Things A Little Bird Told Me Page 3

  But the real kicker was the mistake we’d made in assuming our apartment, 1A, would be on the ground floor. The building was built into the side of a cliff, so the numbers were basically reversed—you entered on the ninth floor and the floors went down from there. We had rented a ninth-floor walk-down. Each day began with us clambering up nine double-height flights of metal stairs.

  Every morning, I commuted to my new job in Mountain View, a pretty town with shops and cafés and a weekly farmers’ market. It would have been perfect for us. Our rent there would have been even lower, and I could have biked to work. Anyhoo, that’s not what we did.

  Livia and I didn’t have any furniture for a year and a half. Our credit card debt was a black hole that ate all our income. And when Google gave out one thousand dollars in cash to every employee at Christmastime, I stopped on the way home that day to recklessly spend most of the bonus on a TV. We put the TV on the floor and used its box for a dining table. Otherwise, we were living hand to mouth. We’d brought only our cats and whatever else would fit in our Toyota Matrix. There hadn’t been room in the car or money left over for luxuries—like, say, a bed. We slept upstairs on the bedroom floor. At least it was carpeted.

  At Google, when word got around that I was sleeping on the floor, some colleagues passed around a coffee can and raised eight hundred dollars for me to buy a bed. It was an amazingly kind gesture, and I was touched and grateful. However, I had no choice but to misallocate the funds and put them all toward my obscene car payments, which were several months overdue. As for the rest of our furniture, I brought home two garish, multicolor Google beanbag chairs. We sat in those beanbags and slept on the carpet for over a year—until I finally got some dough from Google.

  I joined Blogger in September 2003. On August 19, 2004, Google finally had its much-anticipated public offering. The options I was granted as part of my hiring package were on a four-year vesting schedule. I had the right to buy them for a dime per share. By the time Google went public, I was one year vested, and the value per share quickly rose to over one hundred dollars. By the next year, it had nearly tripled. Every month, I was allowed to exercise more of my stock options, so I would pick up the phone, ask a guy on the other end to “sell, please,” put down the phone, and say, “Livia, I just made ten thousand dollars.” Little by little, we chipped away at our credit card debt.

  But something was missing. Something I’d learned to love in my first job, the one I dropped out of college for, working for the art director at Little, Brown.

  On my first official day of work as a designer at Little, Brown, I walked into the art director’s office, and he silently beckoned me over to his desk. Without speaking or turning around, he reached his left hand over his right shoulder and plucked a book from the shelf. Like a Jedi Master, he never took his eyes off me. The book he had selected was a Pantone color swatch book, and it must have been the one he wanted, because he started looking through it. I stood quietly and watched as he slowly flipped through pages and pages of colors. Finally, he stopped in the range of the light browns and tans. He found what he wanted and tore out one of the little perforated swatches. He put it down on his desk, placed one finger on it, and wordlessly slid the chocolate-colored swatch slowly toward me. He then stated drily, “That’s how I take my coffee.”

  Oh my God. I dropped out of college for this. I gave up an awesome free-ride scholarship. And now I have to go to Dunkin’ Donuts and ask the lady if she can do the coffee . . .

  In three seconds, all those thoughts went through my head. As I was considering how to replicate that color at the local café with just the right amount of cream, the art director burst into laughter.

  “I’m kidding! What kind of asshole do you think I am?” And so began my apprenticeship in graphic design and my introduction to a new way of thinking. The director, Steve Snider, and I worked side by side for over two years.

  Book cover design teaches you that for any one project, there are infinite approaches. There were several factors at play in jacket design. A jacket had to satisfy us, the designers, artistically. It also had to please the author and the editorial department by doing justice to the content. It had to appeal to Sales and Marketing in terms of grabbing attention, and positioning and promoting the book. Sometimes designers were frustrated when their work was turned down by one department or the other. “Idiots. Fools,” they’d mutter, storming around the office. “This is a brilliant design.” And maybe it was. But our colleagues in Sales and Editorial had experience in their jobs, and I learned from Steve to assume that their concerns were legitimate.

  Steve told me that once, for a biography of Ralph Lauren, he’d had a brilliant idea. He wanted to put out six different jackets, each in a solid, preppy color with the Polo logo in the upper left in a contrasting color. That would be it. Ralph Lauren’s photo might be on the back. It would have been so iconic. But Editorial nixed it. So that was that. Steve was still proud of the idea, but he understood that his opinion wasn’t the be-all and end-all.

  For a book called The Total Package, by Thomas Hine, which deconstructed the world of product packaging, I took a little cardboard box of powdered pudding. I opened it up, ungluing the seams, and flattened it out. I made a jacket that mimicked the deconstructed box, with its registration lines and that little rainbow where they test the ink colors. I was really proud of the final product. But, instead, they used an elegant black-and-white jacket with product shapes on it. My jacket wasn’t used, but the work wasn’t wasted. I put it in my portfolio. I still thought it was cool.

