Whoever doesn’t have revolutionary genes, or doesn’t have revolutionary blood. Whoever doesn’t have the courage, heart, or brain that adapts itself to the effort and heroism of the revolution. Let them go! We don’t want them! We don’t need them!
—Fidel Castro, speech at Mariel, Cuba, May 1980
APRIL 23, 2010
Here’s more startup advice: if the drama around your departure from a startup recalls that of a former East German trying to jump the Wall, or Cubans hijacking airliners to Miami, then you should be as ecstatic at leaving as that same East German or Cuban.
We had decided to all go in together to Murthy’s office to offer our resignations, with some vague thought that this would represent a united front. Without much warning, we entered his office on some thin pretext. I can’t recall who spoke first—I think it was me—but we announced our plan to leave Adchemy and start our own thing. Murthy launched into a harangue about what ingenuous rubes we were.
“What are the five things to look for in a term sheet? I bet you don’t even know that,” he challenged, looking right at me.
I had read my share of business-agreement how-tos, but this wasn’t the time to test that rather tenuous knowledge. Murthy was just picking up steam, though.
“You realize when you go to a venture capitalist, the first thing he’s going to do is call me, and I’m going to tell him what I think of you,” he said, gesturing to his phone. “You aren’t the right people to build a company. You don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not smart or tough enough.” And so it went on for a good five minutes.
One of Mark Twain’s more uplifting quotes maintains that small people always belittle your ambitions, while the great make you feel that you too can be great. Murthy was most assuredly a small man. By the end of his drilling, we all doubted what would eventually prove to be the best decision any of us ever made. Shoulders slumped and heads bowed, we marched out of his glass office.
What followed was a week of nonstop harassment from Adchemy. Matt and Argyris fielded most of it, and for good reason. According to our code-repository statistics, McEachen had written about half the code in the Adchemy codebase. As employee number eleven, he was that archetypal figure on every product team: the silverback, the neckbeard, the absolute expert who knew all the secret scripts that could be run, and where all the technical bodies were buried. And he was that person for just about every product the company had ever made, all the ill-conceived, disconnected, and random functionality that lay unwanted and unmonetized in hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Like all good bullies, Murthy & Co. could smell weakness like sharks smell blood in the water. Of the three, McEachen was the most economically dependent, as he had a stay-at-home wife, two kids, and a mortgage. He also had the greatest sense of investment in the company. So they worked the uncertainty-and-fear angle, convincing him he was throwing away all he had built at Adchemy. To sweeten the deal, they threw more equity at him. None of it was convincing, and McEachen remained steadfast.
Their attempts to keep me were relatively brief, and consisted mostly of one uncomfortable conversation with the new VP of Engineering, Chander Sarna.
Chander was a recent hire from Friendster, where he claimed to have put out the technical fires that had resulted from rapid scaling. He had brought a crew of engineers with him from the dying social network, and they formed the nucleus of his personal mafia. He managed mostly through intimidation. In his ill-fitting polyester polo shirts with color palettes stolen from the late seventies, he reminded me of the bored auto-rickshaw drivers in front of Connaught Place, Delhi, who’d overcharge you a hundred rupees to go down the street to Paharganj.
Having been told to report to his office, I took a seat in front of his desk. The bright South Bay sun of a cloudless afternoon poured in through his picture window.
“So is there anything we can do compensation-wise, Antonio?” asked Chander in his thick Indian accent.
“No way.”
“Why do you want to leave?” he asked, with a concerned look that feigned an almost fatherly interest.
As always with me, my principal sin was telling the unvarnished truth.
“Because we have no products. We have no clients. There’s not a single paying client for anything Adchemy has ever produced on its own.”
Chander shot up from his desk.
“Of course we have paying clients,” he said, gesticulating wildly at a PowerPoint slide bedecked with logos on his monitor. The slides were from Murthy’s most recent quarterly pep rally. “How can you say that!?” he sputtered.
I kept my mouth shut and looked past Chander at the view of Foster City and the San Mateo bridge.
“I think I’d like to try my own thing,” I offered, citing a less controversial motive.
“Look, you don’t know anything about doing startups,” he began, and on into the spiel about how we were clueless neophytes.
He wrapped up with a gesture at reconciliation. “And as for McEachen, he’s had some problems, but we’ve tried working with him to improve things . . .”
McEachen and Chander seriously did not get along. McEachen’s good-natured earnestness and total allegiance to unbiased technical truth conflicted severely with Chander’s love of power and control. McEachen treated anyone, from an intern to the CTO, with the same frank openness, where only reason or data prevailed. Chander demanded the deferential obeisance a Prussian general expected from his troops, meanwhile pledging in turn sycophantish allegiance to Murthy. Thanks to Chander, the company had already lost its very capable head of analytics. Others would soon follow.
