Why Can’t We Go Faster?

Chapter 8 in my ongoing story about workplace surveillance

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The next weeks and months were a flurry of activity. Faster than I thought possible, we had a large part of our existing “curriculum” converted over to our new model. We called our content BBs—it was short for building blocks, and it emphasized their small size—and we sorted our content into our two specialties, Security BBs and Privacy BBs. 

Before long, we had it in the kind of shape where we could show it off to customers. We’d get on a web meeting and help people see what we were doing: how they could save time and money by reducing training time, how much better it would be to only focus on what mattered, how much happier employees would be (well, maybe not happier, but less irritated). Once we got it all working—I should say once Kate and Mark got it working, they were the technical brains behind it—it didn’t take long to build an online tool that allowed people to snap together our BBs like Lego building blocks to construct training however they wanted. We called it the BB Machine. Marketing had a name for it that went on the website—it doesn't even matter now what it was.

I thought our progress merited a team celebration—but Stamper had other ideas. “Just you and me, Dan,” she snapped at my suggestion that we invite everybody to the bar. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.” 

No sooner had the waiter set down the beers than Stamper started in.

“When can we start moving faster?” she demanded.

“Faster?” I asked, wide-eyed.

“Faster!!! This was the easy stuff, the content, the assembly tool. So what!!! Who cares? The real action is in identifying the behavior and changing it. When are we going to get to that? I wanna get to that!!!” She actually banged her fist on the table.

“Stamper, this is the fastest I’ve ever seen the company move! Can’t we sit back and revel in what we’ve done a little bit? When Nels and I think about what we’ve done so far, we can’t even believe it.” It was true: our BBs were a huge success. Our team loved this approach to building content and our customers loved it too. Most importantly, “the market” loved it. We had started getting calls from analysts who wanted to see what we were doing. Gartner and Forrester rated us highly, which led to more sales, and soon we had investors knocking on the door—and no one heard that knock louder than Stamper. 

There was a fire burning inside Stamper before investors started sniffing around the company, but the prospect of investment money was like pouring gasoline on the fire. She just assumed that the money would flow directly to her project—and here I was telling her it wasn’t going to happen all that fast.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

“Mike wants us to talk to several investment firms, and then there’s going to be the due diligence stage, and then it takes a while for the deal to close …,” I repeated what I had been hearing; it’s not like I was an expert. But even I could see that this wasn’t going to happen overnight.

“We’ll get investment money,” I assured Stamper (and myself), “but it’s going to take some time. We’ve just got to be a little patient.” 

“I don’t want to be patient!” she barked. “We need to get some smarter developers in here and we’ve got to partner with some of the bigger companies. Why can’t we go faster?”

“Stamper, we can’t just wave a magic wand and make that happen!”

“Why not? This content work took twice as long as it should have because we had to do the work on the side, because Mike wouldn’t just take us off other work and let us run with this. Why can’t he see that he should be going all in on this?”

“Mike’s run this company for 25 years. We’ve got to respect his caution—he doesn’t want to put all his eggs in one basket.” Nels reminded me of this all the time. It was partly Mike’s caution that kept our company so stable.

“I don’t want to respect his caution!! I want us to grab some developers and run with this. Why can’t Mike get out of the way?”

“Mike owns the company!” I inserted.

“I don’t care! Can’t he see this is our chance to do something huge? He’s lucky to have us. He should be borrowing to fund the next steps, or selling the company to someone who has the courage to fucking move faster!”

I like Stamper. You can tell I do. But dammit she could be a petulant baby sometimes. She wanted what she wanted and she wanted it now. But I reminded her that we could only move as fast as the system we were in would allow, that she was still the visionary and that she just needed to trust that soon we would have the investment to move this forward. I flattered her, which helped, but I could see in her eyes that her view of me was changing. Was that the day that I began to look less like a partner and more like a roadblock? She could have rolled me right then and there, but she didn’t.

“Fine, fine, I know, I’m impatient,” she said. “But when do I get to meet with these investors? I know I can get them to see that we need money and brains to move this faster. Just let me convince them.”

This is where I failed. Me, Nels—maybe Stamper even. You see, we were stupid about investors, at least the kind of investors Mike was bringing in. We thought that once they saw and understood what we were doing, when they grasped Stamper’s vision, they couldn’t help but throw money at us. So we dreamed big when the investors came in, and when we got to talk to them, Stamper and I, we tantalized them with our grand ideas about technology that could sense what employees knew and didn’t know, and how we’d use that technology to revolutionize the way we delivered training. Great content, we gushed, delivered just to the people who needed it. Happier people. Less time wasted. More money, for us, sure, but also for our customers. How could they not pour their gasoline on this fire, turning it into a mighty blaze? 

When we were finally given time to brief the investors on our product development plans, Stamper got so damned excited about what we could do, where we could go with these ideas, that she had these guys (and yeah, it was all guys, young East Coast guys) eating out of her hands, even though she was mostly talking about content variations and sensing technology and user behavior analytics. They could see how Stamper burned to take our ideas to the next level—but mostly, they saw a cash cow. We were describing the tech we wanted to build, but here’s what the investors heard: “Blah blah blah money. Blah blah blah blah sales. Blah blah blah recurring revenue.” It wasn’t our product they were interested in; it was six straight quarters of accelerating growth and the promise of a recurring revenue stream. They weren’t concerned with how we built it—that was not their business and they didn’t really understand all that tech stuff anyway—but they could sure as hell see that they could make a bunch of money off it, and that was all they needed to know. But we didn’t see all that. 