  Steve taught me that having a cover turned down wasn’t a problem. It was an opportunity. My job wasn’t only to be an artist, creating work that pleased me. The challenge was to come up with a design that I loved and that Sales and Editorial thought was perfect. That was the true goal. “Your goals should be bigger than your ego,” Steve used to tell me. When I satisfied every department, only then would I have really succeeded in nailing a cover.

  When Steve and I were stuck, we’d try to inspire ourselves. We’d take a precut matte frame and hold it up against different things around the office. Would the wood grain of a credenz a make a good background? How about the blue sky outside? (Steve Snider would later use a blue sky with white clouds as the background for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.)

  Sometimes there were restrictions that limited our options. We’d be told, “For this book, you have to use this photo. It was taken by the editor’s sister. It’s nonnegotiable.” And the art would suck.

  I’d say, “Great, gimme that one.” Then I’d turn the art sideways and blow it up eight hundred percent. Now it was cool. There was always another way to go. My creativity wasn’t limited to five designs per book, or any other number. There was always another potential cover. I quickly learned not to care about the hard work that had been wasted. I didn’t take rejection personally. My creativity was limitless. I wanted to come up with another idea. I got a million of these, I thought. I could do this all day long! It was a matter of attitude.

  Graphic design is an excellent preparation for any profession because it teaches you that for any one problem, there are infinite potential solutions. Too often we hesitate to stray from our first idea, or from what we already know. But the solution isn’t necessarily what is in front of us, or what has worked in the past. For example, if we cling to fossil fuels as the best and only energy source, we’re doomed. My introduction to design challenged me to take a new approach today, and every day after.

  Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work.

  Steve became my mentor. He drove me in to work every morning, and we became friends, playing tennis together on weekends. He was more than thirty years older than me, but we were a good match: I didn’t have a dad
growing up; he had two daughters, and he’d always wanted a son. Eventually he started bringing me with him to present covers to the New York office. On the way, I’d ask him a million questions, not just about design, but about life. How did you know when to propose to your wife? How much money did you ask for at your first job? Asking questions is free. Do it!

  With Steve’s encouragement and confidence in me, I left Little, Brown to start a freelance business doing book design. It was the late nineties, so it was inevitable that I would soon expand my services to include website design. Every new business then included website design. I could have started a dry-cleaning service, and the sign would have read ALTERATIONS/WEBSITE DESIGN. When my friends graduated college and decided to form a web company, I was already designing and building websites. We started Xanga together. Learning design with Steve set me on the path that led me where I am today.

  The notion that creativity is infinite drove my everyday energy, but that idea rose to the fore in 2005, when I was still at Google, working on Blogger, having finally climbed out of the debt that had plagued me for my entire adult life.

  I was endlessly inspired by the characters at Google. There was Simon Quellen Field, a self-named older guy whom I’d met my very first day at orientation. I asked him what he was going to be doing at Google and he said, “I don’t know. Something that requires a PhD.” Simon had a big gray beard, a long gray ponytail, and a live parrot perched on his shoulder. He claimed that he owned a mountain in Los Altos, lived on top of it, and had a huge aviary and parrot farm.

  During lunch, a guy named Woldemar (a.k.a. “He Who Is Sometimes Mistaken for He Who Shall Not Be Named”) would juggle by himself. I’d go over and talk to him: “Don’t you feel weird juggling here?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’d feel nervous and embarrassed.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Okay, see you later, Woldemar.”

  Misha was squat, with a potbelly, a beard, and a thick Russian accent. He tracked me down when I posted a paper on the Google intranet. (The paper considered that, like it or hate it, when you go for a job interview or on a date, people are going to Google you. You might as well take ownership of that. I suggested that Google let people convert the search results on their names into a social networking profile page, editing the results, and expanding from there. I called it Google Persona. I still think it’s a pretty good idea, but it’s up on the shelf, next to Steve’s Ralph Lauren book jackets.) Anyway, Misha read my post and took an interest in me. He hunted me down and said, “Biz, come. We take walk.”

  Should I take a walk with this Russian guy? Why not?

  So from then on, Misha and I would take strolls. We’d amble by the parrot guy and the juggling guy, and he would say things like “Biz, I invent new way to present time.” It was guys like Misha who made Google work.

  Despite the welcome financial stability of the job and the endlessly fascinating characters, there was something missing from my work at Blogger: I didn’t have a chance to challenge myself every day.

  One of the ways I tried to fulfill that urge was to regularly brainstorm with Evan about what we might do next if we were to leave Google. One afternoon in 2005, he and I were carpooling home to San Francisco from Google in Mountain View. Ev was driving his yellow Subaru wagon, and I was riding shotgun.

  “You know how people can record their voice in the web browser with Flash if they have a built-in microphone?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Ev said.

  “Well, we could build something that lets people record whatever they want. Then we could convert that to an MP3 on our servers.”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I think I have a genius idea.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Evan will listen to any idea I have, but he’s not one to get overexcited. He’s thoughtful, analytical.

  We were driving through the northbound dot-com traffic on Highway 101, around San Mateo. I took a deep breath and went on.

