The president of our new owner, Mzinga, came to present to us and he was another very friendly and approachable boss (Boss4). He told us that we would be reimbursed immediately for our accumulated vacation time and would all get exactly the same salary and time off that we were entitled to at that point. He had papers ready for each of us to sign saying this. It pained me that many of my colleagues would now have a much worse commute (lots of them lived West of Littleton, and Burlington was almost the Big City), and that a number of them would not thrive with the transition. But I was ready to thrive and for a while I did.
"Mzinga" means "beehive" in Swahili and a team of crack marketers had hit on that name as an "original" (it was not) expression of what we wanted to be. Mzinga had a company song and passed out recordings of it at the big reception they held for us in March 2008. But what a strangely structured company it was for me. As much as Prospero had been engineer-centric this was marketer-centric. No decisions could be made until a roomful of marketers had discussed it for days or a couple of alpha-marketers were psyched about it ... YMMV. They had free snacks, cookouts every week in the summers, a wealth of branded swag they expected us to wear, and plans for rapid growth and moving to a big building somewhere on 128 where they could show their sign to everyone on that highway.
I seized a desk in the Burlington office pretty quickly. It was an 11-minute commute for me, and for most of my time there I drove our small, dark-green Saturn and left the mini-van at home. I started a series of programmer and designer meetings to introduce them to Prospero technology and our way of doing things. Mzinga was a flurry of marketing concepts masquerading as a company, and was highly leveraged to a group of angel investors we never met. They had acquired another company right before us, and had a vision of combining the learning software that the new acquisition in Mechanicsville PA had with the social software we Prospero people brought to the table. They thought they'd made a key acquisition when they bought us, and we agreed. We had a world-class platform. Unfortunately, they didn't figure on several things such as us having existing customers we had to serve (though they loved our client list) and that we had a lot of positive momentum that shouldn’t be disturbed. The executives at Mzinga needed to communicate to some of their existing staff that they bought Prospero because we kicked ass. Another problem was that all of us Prospero types were sensitive to bullshit, and it was dealt out all the time there.
I worked with a number of great people at Mzinga. I've been lucky enough to find good people at all my jobs. Besides the snacks and cookouts and pizza we had a company softball team (I alternated at first base with our president; 5 middle-aged guys pulled hamstrings in our first game) and the spirit of a start-up. We also had regular Friday beer events, and a foosball table on which I excelled (it had been my sport in college). We were going to do great things, whatever they were! And as I've said, people in the high-tech world are generally polite, diverse, liberal, and highly intelligent, and Mzinga was not at all an exception to that. There was a small sandwich shop across the parking lot, and I usually ran over there to grab something then ate at my desk. We were busy and I was usually in early and one of the last to leave.
I remember going to a reunion up in Vermont of our clique of buddies from high school that Spring, and being very excited about my job and what we were going to do. Another life milestone, this one very sad, was that my Dad's second wife passed away that Fall. She and Dad were childhood sweethearts and re-met a couple of years after my mother and her husband had both died. They got married and had a fantastic 16 years together before she died of cancer, as had my Mom. This was a great love story.
But the company didn't know what to make of me. I was a round peg that did many things and they needed to fit me into a square hole and have me do one thing well. They couldn't understand how there could be people who weren't marketers (unless you were a programmer, and *they* barely spoke English). When they saw my new title of Director of Product Information they parsed that and concluded that I was a product manager. You know, the kind of person who understands the market and can cite statistics of how much market share we'll gain if we release this product or mothball that one.
They hired a new head of Product Management (Boss5), and I really liked working with her, she was a smart cookie. She realized that she needed to understand this Prospero thing, but was really turned off by the passive-aggressiveness she ran into with them. So she leaned on me to translate Prospero into terms she could understand and coach her on what capabilities we really had when push came to shove. She realized that even though I was on her team of (five) product marketers, and was perfectly capable of doing what she expected from her team members, what was needed was that I keep doing what I had been doing for Prospero. If it ain't broke don't fix it. I learned a lot from her. When she realized that I didn't know marketing from a hole in the ground she started loaning me what she considered the best books about the discipline, which I really appreciated.
