If you want to seduce a beautiful woman, court her ugly sister.
—Spanish proverb
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2011
I wouldn’t be the first person in Silicon Valley history to interview at a company at which I didn’t really want a job, but these were certainly somewhat unique circumstances. I had to help the boys impress Twitter so we’d get an eager acquisition offer, which I’d immediately recuse myself from by joining Facebook.
As we did at Facebook, we’d have to run the daylong gauntlet of job interviews, the boys getting engineer interviews, and me a product manager one. I got the list of interviewers from Jess, to do our usual stalking/due diligence.
Interestingly, Twitter was leveraging its internal former startup folks to suss out new ones. A good half of my interviewers had come over in Twitter’s second and very recent acquisition. DabbleDB was a database company founded by Canadians, and acquired in June 2010. I’d have two founders in my lineup, and the boys would have one founder each, along with just straight Twitter engineers.
Back we went through South Park to Twitter and the whole disappearing-ink name tag thing. As at an interrogation, we were split up immediately and taken to separate rooms.
I felt stress, but second-order stress—I felt nervous for the boys. If I didn’t do well, they’d suffer, not me. Of course, realistically this was as critical to me as it was to them. There was simply no way, even in the tech mosh pit, that I could abandon AdGrok if there was no bid for their side of the company. Even in the Land of the Stateless Machines, that was one underhanded machination too far. No, I’d need to help get them across the finish line here.
I recall very little from the interviews, except a comment from one of the DabbleDB engineers. After getting through the stress questions, I asked him, “So what do you like most about Twitter?”
By this point, we’d built a decent rapport, so with a nod and a wink, he said, “Well, you know, in companies like Facebook and Google, they serve you breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Here at Twitter, they only serve you breakfast and lunch.”
I cringed inwardly. So the big selling point was that nobody worked late into the night, so we could have that chimerical work-life balance?* I smiled to keep the warm vibe going. But that comment more than anything else sealed my decision. I was not going to blow the biggest career wad of my life on a company that hesitated to work past six p.m. daily.
The boys and I met back at AdGrok within a few hours. For the past few days, we’d been warming up to the whole Twitter idea, and excitedly sketching out what a future Twitter ads product would need to look like to succeed. They were in relatively good cheer, and had been impressed by their meetings.
It will smack of self-serving rationalization, but I was convinced that a hybrid deal in which I went to Facebook and the boys to Twitter was absolutely the best possible outcome for AdGrok.
There was one niggly detail, though: I had to break the news about the Facebook side of the deal, and the fact that I wasn’t coming along with the boys to Twitter. As mentioned, I had lied to them and told them that Facebook had rejected us in toto, them and me alike. I had done this initially out of panicky chicken-shittedness, but then, on further consideration, I realized it might stress them to the point of choking with Twitter if they knew. They absolutely had to get an offer from Twitter for the master plan to come off, so this little white lie made sure that happened. But the bill would come due on that liberty with truth I had taken, and the time to settle it was fast approaching.
THURSDAY, APRIL 14, 2011
Jess sent an email, subject line: “Call,” to set up some time with her and Kevin Weil.
Bingo!
Remember: if you’re having phone calls, the deal is still on. Phone calls are yesses, emails are nos.
I went outside to Townsend Street to take the call.
Jess’s persuasive tone told me what I needed to know in the first two seconds. Twitter wanted to buy AdGrok, for real this time. She promised a term sheet within twenty-four hours. We’d heard this from Twitter before, but I believed them this time. One giveaway: Jess called back to ask specifics about the cap table. That meant they were already thinking about the investor versus founder split in their proposed deal, one of the more important high-level parameters.
It was time to come clean with the boys. I couldn’t morally justify the deception any longer.
There’s a unique style of Spanish genre painting called the desengaño. “Desengaño” means literally “un-tricking,” and it is best translated as the disillusion, or the unveiling of a harsh truth, to be wordy about it. Typically depicted in the desengaño are the everyday reveals of sordid human deception: a young man stumbling on his beloved cooing with his best friend, a businessman catching his partner pinching from the till, and so on. They are meant to be an instructive moral lesson in everyday life, elevated to an art form. The engañado (“tricked one”) typically wears an exaggerated expression of betrayal bordering on incipient rage. The implication is that the next frame in this drama will feature some corrective moral action, such as a duel to the death by navaja, or an ignominious march through the streets by the manacled thief.
I was hoping the scene about to unfold in the AdGrok office that afternoon was not worthy of a Velázquez’s attention.
“Hey, so we need to have a chat,” I said to their backs. They turned with quizzical looks. Given the ups and downs we’d been through, they could expect anything from another lawsuit to my coming out as an aspiring transsexual.
“So, remember when I said that Facebook rejected us? Well, that wasn’t completely true.”
I proceeded to sketch out the situation, where I was with Facebook, and why I had concealed this from them for the past two weeks.
Following a tomblike silence, their reaction was more understanding than I expected.
“You know, I had kind of thought that maybe the Facebook thing was more complicated than you let on,” said Argyris, surprisingly calmly.
Bomb defused, or at least not yet detonated, I explained to them that I thought my future lay with Facebook, and that I had every reason to believe—here I was skating on pretty thin ice—that we could pull off a combined deal if we tried.
This did not go over so well. The boys panicked; surely I’d torpedo their deal if Twitter realized it wasn’t getting me as well. While on the scale of group AdGrok freak-outs this did not take a championship trophy, it did recall some of our earlier rumbles.
Diego, get in here with your paints now!
They tried to convince me to stick with the Twitter deal, but that was like trying to convince a mule to dance reggaetón. Rather than dig in and fan the mutiny with reciprocal defiance, I simply presented Facebook as a fait accompli, and not a group decision requiring consensus. They dropped their case, and, with crestfallen looks, turned back to their code-splattered monitors.
We wouldn’t discuss the matter again until right before the first real deal negotiation with Twitter, and the suspense around it kind of hung in the air until then. As always, I’d find some way to make the simple complicated, and the relatively safe, risky.