Things A Little Bird Told Me Page 2

  In the first meeting, when a woman said, “Thanks for coming in. Can I get you anything?” I said, “Yes. Do you have an aspirin?” I’m pretty sure on the list of job interviewee “don’ts,” immediately exposing your hangover ranks high.

  One of the guys who interviewed me asked, “Do you know why Google acquired Blogger?” He was genuinely curious. At that point Google had acquired Deja.com’s Usenet discussions, but this was its first real acquisition of a company with employees. My answer was simple, if not necessarily correct. I said, “Well, it’s the other half of Search. Google searches web pages. Blogger makes web pages. It gives you more to search.”

  By the fifth interview, I asked a guy, “Do you know why you’re interviewing me?” He said, “No. I only started here two days ago.” I’m pretty sure on the list of job interviewer “don’ts,” that’s also pretty high up there. Maybe that meant we were well matched.

  Regardless, when all was said and done, the job that had never been mine finally was.

  With no small help from Evan, I’d manufactured this opportunity without a college education, much less a higher degree; without working my way up a ladder; and with a failure or two under my belt for good measure. I wasn’t a shoo-in; I wasn’t anything. But I did have experience in one particular area: creating my own opportunities.

  I discovered early on that it was better to make my own destiny. As a kid, I spent a bunch of time playing in the yard alone, but one of my favorite things was to go down into our basement and “invent things.” My grandfather built telephones for American Telephone and Telegraph in Boston from 1925 to 1965. He passed before I was born, but my mother never cleared out her father’s work stuff. In our basement were his workbench, all his tools, and a giant apothecary-type arrangement of various springs, sprockets, wires, and the like—everything my grandfather had used to build and repair rotary telephones. I’d go down there and pretend to be inventing wondrous contraptions in my secret, underground laboratory.

  My mom’s best friend, Kathy, had a husband, Bob, who was an electrician. His basement, as far as I was concerned, was another laboratory. The real deal. Whenever we visited their home, I would walk straight in and say, “Bob, let’s go invent some stuff in the lab. I have a few ideas.” I distinctly remember having a revelatory thought that with two empty soda bottles and some hoses, I could rig a contraption that would allow me to breathe underwater.

  When I told Bob the idea, he said, “You mean SCUBA?”

  I told him the name needed more thought and insisted we get to work. He diplomatically said we’d need an air compressor and some other things he didn’t have and suggested we build a battery-powered light mounted on an upside-down coffee can instead. It wouldn’t allow me to breathe underwater, but if it had batteries and wires, I was all for it. Another time, I wanted to invent a flying contraption. Instead, we hooked a speaker up to a battery. We slipped flat copper strips into a plastic mat and connected them to the speaker so that when you stepped on the mat, it activated the speaker and made a horrible buzzing noise. I brought it home and slipped it under the area rug next to my bed. That night I crawled into bed and yelled, “Mom, you forgot to kiss me good night!”

  “Aw, so sweet!” she said. She came into the room, stepped on the rug, activated the alarm, and nearly had a heart attack.

  “My invention worked!” I crowed.

  Perhaps to channel this energy, my mom enrolled me in a program called Boy Rangers. Not the Boy Scouts. Not the Cub Scouts. Some obscure other program called Boy Rangers. It was like the Betamax of scouting programs. Not only did I not want to be in the Boy Rangers, but every week I had to bring “wampum” to the program—I had to pay. Also, my parents had divorced when I was a toddler, and my dad lived a few towns over, but he might as well have lived in Istanbul. My parents were oil and water, so we barely ever saw my father. As it happened, the Boy Rangers was a father-son thing. Every week, all the other boys had their dads with them, and I attended solo. If there was a merit badge for “rubbing it in,” they all would have earned it without trying.

  Anyway, the Boy Rangers was modeled after Native American tribes. In order to advance from Paleface through Papoose, Brave, Warrior, and eventually to Hi-Pa-Nac (which sounds like an anti-cholesterol drug but is actually some sort of chieftain) we had to create our own feathered headdresses, learn how to tie knots, and memorize various tribal slogans. You know, cool-kid stuff. I was stuck in Boy Rangers from age six to ten, all those critical years when most boys were playing Little League baseball, Pee Wee football, and all the other sports. I wasn’t very driven to master the Boy Rangers skills, but the leaders always gave everyone the patches anyway. The other kids had their patches sewn onto their khaki shirts, but my mom attached mine with safety pins.

  As a struggling single mom, the most important thing my mom did for me, my sister Mandy, and my two half-sisters, Sofia and Samantha, was to keep us in Wellesley, where she’d grown up. The town had become very affluent, and the public school system was one of the best in the country. My mom had gone through the Wellesley school system and loved it. She was determined that we have similarly good experiences.