When the PE boys bought in, they bought in big, taking a controlling interest in the company. We just assumed that a big chunk of their money was going to get poured directly into helping us build out the next stages of Stamper’s vision—the technology that would identify human behavior and flag it for improvement, the technology that would deliver the cool content we were building. 

“Dan, we’re going to get to build this!” Stamper gushed to me soon after the PE deal closed.

“I know! We’ve got to think about what to do first: hire devs or start talking to some of the big IT infrastructure companies about partnerships,” I said.

“I wanna hire the devs,” she said. “I wanna find the smartest, wildest thinkers we can get! You’re better at those partnership discussions. Can we start now? Please, please.” She could be so damned charming.

“Well, I haven’t been given budget yet,” I cautioned her. I explained that it was going to take a couple weeks for the transaction to complete, and then we’d have to decide as a management team how quickly we could move. “I still think we need a little patience.”

Patience! What was I thinking to counsel patience? You can’t counsel patience to an avalanche roaring down a hill, nor to a wave crashing on the shore, and I should have known better than to use that word with Stamper. She wanted to keep pushing and I should have found a way to direct her energy, but instead I counseled patience.

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Here’s how it played out:

“Dan, why are we hiring so many sales people?” Stamper asked when the first big “play” from the PE team was to double the size of the sales team. (They called it a “play” and it came from their “playbook.” Jocks!) I explained to Stamper that the PE guys wanted to get some clear buy signs from the market and the only way to do that was to get more sales conversations. I almost believed it myself. The way I spun it to Stamper was that the PE guys implied the next step was hiring developers and building out the technical side of our solution, the “product.”  But “implied” was the operative word. They never once mentioned a “play” that involved investing in product. I just wanted that to be true.

“Why do we need a new CEO? Mike gets what we’re trying to do!” Stamper moaned to me after Mike announced that he was going to step aside as soon as they completed a CEO search. “I’ll miss Mike too,” I said, truthfully, “but the board thinks we need a CEO with more high-growth experience and a better understanding of ARR and the KPIs needed to fuel ARR growth, and you know, I agree with them.” I’d started down a slippery slope, using that language, but I was trying to see the world through the eyes of the investors. 

As they explained it, we’d invest more in the technology once we proved that we could increase our funnel and our conversion rates and start reliably hitting monthly recurring revenue targets. There was some mumbo jumbo about organic vs inorganic, but my eyes glazed over at this stuff. I just naively believed that at some point we’d turn the money stream into product development. Stupid me. When I talked like this—when I tried to parrot the investor’s language—I could see the light dim in Stamper’s eyes. She might be able to stomach the “be patient” talk from me and Mike, but she couldn’t take it from the PE guys. They were supposed to be the ones bringing the action.

When the new CEO came in, I convinced her that we’d start to see some changes. And, I offered hopefully, “We’ve got a slot at the first board meeting with the new CEO.” I showed her the agenda. She scanned it quickly. 

“10 minutes? They’re giving us 10 minutes?! And we’re last?!! Are you fucking kidding me? Do they even give a shit about what we’re trying to build?” Stamper slammed her hand on my desk, demanding an answer.

“Look,” I said, “they still think that product is important, it’s just that they really want the executive leadership team to focus on sales and marketing. Besides, we’re in good shape, so there’s not much to report.”

“This is what you keep missing Dan: the content may be in good shape, but the technology sucks. Who gives a shit about having good content if we can’t identify who needs it and and we can’t deliver it quickly and we can’t fucking measure how people are doing! We’re never going to do that without money and talent!”

When I think back, I think this is where the tables turned with Stamper and me. I think that right here was the moment she saw that I had become a roadblock and it was only our enduring friendship that kept it as civil as it was.

But I trotted out my rationale, assuring her that we were still the heart of the company, that what we were doing was important … I may have even said that we should keep playing for the long con. But by this point, I’m not even sure I believed it myself any more. It was pretty clear that the CEO didn’t really get our vision and the people he brought in didn’t speak our language either. I tried to delude myself with my reassurances—but I wasn’t fooling Stamper. 

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The board meeting was a disaster. The hour allotted to sales and marketing blew up into two-and-a-half hours of hard questions and weak answers, and then the finance review got bogged down in EBIDTA. My joke about EBIDTA BIBIDTA fell flat, and our 10 minutes got crushed down to “just give us a quick update.” I could sense that Stamper was seething, but I put my hand on her forearm and just gave them a quick update on new content releases. I didn’t tell them that we couldn’t make any headway on our prediction engine until we hired more developers. It just didn’t seem like the right time to press for new hires. 

Stamper was waiting for me when I arrived at work the next day. “We’ve got to talk,” she said as she pulled shut my office door. And just like that, it was all over. Stamper was moving on—she couldn’t tell me where just yet, but she would soon.

I wanted to be mad—but I wasn’t. I got it. Our company had gone from being a really cool place to being a complete clown-show faster than you could spell “private equity” and no one knew that better than me. Hell, I kicked myself for not having the guts to just quit myself, leave it all behind and try again somewhere new, but I had poured so much of myself into this place, hired so many of the people who were still there, that I just kept telling myself to give it a little more time, maybe we can turn it around.

If he was still with the company, Nels would have been mad, would have tried to talk her out of it, appealed to her loyalty and maybe even laid a guilt trip on her. But Nels hadn’t survived the CEO change, and I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her any more. Besides, I wanted more for her than what we had going—I wanted her to get what she was after, and I knew she had to go to do it. So I worked with her to shut things down and she took off a few days later. We promised to keep in touch and we did, eventually.

“I’ll tell you more about it after I start,” she promised. And then she dropped off the face of the earth.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.