding burnout in web space, turning away capital...
From a NY Times Roundtable discussion whose participants included:
- Kevin O'Connor the Chief executive of DoubleClick;
- Fernando F. Espuelas, Chief executive of StarMedia Network;
- Candice Carpenter, Chief executive of iVillage;
- Stephan J. Paternot, Co-chief executive of Theglobe.com.
"Online Pioneers: The Buzz Never Stops"
nytimes.com
The entire article is rather long. A snippet from it follows, below.
Enjoy, Frank Coluccio
-------begin snip
NEW YORK -- Speed. Sleep. Greed. Recruiting. Role models like Thomas
Edison and Ayn Rand. Losing money, yet turning away capital. New-found
wealth and an ensuing change in lifestyle -- or not.
Those were some of the topics on the table when four chief executives from
dot.com companies -- Candice Carpenter: of iVillage, a women's Web site;
Fernando J. Espuelas: of StarMedia Network, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language
service; Kevin O'Connor: of DoubleClick, an online advertising network, and
Stephan J. Paternot: of Theglobe.com, a shopping, news and business information
site -- gathered late one afternoon early this month at The New York Times for a
wide-ranging discussion about managing in the Internet age.
These pioneers from Silicon Alley, an area in the Flatiron district of Manhattan
that is populated by many fledgling Internet companies, were joined in the
two-hour discussion by Saul Hansell, Patrick J. Lyons and Judith H. Dobrzynski of
The Times.
As founders of young companies, each executive had experienced the adrenaline
highs and the growing pains that accompany the transformation of an idea into a
business and then into a publicly traded company. They don't worry about
nonexistent earnings in a topsy-turvy environment where not producing a profit is,
for the moment, a virtue. For them, the bigger pressure is to build organizations --
fast -- before opportunities slip away.
Following are excerpts from the conversation.
Q. What's the difference between running the kind of company you run and
running a big company?
Carpenter: Speed. Leading in conditions in which speed is a very big factor. It
puts a lot of additional pressure on all the systems. And you have a lot of very
young people, and you're teaching them to be managers at a very accelerated pace
without a lot of formal programs.
Paternot: Tying into that is just the idea of keeping your entrepreneurial spirit.
Things are shifting fast enough that you need to be able to jump into any new
idea, shift your company into it and move at light speed.
Espuelas: I would say the absence of a road map. Not that any business is
particularly easy, but when there's nothing that you can follow except your
instincts and the little bit of data you're able to gather in this context of a lot of
speed, I think there's a lot of intuition that goes into these kinds of very
fast-moving environments.
O'Connor: In large corporations, you need to spend a lot of time quantifying what
the market's going to look like and how you're going to go about it and what the
expenses are going to be.
And here it's very much speed, it's intuition, it's trying to figure out, "Is this a big
market or a small market?" If it's a big market, you go after it. You spend a
tremendous amount of money and you go after it quickly.
Q. What's the first thing that's sacrificed in the name of speed?
O'Connor: Facts.
Carpenter: Sleep. We're trying to
really come up with graded solutions
to burnout caused by exhaustion. We
have people who have been at this
for four years in our company and we
have to figure out a way to get them
to learn how to completely refresh
themselves in short increments of
time.
I've stood at the elevator with people
going on vacation and actually taken
the laptop and the cell phone out of
their hands and said, "Great, now you
can actually have a vacation." The
only way to truly regenerate yourself
enough to be truly creative and
inventive again is to be unwired at
times in the year and to be in the
other part of the world.
Q. Do any of you have programs for
dealing with burnout?
Paternot: Sometimes it's frequent
rotation of some of your stars. You'll
often find that in your company you
have a few stars, and if you leave
them in the same position too long
they'll burn out. And, quite frankly,
you don't want to lose them.
Carpenter:
We're starting a sabbatical program.
It's for people who've been there
three years who would love to be there 20. We're giving them a month to go and
just do whatever they want. Sleep probably will be at the top of most people's list.
Espuelas: Are you going to take it yourself?
Carpenter: Yeah, I am. I have to, otherwise no one else will take it.
O'Connor: We have a very strong policy that people can move to wherever they
want to move. Any job in the company's open. So we try to force rotation, because
doing the same thing, day in and day out, tends to cause burnout.
Consciously Reaching Out
Q. Tell us a little bit more about how you're managing growth so far.
Espuelas: I travel all the time. And I try to talk to as many people as possible. We
do monthly all-hands meetings and we actually Web-cast them simultaneously
and have people call in and try to have an ongoing dialogue. And now we're doing
things which I never thought we'd ever do. We're going to create an employee
newsletter. We're doing a lot of things that I used to scoff at when I worked at
other companies.
What I've also found is that things I said two years ago are now on a plaque, and
that people are still acting the same way: "But Fernando said that." Yeah, but that
was two years ago.
