My first child was born in 2005. At the time, my career at Apple was starting to take off. But we lived at least an hour from Apple in San Leandro. The commute was really painful now that we had a baby in daycare and both of us had full-time jobs. If something happened to my spouse, and I had to pick up the baby, I basically had to leave at 2:30 when I normally would leave at 5:30 or 6:00. I was basically gone from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM. It was really hard on my spouse and the baby.

And the work was ramping up as my responsibilities grew.

And then we got pregnant again.

Funny thing about having children: you look at the world differently. We loved our house in San Leandro, and our little neighborhood subdivision was really nice and pretty. However, it was really close to really bad neighborhoods in San Leandro, Oakland, San Lorenzo, and Hayward. Now that we had children, we saw many more shady characters walking and driving around. The high school up the road was truly scary-looking. We decided that we needed alternatives to San Leandro.

There was the night we were up with the baby, and a couple of men were parked in an old car with the engine running right outside our house, talking for two or three hours.

And there was the time the intersection where we lived had tire-mark donuts in it, from somebody doing “sideshow” driving.

We started looking at houses closer to Apple, which would improve my commute, and put us in much better school districts. My wife’s work required a lot of travel, and our house was close to the Oakland Airport. San Jose International had a different, less convenient set of flights, so that would be a drawback, but not that bad, considering the other benefits.

We started taking a look at real estate in Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Mountain View, Los Altos, and Palo Alto. And we were horrified. Our house in San Leandro was a 4000 square feet, 4 bedroom, 3.5 bath Spanish-style house, with a big kitchen and good living spaces. There was no yard or anything, but the house was spectacular.

There were no houses like that on the Peninsula or in South Bay.

We spent many weekends looking at houses. We found 50 year old houses that hadn’t been updated for $800,000. We found some smallish new construction houses for $1.2 million. But the most dismaying was in Palo Alto.

It was a lot on University Avenue (a busy street). The lot had 4 tiny little houses on it, and one of them was for sale. It was 650 square feet, and had a bedroom, and bathroom, and a kitchen. The house hadn’t been updated (ever), and the roof had grass growing out of it. All of this could have been ours for a bargain price of $999,995! What a deal!

We did find a nice 3000 square-foot house in Cupertino was 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths, and a reasonable yard. Relatively new. Still not as nice as the San Leandro house, but we liked it. It was $2.6 million.

A side note: I know that prices are much worse now 12 years later. It was still unbelievable then

We talked to our mortgage broker, and she said that she could get us into that house, but unless we made extra payments to the principal, we would not gain any equity unless interest rates went down, and if the housing market started losing value, or if interest rates went up, we would have a negative equity situation, and a ballooning monthly payment.

I grew up in Texas. I met my wife in Texas, even though she did not grow up there. Her ex-husband’s family was from Texas, and she had spent a lot of time there. My family was in Texas. Hers was in Kentucky, but Texas is a lot closer to Kentucky than California is.

I opened a web browser and started looking at positions. There were a lot of positions open in Dallas and Austin. Neither one of us were interested in Dallas, but Austin seemed intriguing.

After we discussed all of the options, we decided that I would pursue positions in Austin. I will discuss the job hunt and the position I eventually interviewed for and took in the next post, but one little post-script.

After I had an offer from the Austin firm, I was trying to plan my exit from Apple. One day, one of the engineers who had worked on the Intel transition approached me, and said, “I was impressed with your work during the Intel transition while in the Developer Tools Program Office.”

“Thanks.”

“There is a position in the Mac OS X Program Office I think you would be a great fit for. You should apply. It’s kind of like what you are doing now, but will be more strategic for Apple, have more visibility, and more impact.”

Sigh.

I told him, “Well, I am moving my family to Texas and leaving Apple. So I won’t be applying.”

He looked very disappointed. I wonder now if that was a position working with iPhone.

 

Late in 2005, a recruiter called me. He was representing Flock, a social browser. They were past just starting out. They had a few engineers, a president, and not much else, and were looking for a VP of Engineering. They were at the point where they needed adult supervision. Would I be interested?

Well, I thought to myself, a startup could be quite lucrative, which would be great for my expanding family. It would take all spare time, which would not. However, with a title like VP, maybe the stock options would be generous?

From the recruiter:

The Culture

The Company’s goal is to attract motivated people who seek career opportunities with the industry leader, a growing company, whose products are superior to the competition and is dedicated to excellence.  The Company takes great pride in its people, and realizes they are its greatest resource; the desire is to make the environment one of opportunity for personal and career growth.  Like most start-ups, our work environment is fast-paced, collaborative, demanding, and highly productive. We all readily take on responsibilities outside our job descriptions and are all focused on getting a lot done. We value intelligence, flexibility, energy, perseverance, resourcefulness, commitment, willingness to learn, and ability to work at any level of detail and scope. Excellent oral and written communication skills are required, as well as good inter-personal skills. Accurate estimates of identified tasks, and the capacity to work under pressure are all a must.

Intangible Qualities they are looking for

They need an executive that is excellent with customers, respectful, cares about people, strong integrity & ethics, Someone that has a record of over-achievement success, & strong performer.  They are looking for an executive that prides themselves on long term career opportunities and personal growth ability.

This company is very much a “people” person company and that is the key driver with everyone they hire.  What they are looking for is a team builder, strategic thinker, bold, energetic, dynamic, change agent, someone that can partner with other executives, expand international markets, “eye of the tiger”, very sharp, articulate, brilliant, smart, &, charismatic, sense of humor, and self starter.

So, I decide to check it out. They sent me a white paper-like doc, and it starts with the following:

Flock is a new browser, built on top of firefox (sic). It is a functional browser with excellent features (including firefox features like tabbed browsing, etc.). What really makes is stand out are two additional features they’ve added to build social networking directly into the browsing experience: social bookmarking and a wysiwyg (sic) blog writing tool.

It then proceeds to describe the various features, referencing del.icio.us-type features. And it talks about its builtin blog editor. All somewhat interesting. So I agreed to stop by.

They were located in downtown Palo Alto in an old Victorian-era house, apparently owned by the venture capital firm backing them. The place as a house was sorely lacking; there was dry-rot, and it needed cleaning and painting. I walked in the front door, and was immediately assaulted by what I can only describe as Startup Funk. Took me back to StyleWare. It had elements of mildew, unclean bathrooms, unbathed young men, and stale Chinese food. The main room had 2 or 3 banquet tables covered with computers. The president’s office was a room off of the main room, and it was pretty nice.

We talked for half an hour about software management, scheduling, QA, demos, hiring, etc.; all of the stuff you would expect to talk about in a management interview. Then it was my turn to ask questions. So I asked the one that had been on my mind ever since the recruiter contacted me.

“How are you going to make money?”

“Well, we are working on our second round of funding.”

“No, what’s your revenue model?”

“The browser is free”

I paused, trying to be nice. I continued, “At some point, somebody who is not buying a stake in the company is going to have to pay you for something. It could be a cost to download, a cost for a subscription, or by selling ads somewhere. What’s your plan?”

“Oh, we aren’t worried about that right now. Our goal is to grow as fast as possible. At that point, it should be apparent how we generate revenue. Or we will be acquired.”

A couple of days later, I told them I wasn’t interested. This tech wasn’t interesting enough to work on without a business plan.

A few months later, I was in downtown Mountain View by the train station, and saw an office with their name on it, and movers moving stuff into it. At the time, I guessed that they had secured another round of funding.

However, they did not ever figure it out. They were acquired by Zynga in 2011, and the brower is no longer supported.

I never got to ask them how they were going to handle Firefox updates…