  To me, all my friends were rich. It seemed that they assumed I came from a wealthy family, too, but at various times, we were on welfare. I remember the gigantic slabs of government-issued cheese. I was on a school lunch program for low-income families, which was good because it meant I didn’t need lunch money, but it was bad because of the way it worked. To buy lunch, most students bought lunch tickets. Those tickets were green. To get my lunch tickets, I had to go to a special office once a week to be issued five gray lunch tickets. When other kids asked why my lunch tickets were gray, I made jokes about their green tickets. I suppose I started developing a sense of humor and a certain attitude to deal with the obvious differences in our lifestyles. I would even raid the Lost and Found box so I could find a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt—something other than the same jeans and T-shirt that I pretty much exclusively wore otherwise. Most of my socks and underwear were marked “Irregular.” My mom did her best, and she managed to keep us in Wellesley, in a school system that happened to be receptive to my particular brand of creativity.

  When I got to high school, all my friends were nerds. But I knew from TV and the movies that a good way to expand my social crowd would be to play on a sports team. I was naturally athletic, and from all my years in the Boy Rangers, I was really good at tying half-hitches and sheepshanks, but I’d never tried a team sport. The basketball court had all these crazy lines on the ground. All the other kids seemed to know where you were allowed to stand and for how long. I just stood there. Then, in the football tryouts, there were all these rules. How did it work? How many chances did we get? And how was I supposed to know when I was on the wrong side of the field? I was confused and nervous, which made me even more confused. Before I went to the baseball tryouts, I wised up and did a little research. But there was no way to make up for all the lost time. In this situation, the visualization technique I used to land the job at Blogger wouldn’t have worked. Even if I’d been aware of the strategy at the time, I would have visualized myself making a thousand home runs and then stood by and watched while all the other kids scored them. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t make any of the sports teams. That’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands.

  A little investigating told me that there was one sport my high school did not offer at the time: lacrosse. If none of the other kids had any experience playing lacrosse, then everyone would feel as confused as I did. It would be a level playing field. So I asked the school administration whether, if I found a coach and enough boys, we could start a lacrosse team. The answer was yes. So that’s what I did. After all that apparent ineptitude, I emerged as a decent lacrosse player, I was elected captain, and we were a pretty good team (though I still preferred the company of the nerds to the athletes).

  The determination that led me to create a new sports team taught me an important lesson: opp
ortunity is manufactured.

  My dictionary defines opportunity as a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something. The world has conditioned us to wait for opportunity, have the good sense to spot it, and hope to strike at the appropriate time. But if opportunity is just a set of circumstances, why are we waiting around for the stars to align? Rather than waiting and pouncing with a high degree of failure, you might as well go ahead and create the set of circumstances on your own. If you make the opportunity, you’ll be first in position to take advantage of it.

  It wasn’t until later that I realized that this is the core of entrepreneurship—being the person who makes something happen for yourself. But it’s also true for all forms of success, in all parts of life. People say success is a combination of work and luck, and in that equation, luck is the piece that is out of your hands. But as you create opportunities for yourself, your odds at the lottery go way up.

  In high school I’d learned how fulfilling it was to make my own opportunities, and I assumed I’d be able to do the same in college. I graduated high school in 1992 and cobbled together a bunch of local scholarships to cover my first year of college at Northeastern University. Knowing the funding would run out, I landed a scholarship for excellence in the arts, which gave me a free ride at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

  But college didn’t turn out to be all I’d envisioned. Every day, I commuted an hour from my mother’s house to the UMass campus, a maze of concrete that was rumored to have been designed by builders who specialized in prisons. One of the first things I wanted to do there was produce The White Rose, a play based on an early anti-Nazi movement in Germany. But the woman who ran the theater department told me my only option was to attend her class and be a part of whatever play she had picked. Hmm. That wasn’t what I had in mind.

  On the side, I got a job moving heavy boxes in an old mansion on Beacon Hill for the publisher Little, Brown and Company. I carried boxes of books from the attic of the mansion down to the lobby. It was the mid-nineties, and the publisher’s art department was transitioning from spray glue to Photoshop. They even had an old Photostat machine in its own little darkroom—a huge and expensive machine that did the same job as a ninety-nine-dollar scanner. I knew my way around a Mac, and designing book jackets looked like fun. So one day, when the entire art department went out to lunch, I snooped around until I found a transmittal sheet for a book that listed the title, subtitle, author, and a brief summary of what the editorial department wanted for the jacket. The book was Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band, by Scott Freeman. I sat down at one of the workstations and created a book cover for it. On a dark background, I put “Midnight Riders” in tall, green type. Then I found a picture of the band, also very dark, that looked good below the title. When I was done, I printed it out, matted it, and slipped it in with the other cover designs headed to the sales and editorial departments in the New York office for approval. Then I went back to moving boxes.

  Two days later, when the art director came back from presenting designs in New York, he asked, “Who designed this cover?” I told him I had. He said, “You? The box kid?” I explained that I knew computers, and that I was attending college on a scholarship for the arts. He offered me a full-time job as a designer on the spot. The New York office had picked my jacket to use on the book. Looking back, it wasn’t very good, but they chose it.

  I was being offered an honest-to-goodness full-time job. Should I take it? College so far had been a disappointment. (My experience there reminds me of a Dutch phrase that an entrepreneur I visited in Amsterdam once told me: “He who stands up gets his head chopped off.”) And here I was being handed an opportunity to work directly with the art director, who would turn out to be a master. The way I saw it, people went to college in order to be qualified to get a job like the one I was being offered. Basically, I was skipping three grades. Besides, I’d learn more here, doing what I wanted to do, than drifting anonymously through college. So I dropped out of college to work at Little, Brown, one of the best decisions of my life.

