So I was moving to a great job in April 2005, making the same @$84K I had been at Inforonics, and was very excited about it. But I remember having a chair-lift conversation during a ski trip around that time and being asked what I was going to be doing in my new job? It was then that I realized I really didn't know! Well, I did a lot of things and did a lot of growing up there. Inforonics was a great ride (though a rough one) and was like living in a large, weird family. Prospero was a family too, but I needed to be one of the adults.
Prospero was named after the magician in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" who brought order to chaos. It was a very engineering-centric company, led by a president who was actually the lead programmer (Boss1), a CTO (Boss2), and the head of Sales and Marketing and product also (Boss3), though he said that his job consisted mostly of answering the phone and saying, "How much did you say you want to pay us?" [Starting to number bosses now, ‘cause it gets confusing.]
The reason that Prospero was printing money in the later aughts, was that we were really one of the first social media companies ... the term hadn't even been invented when I started. Prospero had grown out of Delphi Forums, which had grown out of online bulletin boards. Prospero had taken this form of interaction, user-based content, to another level. We were a white label partner for some pretty heavy hitters. Companies like the major publishing, television, and entertainment networks had realized that they needed to have "comments" sections along with their content, but that this was not their main business. Instead they hired us to do the interfaces, back-end databasing, and moderation, and to integrate it all with their web pages. In my time there I worked with clients like NBC, Meredith Publishing, and ESPN/Disney.
Prospero was a really small company when they hired me. I think I was employee number 12 (not counting the Mallory Ventures staff who did our back office stuff, like personnel, payroll, and cashing the checks), but we grew fast. There were a lot of clients and a lot of work to do and we all wore multiple hats. I could do a little of this and a little of that and that's what I did. I don't think I ever had a title there until I made one up for myself.
Briefly, we had a platform and some tools to configure it in a variety of ways, and a fast SQL server back-end. Almost all of what we did was centered around the same set of HTML pages/snippets: search, list, edit, list comments, add comment, etc. And when we set up a customer they got default templates for these pages. You could configure these to a huge extent by using our control center interface. This enabled you to set basic settings like captions and text size, but also very technical ones, like Javascript, cascading style sheets (CSS), page dimensions, etc. And so users would get customized-looking pages while using the same templates that we could edit globally to add features. You could also write custom templates for customers that needed to add pages or do something custom. We could serve full web pages for users but most often served the HTML as snippets that could be included in the customer's other pages, preserving their branding. This was quite different for me in some ways, especially since UNIX/Perl wasn’t involved at all and that it was mostly front end stuff, but I picked it all up really quickly and got very good at it.
I could go on, but the bottom line was that you could set up simple services for some customers, or get VERY involved with writing custom stuff for them. I started off with simpler stuff ... one of my first assignments was setting up a discussion group/bulletin board for NBC (National Broadcasting Company) to enable Hurricane Katrina refugees to find each other and get their lives back together after that diaspora. As tragic as that event was, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to use technology to help people directly. The job at Prospero started off well and I was soon doing more custom work. My background as a programmer, my ability to master bespoke languages, and knowing a lot about HTML, Javascript, and CSS were just what was needed. The company needed jacks-of-all-trades and I thrive in a situation like that.
There were two things that really contributed to our ability to work together and be creative. One was that we all had "Z flags." In Prospero lingo that meant that we all had total permission to do anything. If we needed this or had to get that done we could do it ourselves and not have to wait for other people or to get permission, and we all trusted each other with this power. One thing it meant was that we were all terrified of fucking up! Every once in a while someone would make a change that would be a mistake and/or affect someone else's setup. But we had a great attitude about that, if you fucked up you had to bring in the donuts the next morning and all was forgiven. Most companies are unbalanced in one direction or the other, libertarian or authoritarian. Prospero was a programmers paradise and was libertarian to a fault, we all had the right to do really well or really poorly. Some people crashed and burned but most did not.
The other thing was that we ate our own dog food. We had a couple of internal forums, most important was the "ptech" forum/discussion group. When you came in each morning the first thing you'd do, before checking email or getting a cup of coffee, was to check ptech to get a quick read on what was going on. We were running some important stuff 24x7 and we all needed to know immediately if there were any all-hands-on-deck situations, hopefully before the client realized it. But the real magic of the forum was that you could not have a clue about how to do something, but then get a clue really fast by searching what had happened in the forum in the past or by asking questions in it. And we all bought into this wholeheartedly, if someone asked a question we answered with no ego involved. We had all been there and jumped at the chance to help each other, knowing that they would help us the next day. This positive use of a forum helped us to proselytize to potential customers, we all bought into the power of open communications.
There's a bad side to forums of course, they can be dominated by bad actors and this got worse and worse as forums/discussions/comments got more common on the web. We set up a really complicated network of forums for ESPN to embed in their pages, but then had quite a struggle trying to prevent bad actors from taking it over. We had moderators on staff but they had a hard time with these assholes who were more interested in insulting each other and giving the finger to everyone than they were in actually discussing sports.