I continued working on wikis, but shifted to another big project in the second half of my time at Mzinga. This was a widget that customers or end-users could run on their desktops (possibly integrated into web pages) or phones (yes, smart phones had finally started appearing and "mobile enabled" had become the sexiest phrase in software development) that you could set up to do polls on the topic of the second. I'd worked with Boss2 on how to get around the cross-site scripting issue that we needed to deal with, and he had some great ideas. But implementing them meant a lot of work, especially since we thought it essential to allow customers to brand our widget with their own CSS, as with our other offerings. I had got this working and our department was starting to click, when the shit hit the fan.
We're maybe too close in time for there to be one narrative, or at least a reasonable number, of how the Great Recession in the late part of that decade started and was exacerbated. I think a great factor was Republican laxness in finance regulation, and it took a sweep by the Democrats in 2008 to (partially) fix it.
In any case, ever since we'd been bought by Mzinga, at company meetings we were assured that the tanking economy wasn't going to affect us, since we were such geniuses and had successful products and investors who had unshaken faith in us. Yeah, that didn't last that long. As I've said, our market niche was closing and our old Prospero model for doing things needed to change (the app I was working on was an example of the new things we needed to do). The concept of "social learning" was getting no traction, this was not the time to throw money around on R&D, and eventually our investors pulled the plug. And our flagship customers were disappearing as they brought social media in-house.
One great thing that happened during that time however, was that Barack Obama was elected president, and we were all so relieved about this for many reasons. For his inauguration in January, they set aside our biggest conference room for people to watch it, and it was packed! We were shoulder to shoulder and latecomers were trying to push their way in. This was a great moment when we all felt like we were on the same team and that the world was getting better. Not fast enough though.
In February 2009 there was a round of layoffs which included about a third of the company, most shockingly Boss5. She'd been recruited heavily to join the company 10 or so months before that, and was the kind of visionary but practical person we needed to get us past this, but she was kicked to the sidewalk. I helped her pack and carry things out to her car. She was hurt and infuriated, justifiably so.
Suddenly I was even more in limbo. My supposed new boss (Boss6) was the head of marketing, but he knew that I and the other "product" people weren't marketers, so he didn’t value us very highly. I remember sitting with a roomful of panicked marketers who thought their heads were going to roll at any minute and trying to explain what our new "polls" app did and why it was marvelous. They were hostile, and I couldn't help but take it personally. They couldn't understand the app and asked me for documentation about why this would fill a market need and what my rollout plans were. I told them that neither of those questions applied to my role and that I had been asked by marketers (who'd since been laid off) to develop the product ... ask them for documentation. The handwriting on the wall was pretty clear after that meeting!
March 19 2009 will go down in history as Mzinga Day. A lot of us had really cared about Prospero and thought we were headed for even bigger things when we were bought by Mzinga. Instead, their incompetence and being in the wrong place at the wrong time led to our wonderful little company becoming a smoking crater in a little more than a year. I'm sorry to be bitter about this, but people got hurt. It was strange, but we all knew when we showed up that March day that some serious shit was about to happen. And half the remaining company got laid off, in alphabetical order. Our president, Boss4, got laid off himself. To his great credit he did not shirk his responsibility, and took the rest of the day to call people into his office one by one and let them know the bad news.
I tried to approach it calmly. I had a couple of irons in the fire for other jobs and had the experience of having been laid off twice before. Many people just left, they just wanted to get the fuck out of there and never think about Mzinga again. But I stayed to politely close a couple of email threads I had open with vendors, to pack up my desk, and to go around and say goodbye to colleagues. In the meantime the Prospero types had gathered at a nearby Thai restaurant we all liked, and I finally joined them. A bunch of beer had already been imbibed, Thai food eaten, grievances aired, and support shared. I participated whole-heartedly. Prospero had several reunions after that, but they petered out after a while. We still have a Facebook group though!
None of my irons in the fire worked out though. In Spring 2009 no company was hiring and everyone was trying to avoid risk. This was not a great time to be out of a job, and I had somehow become 53 years old, not a great age for being hired. Dave graduated from Woburn Memorial High School in June 2009, when I was wondering if I’d ever get a job. He was excited about starting at Ithaca College in the Fall (I was excited too!). But hanging onto the faith that I’d get a good job soon was getting harder and harder.
No comments:
Post a Comment