  I’m not advocating dropping out. I could have entered college with more focus in the first place, or I could have tried to change my experience when I got there. But taking a job that I’d won through my initiative was another way of controlling my destiny. This, as I see it, was an example of manufacturing my own opportunities.

  This is why starting a lacrosse team, producing a play, launching your own company, or actively building the company you work for is all more creatively fulfilling and potentially lucrative than simply doing what is expected of you. Believing in yourself, the genius you, means you have confidence in your ideas before they even exist. In order to have a vision for a business, or for your own potential, you must allocate space for that vision. I want to play on a sports team. I didn’t make it on a team. How can I reconcile these truths? I don’t like my job, but I love this one tiny piece of it, so how can I do that instead? Real opportunities in the world aren’t listed on job boards, and they don’t pop up in your in-box with the subject line: Great Opportunity Could Be Yours. Inventing your dream is the first and biggest step toward making it come true. Once you realize this simple truth, a whole new world of possibilities opens up in front of you.

  That modus operandi is what brought me to Google in 2003.

  I’d landed at Google, but Real-Life Biz was still working out the kinks. Genius Labs was a nonentity, Livia and I still had tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, my car wasn’t up for the cross-country drive, and I was on my way to an opportunity I’d manufactured out of nothing but a unique blend of confidence and desperation.

  I wanted a bigger car, a Toyota Matrix, for the move across the country, so I went to a dealership to trade in our old Corolla. I said to the dealer, “I have this Corolla, but I don’t have any money. Can I give you the car and get a payment plan for the rest?”

  He said, “For five thousand dollars down—”

  I interrupted him. “I really don’t have any money. I have no money. Nothing. Zippo.”

  He said, “For two thousand dollars down—”

  I politely interrupted again, “If I had some money, I’d give it to you, but I don’t. I’ve no money, no access to money, and my credit cards are completely maxed out.”

  So he took my Corolla and gave me a financing deal that even he admitted was terrible. Time for another visualization.

  I thought, Here’s to my future self, who will pay for all of this.

  Renewables are just what they sound like: naturally replenished resources. They’re inexhaustible. In spite of the earth’s depleting reserves, don’t you feel better already, thinking about renewables? The idea of replenishment is such a relief. There’s more where that came from. We won’t run out. This life that we’re trying to live is sustainable. This is an important concept when we think about the world’s resources, but it’s also applicable to our work and lives, and it came into play in my eventual decision to leave Google.

  I worked on Blogger at Google for two years, and up until the initial public offering, Livia and I were still deeply in debt. Our living situation was less than ideal. In fact, it was less than mediocre. Before we moved to San Francisco we had asked Evan and Jason where we should live. The most obvious choice was downtown Mountain View, near where the Google offices were located. But Jason and Evan were self-proclaimed San Francisco snobs, so they told us, “You gotta live in the Mission, man. That’s where it’s at.”

  We could tell that the Mission was too gritty for us. It was in that phase between down-and-out and up-and-coming, where the hipsters had moved in but there were still gunshots at night—possibly directed toward the hipsters. For people like Ev, who grew up in Nebraska fantasizing about the big city, it was cool being the city mouse. But Livy had grown up in New York City in the seventies. She’d had enough of living in the city; she wanted to be the country mouse. To move to yet another city and pick a transitional district with l
ingering gang territories would have rubbed salt in the wound. Then we read about a really nice neighborhood that was Mission adjacent: Potrero Hill. From the pictures we found online, it seemed to have a cute street with an old-school deli, a family-owned grocery store, a corner bookstore, and probably a savings-and-loan run by George Bailey, from the looks of it.

  Still searching online, I found a fifteen-hundred-square-foot loft in Potrero Hill for thirteen hundred dollars a month. Holy crap! I’d always wanted to live in a loft. And the apartment was number 1A. We’d be on the ground floor—no more walking up to the attic. We’d walk out our front door and be right in charming Potrero Hill.

  Fingers crossed, I called the landlord. It was still available! I agreed to rent it on the spot. We felt so pleased with ourselves to be driving west with our affordable, cool loft waiting for us.

  What we failed to take into account was the “hill” part of Potrero Hill. Downtown Potrero Hill is at the base of the north slope. Our new apartment, we discovered on arrival, was on the south slope. The only way to get from one side to the other was to walk up and over a hill steeper than a ski slope. I’m all for cardio, but I wasn’t about to climb that hill every time I wanted an overpriced scone, which I couldn’t afford anyway.

  As for the cool loft building we’d anticipated, it was squeezed between two housing projects, overlooking the highway and a rendering plant, where I’m pretty sure they were making glue out of seagulls, or something along those lines. Our picture windows looked out onto an industrial wasteland.

  Also, it was a live/work loft, and the guy next door was in a band. Guess what instrument he played? Did you guess drums? Good for you! He played loud, crazy music all night, and kept a barking pitbull as his companion.