I was helping Boss3 organize and execute new product ideas, using our platform. We came up with a really good blog product and also a profile product (that could incorporate the blog) that enabled you to say a lot about yourself, to post pictures, and to brag ... some people posted pretty obscene pictures, which our ace moderators deleted or blocked. We also fooled around with wikis. Though some people are assholes, there’s a much greater number of good people out there and we were doing neat stuff for them, enabling them to exchange information and ideas. Some of the forums we enabled, such as the Meredith Publishing ones, helped people trade child-raising tips, agricultural advice, vacation information, etc. One of our customers, VRBO, started a new industry and Boss3 was one of their first adopters.
We grew and grew and within a few years blew past the 50-employee mark. I became kind of the organizer. I hate to use the phrase, "the grown-up in the room," but sometimes it seemed that way. As I say, the company was really engineer-centric and this was good in some ways but bad in others, such as in accountability and all pulling in the same direction. There was passive aggression ("Hmm, he doesn't want to do this so I just won't do it either") and as we grew the egos started to pop up. I remember one new guy trying to blame me for something when he didn't know I was on the phone. I remember a new employee thinking she out-ranked me (we were a totally flat organization, there was no out-ranking) and trying to tell me how I should do things. I was asked to attend a lot of meetings, and became the note taker and spreadsheet-tender for a good deal of what we did. I was the one who had to (nicely) remind people that we needed them to do this by that date or point out to the executives that this or that could not get done on the schedule they wanted. I never got credentials in project management but that’s what I did. Even when we hired some professional project managers, they struggled to understand the issues they needed to be on top of; you needed to understand the guts of how it worked and if you didn’t, the people who did weren’t always kind. It was the Rosetta Stone problem all over again and as we grew, the gap between Egyptian and Greek got wider. I was able to be effective in this environment, the engineers, the marketers, and the graphics people were all my buddies and didn't take it poorly when I told them what they had to do since I had the chops to really understand their challenges and objections, and to find ways forward.
Two big projects I was asked by Boss1 to lead in Summer 2007 were with Disney Family and with TIAA-CREF, the teachers' pension/retirement conglomerate. Things didn't really work out with Disney Family, and that was interesting. They needed us to give them 100% of our attention, resources, and time and they were puzzled when we didn't. Sure, we had other customers, but they were *Disney* and they were used to getting their way. I'm sure they considered just buying us and then being able to tell us what to do. For me, this was bit ominous. It was getting to the point where our small but growing company just couldn't grow fast enough, and maybe the handwriting was appearing on the wall all over again, though in a new language.
The TIAA-CREF project was mostly a good experience, but ominous as well. They had a vision of creating a portal for their customers and, as their customers were mostly teachers, hosting intellectual discussions there as well as supplying pension, career, and retirement information. They had seen what we'd done with personal pages/blogs/profiles, and wanted that to be integrated into the portal as well. AND they'd hired a graphics company to draw up the pages they wanted us to implement and host. I told the sales guy, who had promised them everything, that we could not do what the graphics company had created with the resources we had, and that he'd have to get back to them to manage expectations. He never did, he just left it up to me to be the bad guy and tell them no. That worked out but only after a series of painful meetings, and TIAA-CREF finally realized that they would have to step in and fire the graphics company. The market niche we’d been thriving in had been branded as “Social Media” and was being taken over by people with unrealistic expectations and dollar signs in their eyes.
A crazy thought occurred to me that Fall, maybe I should become a manager! They'd tried to hire others who could take on some of what I did, they wanted to advertise for "Another Jon Bourne," but things were complicated. There were so many ways that we *could* do things, no clear answer to how we *should* be doing things, and no documentation on best practices or how we’d done things in the past. So when people tried to do things the right way they were stymied by too much or too little information. I saw a need for someone to be the official manager of documentation, and it really needed to be someone who understood the templates, Javascript, CSS, and the challenges of our employees.
So I wrote up a presentation and met with Boss1 and Boss3 about this. I even had a new title for myself (Director of Product Information) and a plan for what staff I would need. They didn't laugh at me! In fact, they thought it was a great idea and accepted it right away, though they told me that at first they wouldn't expect me to hire/fire/assess employees, which was a great relief for me. They didn't say that they also still expected me to do what I was doing, but I figured that would sort itself out. What had I done?!? Possibly a good thing.
Well, what they knew but that I didn't at that point was that things were about to change in a big way. Mallory Ventures had apparently been looking to sell their very valuable asset, Prospero. One morning, our president showed up at one of the TIAA-CREF team meetings I ran and announced to us that we'd been sold and that we'd be moving to ... Burlington. Yay!! We'd been restricted all along by the penny-pinching ways of our owner, Mallory, and moving to Burlington meant that I'd have a much shorter commute. I remember that the next day we had another meeting on TIAA-CREF that I needed to project my screen for, but when we got to the room all of the power cords were gone. Mallory Ventures had decided that they needed to grab our power cords before we took them, they were that cheap.
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