Q. Is communication a common problem?
Paternot: Absolutely. We've seen ourselves have to increase the rate of
communication dramatically. When we started four or five years ago, it was a
group of 20 to 25 people. My partner (Todd Krizelman, co-chief executive) and I
could just make decisions very quickly, hoping everybody can keep up. But
eventually it starts to hurt you more when you get to 200, and people in
departments don't understand what's going on. And we've had to deal with a lot of
organizational changes over the last year, but everybody understands why we're
doing stuff.
O'Connor: We start off with a week of training. It's a week of indoctrination for
every employee -- whether you answer the telephone in the German office or
you're a vice president, it doesn't matter. You sit, you learn what we do, why we do
it, what's the core culture of the company, so everybody's got a good, firm
foundation.
Q. How do managers who have worked at large companies fare in your kinds of
companies?
O'Connor: On average, they've fared pretty well. You've got to pre-screen them
very carefully. You tend to get people who expect to have two assistants. But our
first test is, we make them take a pay cut. If they won't take a massive pay cut,
you've pretty much got them pegged.
Q. Do they have options, though, on the other end?
O'Connor: Absolutely.
Carpenter: The structure that I've seen be the most successful is a solid
infrastructure of senior managers from big companies, very seasoned, very good
at creating structure. That gives you room to promote people with less
management experience, and have someone to go to when wisdom and time
around the track is the issue.
Mountains of Resumes
Q. How hard is it to find employees? Are strangers handing you resumes as soon
as they find out who you are?
O'Connor: I probably get 10 resums
myself a day. We probably get, as a
company, 100 resumes a day. There's
a lot of talent that wants to get in,
that absolutely wants to get into the
dot-com company. To get great,
smart people is always tough. But it's
relatively easy for a dot-com
company.
Espuelas: We have two realities. One
is in the U.S., which mirrors that. But
in Latin America, it's totally different:
There's no such thing as us. There's a
lot of big companies that are owned
by families, so the best you can hope
for is to work for so and so, as
opposed to being one of the owners
of the company. So in Latin America
we're able to really tap into really
great people who don't have an
equivalent to go to.
Paternot: Even though we get a
hundred resumes a day, we're at a
point where we're trying to find the
perfect person to fit this type of
software development. It's easier for
us to find people in marketing and
sales, because New York has a lot
more of these people and they're easy
to train.
But finding the right technical
person, whether it's for infrastructure
or for software, we still find it tough.
These people can command huge
salaries from the banks. And finding a seasoned database manager, for instance,
can mean that you have to pay huge cash, because some of these people want the
options and they want the cash, and they're not going to leave their cushy job at
Goldman Sachs unless you throw it all at them. The fact is, if you're a well-known
dot-com company, it helps immensely over the unknown dot-com companies and
over a lot of the other companies.
How to Set Priorities
Q. Do you find that your thinking about the way you run your company changes
over time?
Espuelas: For the last two years, I've been thinking about, well, what happens in
10 years and what happens in 20 years? Which is kind of a ridiculous thing to
think about on the Internet.
O'Connor: Making that transition from a total entrepreneurial world with no rules
or anything to where you've got to have professionalization, you've got to have
systems; you've got to have order.
Paternot: You have to learn to delegate. Todd and I were completely attached to
the product, had to test everything ourselves. We were the chief QA (quality
assurance) guys. Eventually, you have to stop that. As much as I still use the
product now, when I have to use it, I want to be able to rely on 50 people who
think about this more than I do and who know it better than I do.
O'Connor: On the flip side, I still spend half my time with new products -- because
that is the entrepreneurial side and new products are the key to rejuvenating the
company, growing the company. We set out to create a big company.
Q. Did you, from the beginning, do something differently than other start-ups
might have done, because you were planning for growth?
O'Connor: Definitely. I was fortunate because I started my first company right out
of college. So I went through the "how you could have done things differently and
better?" We tried to avoid all the mistakes. I was building the human
infrastructure, getting the people who could build their own business and
leverage. When I look at DoubleClick, we're actually a collection of about 50
companies: People who were running their own thing, whether it's their own
country, and there were 22 countries, or we have a bunch of business units with
people running their own businesses. The thing we most tend to look for in people
is intelligence and -- I call it -- athleticism: people who love to compete, don't like to
lose.
Espuelas: I don't think anybody stumbles onto a big company. You have to
visualize where you're going. You don't know the path necessarily, but there's a
goal. There's something I always think about and try to get people to think about.
I'm not a martial-arts guy, but when you break a board with your hand, what they
teach you is that if you were able to project the energy, not on the surface of the
board, but behind the board, you will break it. And you can break three boards,
then four boards. But if you aim it for the surface, you will break your hand. And
that's a little bit of what you dream about. You have to make choices accordingly.
----end snip
Go to nytimes.com
... for the remainder, before it scrolls into the NY Times fee based archive. |