  “It seems like iPods are getting super popular. We could make it really easy for regular people to create recordings—talking, singing, interviews, or whatever the hell they want—by talking to a web page. Say lots of people do this, and we convert all their random recordings to files, MP3s.”

  “Go on,” Evan said.

  “We collect all these recordings in one place and make them available. Then other people can subscribe to whomever they like.” I explained to him how it might work technically, and how the recordings would sync between their computers and their iPods.

  At last Ev’s eyes opened wide and his jaw dropped. His “holy shit, that’s a good idea” face.

  “So you see what I’m saying. We could basically make a service that democratizes audio in the same way Blogger democratizes the making of web pages. Anyone can have what is essentially his or her own radio show. Other people can easily get that show onto their iPods, so they can listen to all this stuff whenever they want. It could be a whole thing.”

  You know I’m excited when I say, “It could be a whole thing.”

  “You might be on to something.” Evan is a tough nut to crack, but I’d cracked him.

  “I told you I had a genius idea.”

  Once we got back to the city and started researching this notion, we found out I wasn’t quite as genius as I thought—other people had already thought of this and were calling it podcasting. Still, we thought there was a wide-open market for a mainstream, consumer, web-branded podcasting service.

  Evan consulted with his friend Noah Glass, who had been working in this space—recording voices in the browser using Flash. Noah had named his service Audioblogger, because it posted people’s recordings to a blog. But he hadn’t yet put together anything that made it easy to subscribe to these recordings and get them on an iPod.

  One night, Ev called while Livia and I were cooking dinner at our “loft” in Potrero Hill.

  He said, “Noah and I are hashing out the idea you had in the car. Come join us.”

  I glanced over at the broccoli, potatoes, and fake meat stew simmering on the stove. I was hungry. It looked good. “Nah,” I said. “You guys go ahead without me.” It’s moments like this that make and break fortunes in Silicon Valley. Stupid broccoli.

  Because Google had acquired Blogger, Evan had already made his fortune and was free to do whatever he wanted. (Yes, he bought a silver Porsche after the Google IPO. You can’t blame a kid from Nebraska for buying a toy like that when he becomes a multimillionaire.) The next thing he did was to quit Google, team up with Noah, and launch a podcasting company called Odeo.

  A short time after that first call Ev told me that he had raised five million dollars to build Odeo with Noah. It had all happened so quickly, and suddenly I felt like I’d missed the boat. They’d started the company without me. Sure, Google was a great place to be. It was a hot company. I had no boss. I was earning maximum bonuses. I didn’t have to go in to work if I didn’t want to. I had two years of options left to vest. I could relax at Google and make millions of dollars. Or I could quit in order to work on a startup that might not succeed. (Spoiler: it failed.) But I wanted to be challenged every day.

  Think about your work situation. Do you treat your creativity like a fossil fuel—a limited resource that must be conserved—or have you harnessed the unending power of the sun? Are you in an environment where creativity thrives? Is there room for new ideas every day? Can you make room?

  I had moved out to California to work with Evan Williams, not with Google. That was more important to me than options or job security. I couldn’t sit around waiting for my options to vest when I had a chance to be a part of a startup with Evan. Sure, I was bringing a human side to Blogger, but the website was already well on its way. Leaving a stable, comfortable job is like starting again from scratch. It’s not easy, and it may not work the first time, but it can ultimately lead to greater things. I needed a new source of energy. It was time to hack on a new thing.r />
  I called Evan and said, “I want to quit here and work at Odeo.”

  He said, “Awesome.”

  So I quit Google.

  Starting over is one of the hardest leaps to make in life. Security, stability, safety—it’s scary, if not downright irresponsible, to leave these behind. I was at Google in 2003 and I might still be there now. But I had faith in my future self. (After all, my once-future self had finally managed to pay off the Toyota Matrix.) I could help build something new.

  By this point, after we had paid off our debt at last, Livia and I had broken the lease on our ninth-floor walk-down in Potrero Hill, rented a condo in Palo Alto, and I’d started biking to work. After two years of commuting from San Francisco to Mountain View, now I was driving from Palo Alto back up to the city to the Odeo offices. I’d reversed my commute.

  And so we moved again. This time I asked Livia to decide where we should live, since my track record on this was so poor. She chose Berkeley, and because we were tired of landlords who wouldn’t allow us to bring along our menagerie of rescue animals, we wanted to own our home. Livy was the director of WildCare in San Rafael, a wild animal ER. What happens there is very different from a vet’s office, where people might bring in an obese housecat and try to help it live to be seventy. When people find injured animals—squirrels, hawks, owls, skunks—they bring them to WildCare for help. But unlike with dogs and cats, there’s no established protocol for some of the cases. (How do you make a prosthetic leg for a seagull?) And WildCare’s a nonprofit, so often it’s improvising with whatever’s been donated. A tiny mouse with a broken leg? They fix it with dental equipment from the seventies. Livy was saving lives. She’s wired to help others, and her life of altruism absolutely inspires me.