After he was done barking discouragement, we stared at each other for an awkward few moments. His arm rose with a quick start, indicating I could leave. That jiggly little man didn’t even stand up as I walked out the door.
This scene was duly reported to Murthy, and for the next several days management was very careful to keep me out of meetings and away from product teams. I imagine they were afraid I’d propagate my theory about the productlessness of the company. For once, I kept my mouth shut.
After a tense week, it was all over but the shouting. Murthy and Chander had had their go at McEachen and me, with zero result. We would be gone within days.
Argyris would unfortunately not get off so easily. Murthy, as happened at many flailing startups, was making yet another big product bet, in a string of such bets, that was sure to turn Adchemy’s fortunes around (“This time, it’s different”). Argyris’s algorithmic work was absolutely central to this new company-saving direction, and his departure meant delaying or forgoing that bet. For this last piece of retention skulduggery Adchemy would exploit one critical point: Argyris wasn’t a US citizen.
The American immigrant visa system amounts to indentured servitude, a type of peonage. This medieval institution has a long history in the United States. Before the American Revolution, half of the European immigrants to the British colonies came over as indentured servants. Poor children or young adults, with no prospects in Europe, would sell years of their labor in exchange for passage to the Americas. Across the pond, employers would purchase these individuals from the captains who had brought them over, and they were pressed into service or apprenticed to craftsmen. Servants could be bought or sold, as with slavery. Also as in slavery, servants were subject to physical punishment, including whipping, they could not marry without permission, and their contract was enforceable by the law; escaped servants were captured and returned. If female servants became pregnant, their contract was extended to compensate for the time out of work. At the end of the contract, servants were given their “freedom dues” (a small cash payment) and set free to seek their fortunes in their new homeland.
Not much has changed in Silicon Valley.
Skilled immigrant tech workers in the United States have effectively one method of entry: the famous H-1B visa. Capped at a small yearly number, it’s the ticket to the American Dream for a few tens of thousands of foreigners per year. Lasting anywhere from three to six years, the H-1B allows foreigners to prove themselves and eventually apply for permanent residency, the colloquial “green card.”
Like the masters of old buying servants off the ship, tech companies are required to spend nontrivial sums for foreign hires. Many companies, particularly smaller startups, don’t want the hassle, and hire only American citizens, an imposed nativism nobody talks about, and which is possibly illegal. Big companies, which know they’ll be around for the years it will take to recoup their investment, are the real beneficiaries of this peonage system. Large but unexciting tech outfits like Oracle, Intel, Qualcomm, and IBM that have trouble recruiting the best American talent hire foreign engineers by the boatload. Consultancy firms that bill inflated project costs by the man-hour, such as Accenture and Deloitte, shanghai their foreign laborers, who can’t quit without being eventually deported. By paying them relatively slim H-1B-stipulated salaries while eating the fat consultancy fees, such companies get rich off the artificial employment monopoly created by the visa barrier. It’s a shit deal for the immigrant visa holders, but they put up with the five or so years of stultifying, exploitive labor as an admissions ticket to the tech First World. After that, they’re free. Everyone abandons his or her place at the oar inside the Intel war galley immediately, but there’s always someone waiting to take over.
Strictly speaking, H-1B visas are nonimmigrant and temporary, and so this hazing ritual of immigrant initiation is unlawful. Yet everyone’s on the take, including the government, which charges thousands in filing fees. The entire system is so riven with institutionalized lies, political intrigue, and illegal but overlooked manipulation, it’s a wonder the American tech industry exists at all.
So into this bustling slave market, echoing with the clink of leg irons and the auctioneer’s cry, did we ignorantly wade. If Argyris was to join our as-yet-unnamed company, he’d need a work visa. In fact, forget working: he couldn’t even legally stay in the United States once Adchemy terminated him. Immigration law stipulates a former H-1 holder must leave the country within days. Thanks for building our tech industry, you dirty foreigner, now beat it.
Was there a way out?
Argyris, a proud Greek with an admirable display of Southern European enterprise and skill at sniffing out legal loopholes, found a solution. His longtime Turkish girlfriend, Simla, was studying for a PhD at Stanford under an F-1 student visa. Were they to marry, Argyris would qualify for an F-2 student spouse visa. This wouldn’t let him officially work in the States, but it would let him remain there.
The only hitch was, well, getting hitched.
Simla proved very accommodating and agreed, though the “wedding” at City Hall was to be officially treated as socially nonofficial. My proposal for a bachelor party was vetoed. Greek married Turk, despite millennia of geopolitical conflict going back to Herodotus, and we still had a third founder.
