Interior designers in Silicon Valley are either brand-conscious or very literal. Most start-up offices look the same - faux midcentury furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. We’re not just another payment processor. We’re not just another project-management tool. Help humanity thrive by enabling - next! We work hard, we laugh hard, we give great high-fives. Customized setup: design your ultimate work station with the latest hardware. Sometimes I forget I’m not applying to summer camp. Job listings are an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a 23-year-old’s idea of work-life balance. I skim recruiter emailsand job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks: competitive salary, dental and vision, 401k, free gym membership, catered lunch, bike storage, ski trips to Tahoe, off-sites to Napa, summits in Vegas, beer on tap, craft beer on tap, kombucha on tap, wine tastings, Whiskey Wednesdays, Open Bar Fridays, massage on-site, yoga on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table, Ping-Pong robot, ball pit, game night, movie night, go-karts, zip line. Eight hours later we’ll be back in the office, slurping down coffee, running out for congealed breakfast sandwiches, tweaking mediocre scripts and writing halfhearted emails, throwing weary and knowing glances across the table. We disperse, off to terrorize sleeping roommates and lovers, to answer just one, two more emails before bed. Phones are opened and taxis summoned we gulp the dregs of our beers as cartoon cars approach on-screen. We throw our dead cigarettes on the sidewalk and grind them out under our toes. We were lucky and in thrall and now we are bureaucrats, punching at our computers, making other people - some kids - unfathomably rich. Whenever we see a stranger at the gym wearing a T-shirt with our logo on it, whenever we are mentioned on social media or on a client’s blog, whenever we get a positive support ticket, we share it in the company chat room and we’re proud, genuinely proud.īut we see now that we’ve been swimming in the Kool-Aid, and we’re coming up for air. Work has wedged its way into our identities, and the only way to maintain sanity is to maintain that we are the company, the company is us. We are among the first twenty employees, and we are making something people want. We care, for fuck’s sake, about the company culture. We want good lives for them, just like we want good lives for ourselves. We even care about the executives who can make us feel like shit. The problem, we admit between drags, is that we do care. This is a group of secret smokers, and we go in on a communal pack of cigarettes. The people we are on weekends, the people we were for years. Eventually we are drunk enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves. We reassure ourselves and one another that this is just a phase every start-up has its growing pains. Realistically, we know it could be years before an IPO, if there’s an IPO at all we know in our hearts that money is a salve, not a solution. We talk about our IPO like it’s the deus ex machina coming down from on high to save us - like it’s an inevitability, like our stock options will lift us out of our existential dread, away from the collective anxiety that ebbs and flows. We have more in common than our grievances, but we kick off by speculating about our job security, complaining about the bureaucratic double-downs, casting blame for blocks and poor product decisions. We get ourselves out of the office and into a bar. This is what investors do, but it feels personal: Daddy still loves us, but he loves us less. Our primary investor has funded a direct competitor. We’re not hitting our KPIs, we’re not serious about the OKRs. We don’t stick around for in-office happy hour anymore we don’t take new hires out for lunch on the company card. They’ve noticed we don’t seem as invested. Members of our core team have been shepherded into conference rooms by top-level executives who proceed to question our loyalty. Our culture has been splintering for months. It’s not just the salespeople, of course. “Our culture is dying,” we say gravely, apocalyptic prophets all. We escape for drinks and fret about our company culture. Their corner of the office is loud their desks are scattered with freebies from other start-ups, stickers and koozies and flash drives. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN.
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