Company founders and their businesses don't always grow at the same pace or in the same direction. Andy Raskin, author of Inc.'s E-Diaries columns, bids farewell to his firstborn company.
E-Diaries
An Internet entrepreneur bids farewell to his firstborn
Although I've never been very religious, lately I've been thinking a lot about Moses. The guy leads his people out of Egypt, parts the Red Sea, hands over the reins to someone else, glimpses the Promised Land, and goes off to die. All of which was necessary in the greater scheme of things, I suppose. But hard cheese on Moses, all the same.
Readers of my last column will have some idea why I've got Moses on the brain. In July, about a year after founding a marketing-services Internet company called Gazooba with my buddies Zen and Shanti, I stepped down as CEO to make room for a been-there-done-that executive named Colin Campbell. Venture capitalists had been telling me they'd invest only in a CEO with a track record of hiring and managing dozens -- if not hundreds -- of people. And, in fact, Colin almost immediately secured a handsome round of financing for the company.
I harbor no doubts that passing the crown was the right move. Clearly, I wasn't the man for this particular job. But that begged the question, Having hired Colin to be Gazooba's CEO, what job was I the man for?
Not long after coming on board, Colin asked me to propose a new role for myself. In an effort to come up with something, I spent one Sunday morning at a Starbucks on Polk Street, comparing my skills and passions with Gazooba's hiring needs. Sipping a tall chai tea latte, I composed a list of things I'd learned to do -- and loved doing -- as a CEO and an entrepreneur. Here it is:
1. Persuaded a bunch of venture capitalists to back my half-baked idea.
2. Persuaded a bunch of smart people to leave cushy jobs to work for a company based on a half-baked idea and run by people with names like Zen and Shanti.
3. Chose for my company's moniker a word that didn't even exist but that we thought would make people smile.
4. Offered options to half the service population of northern California.
5. Presented my half-baked idea to big scary audiences at high-profile industry conferences.
6. Bribed real estate agents with T-shirts in order to secure prime San Francisco office space.
7. Made payroll by creatively cutting expenses, finagling bridge loans, and prostrating myself before vendors.
8. Persuaded big Web companies and even a major telecommunications company to pay money -- money! -- for my half-baked idea.
9. Chronicled the whole experience for a national business magazine whose editors kept warning me not to make anything up.
I read over the list, and my eyes welled with tears as I recalled the thrills, chills, spills, and other nonrhyming but no less dramatic and emotionally charged events of the past year. Only then did I realize three things. First, no matter how much I loved working at Gazooba, I'd be bored silly with a job as vice-president of one thing or chief of another. Second, I was thoroughly addicted to whatever chemical is released by the brain upon the successful transformation of a half-baked idea into reality. And third, everyone in Starbucks was staring at me because I was sobbing like a schoolgirl.
The next day Colin and I had lunch at the Tadich Grill, a venerable San Francisco seafood house around the corner from our office. Over sautéed sand dabs, I told Colin that I wasn't sure there was a place for me in the new Gazooba or, more to the point, that there was a place for the new Gazooba in me.
"Why don't you give it some tame?" Colin said, his Scottish accent no longer impenetrable to me. "Next week we're having some off-sites. I think they might give you a different perspayctive. Let's feigned out how yer feeling in two weeks." I was in no rush, especially if a fulfilling life at Gazooba was still possible. We set the clock ticking, and I promised to keep our conversation on the q.t.
For many of my coworkers, my announcement was akin to the Jolly Green Giant's declaring that he could no longer envision playing out his personal destiny among the sweet peas and pearl onions.
But I soon discovered that my future happiness at Gazooba was not to be, chiefly because there was to be no Gazooba. It happened on a Friday morning. Colin called about 10 of us into the conference room and introduced a couple of gents from Idiom, a naming consultancy. "Great," I thought. "We're going to discuss some names for our new product extensions." But no. "The reason we're here," said one of the Idiom guys, "is that now that your company has repositioned itself as a business-to-business provider" -- a decision I had made prior to Colin's arrival, partly at the urging of our board -- "the name Gazooba doesn't work anymore. We're here to pick a new name."
My heart sank. Gazooba was emblazoned on my soul and my license plate. I couldn't bear to see it die. I fully understood the rationale: we were selling to marketing managers at big corporations now, and our clients, perhaps understandably, weren't comfortable cutting $100,000 checks to an outfit whose name was chosen, in part, because it sounded Dr. Seuss-ish. Suddenly, I realized that it wasn't just the name change that was bringing me down. It was the whole concept of selling to marketing managers at big corporations. My company's new direction was smart and strategic, and it left me absolutely cold.
My feelings must have shown, because Colin didn't invite me to any of the follow-up meetings. I felt left out, of course, and maybe a little resentful. But mostly I was relieved at not having to take part in the relegation of Gazooba to the dustbin of Internet history. In the end, the management team narrowed down the choices to two names: Qbiquity and Metafinity. Qbiquity and Metafinity. Qbiquity and Metafinity. I said the two words over and over, but they just weren't ... well, they just weren't Gazooba. [Editor's note: the company ultimately settled on Qbiquity.]
