The New Road

Certive memories

Working at another startup reminds me of my time at Certive. Probably my favorite memory came from the time when the 70 or so employees basically revolted and said that, since the company hand't come up with a plan that they were going to create a system to find a plan. This probably sounds crazy, but up until this point nobody had actually come up with a product that this startup of 70 people with $42M in the bank could actually create and sell.

So a plan to create a plan was hatched. In fact, the plan entailed creating about 42 committees. One committee would create the plan and the other forty-one would vet it. It was insane on it's face, but that was the times.

Anyway, two memories spring from this for me. The first was that in one of the committees that I was in. The technical vetting committee or some such, the poeple in the group were essentially randomly assigned. So we had an office assistant in our group. As well as an HR person who specialized in beach volleyball. Anyway, at one point the office assistant person just burst into tears and ran out because she couldn't figure out what to do with herself. Which, is, really, quite understandable.

Another memory was that the marketing group, which so far had absolutly nothing to do, decided that it would be a good time for a staged setup. So they took one wall, painted it battleship gray and put up folders for the output of each committee. Where the folders were linked up with red ribbons. The folders were jet black, thus connoting a military theme. But the jet black folders made it so nobody could read the contents of the folder. Plus some of the folders were over 9 feet off the ground. Which meant that you had to use a ladder to get to them. End of that story is that nobody used the folders at all.

But the best part was that they put this together over a weekend. And part of the art installation was an old-fashioned army surplus cargo net. Which, as it turns out, is meant to be outside. Because if it's left inside it will out-gas a nasty petro-chemical gas. Which it did. And a bunch of employees had to go home sick and the the cargo net was out in the trash by 10AM on Monday.

Anyway, great stuff from the .COM days. At least at that company it was complete chaos.

Of course, long after I left it looks like they got their shit together and now seem to be doing alright with some kind of business intelligence product.