Life

Sometimes it amazes me how little I knew about job-life when I was searching for and picking jobs during my senior year of college. Over the past 3-4 months I’ve come to appreciate the value of having a job that works me about 40 hours/week during most weeks, giving me roughly 4-6 hours each weekday and all weekend to do my own stuff (exercise, read, spin, whatever), as opposed to a job that would work me 80+ hours a week, making my job my life. I’ve had numerous conversations with fellow grads about this and we all seem to have the same comment: “I never seriously considered the number of hours I would work per week as a deciding factor.” Granted, it’s much easier to look back on that decision now that we actually have jobs. In many ways, senior year can feel like one big game of musical chairs in which you scramble for whatever job chair is available to you, regardless of what you’re in for once you sit down. Still, most of us now look back on our personal job choices with the 20/20 hindsight of valuing a balance between work time and personal time. This is just one of those deciding factors that we didn’t realize even was a deciding factor.

Over the last four and a half months with NE I’ve discovered another “deciding factor” that honestly never came into my decision process – start-up vs. big, established company. The reason this has come up is because NE’s financial situation has been beyond shaky for, well, I guess the past year or so. 75% of our C round investment is 18 months overdue (and I’m of the opinion that it never will). What’s particularly frustrating about that bit is that I interviewed and accepted my job offer 16 months ago with my now-CEO telling me that “we’ve just closed our third round of funding.” I guess in the future I’ll be a bit more savvy and know to ask, “So, do you actually have the money in hand? No? Well then don’t tell me you’ve closed your round of funding.” Anyway, I have to keep perspective when complaining about our financial issues since the company I turned down in favor of NE had to let go the Tech grad who got an offer same as me last August because of similar financial issues, so if you only consider those two offers then it’s pretty obvious which one was the correct choice.

However, those were the only two companies that I actually followed through with all the way to the point of getting an offer. A couple of much larger, more stable companies got back to me much later than NE and Spoke. Amazon called me up to interview for a full-time position (never mind that they were only looking for interns as the Caltech career fair) six weeks after the career fair. I remember that day well, because it was the Friday before the weekend during which I was going to make my final decision between NE and Spoke. I’d already had four in-person interviews, a number of other phone calls, and a very nice job offer with NE alone before Amazon called me back. But maybe that’s the nature of a large company. Maybe it takes them a much longer time to filter through all of their applicants to find the diamonds in the rough. Whatever the reason, Amazon got crossed off my list simply because they called me too late.

But Amazon had something that neither NE nor Spoke had – financial stability. If I were to have gone to work for Amazon, I’m pretty sure that I could have been guaranteed a paycheck for as long as I performed well – or at least as long as the company did well. And this is the key point that I’ve been working towards in this entry – the nature of the start-up. I sometimes wonder just how naïve I was when I considered working for a start-up like NE. Sure, there’s a risk when you go to work for a start-up, especially one that’s dependent on capital investment for its operations to continue. But, really, NE? It’s perfectly safe, right? We’ve already had two rounds of funding, with a third just about to complete. We’ve already been working on our scanner for four years and we can now demo a functional prototype. Hell, we even have an exclusive scanner-distribution deal with a major CAD-software maker which is estimated to bring in at least $40-mil in the 2-3 years after its release next April. We’re free of the normal start-up risk, right?

Well, not really. As I mentioned, due to reasons completely unrelated to the quality of our product (or, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, absolutely related to the potential of our product), NE had to enter a furlough period at the start of February, which basically meant that the employees, while not fired, were not going to receive paychecks until we received more capital. I was lucky enough to be working on an outside project that had been supplying money for my paycheck since September, so I, as well as maybe 10 other employees, was able to receive pay (albeit sometimes weeks late) as usual, otherwise I’d definitely be working somewhere else at this moment. Now, four and half months later, I’m finally having to deal with the difficulties of the furlough period. The outside contract work ended at the end of May, and now my paycheck depends on NE’s ability to get capital money. Last Wednesday I missed my first paycheck with no idea as to when, or even if, I’ll get paid for the work I did during the first half of June.

So, as you can probably imagine, I’ve been a little stressed out over the last three weeks or so. Tonight I finally took steps towards easing that stress by setting up a “fail-safe” plan for the next couple of months. Basically, I have enough cash set aside in my “rainy day/disaster fund” (you can guess which name applies here :-P) such that I can make all payments on current debts (rent, car, etc) through September. However, while it’s nice to know that my credit rating won’t get dinged until October, the idea of living on cash reserves for three months is not something I’m looking forward to. But that’s not even the hardest part of this situation. The hardest is going to be determining if/when to cut bait with NE. Our scanner is amazing, but right now, that really doesn’t matter if we don’t have the money to pay for our employees to complete the final year of development on it. And while I’d be willing to risk going without pay until April while working to finish our scanner, the simple truth is that it’s just not possible to do so. I have bills that need to be paid and the bill collectors have nothing to gain by waiting until NE’s scanner makes bank before they can get their money. The world just doesn’t work that way.

Damn it, I don’t want to leave Santa Monica. I don’t want to leave NE. I don’t want to leave the sunny days, the runs on the beach, and the walks on the Promenade. I love the area, I love my job, and I love my life as it is right now. But I may have to give all of that up if NE continues to operate on no income. So, after updating my resume tonight to include my time at NE, I’m going to start applying for jobs so that, if everything goes according to play, I can have interviews with a number of companies by mid-July, have one or more job offers in-front of me by mid-August, and, if necessary, have a new job by September. But, man, I really hope it doesn’t get to that point.

At this point I could throw out any number of platitudes saying “life’s a bitch, but you learn from it and keep going,” but really, I’m a tad sick of philosophizing on life at this point. It’s a lot easier to philosophize on life when shit isn’t falling apart.