Except for one stupid mistake.
As our final week at Adchemy wound down, Murthy and Chander would shut Argyris in an office and try to “sweat” him, filling his mind with dark visions of the future:
You’re throwing your future away on this crazy venture, Argyris.
You’re abandoning Adchemy when we most need you, Argyris.
When you leave Adchemy, your H-1 visa will be canceled and you’ll be forced to leave the United States, and everything you’ve built here, Argyris.
Argyris put up with the hazing as best he could. But at that last point, he couldn’t help himself, blurting out, “The visa isn’t an issue. I’ll have an F-2 through my wife. So whatever!”
This perked up the ears of Chander and Murthy. They consulted their in-house legal counsel, who, like those of any tech company, knew their way around US immigration law. They informed Argyris that working under an F-2 visa was illegal.
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t completely true. F-2 visa holders are allowed to remain in the United States and be investors in US companies (which Argyris was soon to be, as founders officially “invest” in a company by buying its shares at a negligible price). And given that we had almost no money, we weren’t paying ourselves, and so Argyris wasn’t officially “working.” Like many startup founders from foreign countries, many of whom have contributed immeasurably to the economic and technical success of this country, Argyris lived in a legal gray area until we managed to get him an H-1 visa.
That was all beside the point in Adchemy’s mind, however.
As upstanding corporate citizens, they felt obliged—obliged!—to inform the immigration service that their former employee was attempting to violate immigration law (though again, we weren’t technically).
He didn’t want to be reported to the immigration authorities, did he?
Think about that for a moment: a venture-backed tech company with hundreds of employees, and high hopes of going public, was threatening to report Argyris to the much-feared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Referred to by the appropriately chilling acronym ICE, this agency is charged with arresting aliens and jailing them or putting them on the first plane out of the United States. Adchemy was effectively coercing Argyris, as an unscrupulous foreman of a fruit-picking crew in California’s Central Valley does with illegal farmworkers.
What’s even more ironic: Murthy Nukala and Chander Sarna were themselves economic immigrants, having left their native India for the United States but a few years earlier. Both had been forced to navigate the US visa system, suffer the H-1 debt bondage, and live at the pleasure of some sponsoring company. And here they were, the former slaves turned slave owners, cracking the visa whip on Argyris.
Argyris, to his everlasting credit, became fed up with this demeaning treatment. Rather than knuckle under, he bolted his balls on, went into Adchemy one last time, and told them to go suck a dick, they could report him if they wanted. And that was the end of that. If Adchemy ever reported him, we’d never know, but soon enough, after we regularized Argyris’s visa status at our yet-to-be-formed company, it wouldn’t matter.
On the last hour of the last day, McEachen, saint that he was, went to Murthy’s office to say good-bye. He had invested over four years of his life in the company, watching it grow from a small shared space to the expansive floor of a high-end office tower. I waited impatiently by the emergency exit staircase, to avoid running into any other employees.
After ten minutes or so, he emerged, looking astonished, or maybe shell-shocked.
“He barely even looked up from the screen.”
His voice cracked as he said it. He looked at me imploringly. For a moment I thought he might actually cry.
“He didn’t say anything, and didn’t shake my hand.”
Matt McEachen, Adchemy’s best, most productive engineer, until the day he left the author of the biggest chunk of Adchemy’s codebase, was treated worse than a contract janitor on the way out. I marveled at a world in which well-meaning, industrious, but naive engineers are routinely manipulated by the glib entrepreneurs who seduce them into joining their startups, then relinquish them when they are no longer useful. Every Jobs has his Wozniak. I couldn’t exactly claim I wasn’t, to some degree, doing the same to him right then. He was merely trading Murthy for me.
Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations. They’d be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith.
No time for philosophy now. We were committed.
“Let’s get the hell out of here, man.”
I flung open the emergency exit and we flew down the stairs, five flights to the ground floor, and out of that nightmare. But Adchemy would cast a long shadow on us indeed.
The business-savvy reader will at this point be giggling at our naïveté, the schoolboyish reverence with which we beheld the corporate trappings and power we felt we were rebelling against.
Our problem was that we had never known how the sausage got made. We had never gotten our hands on the levers of the world, even slightly.
The reality is, Silicon Valley capitalism is very simple:
Investors are people with more money than time.
Employees are people with more time than money.
Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.
Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money.
Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.
Company culture is what goes without saying.
There are no real rules, only laws.
Success forgives all sins.
People who leak to you, leak about you.
Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.
Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society.
Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.
Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities.
Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.
But hey, look at these shiny iPhones. Right?
At the time, we understood none of this. We’d figure it out soon enough.