Ahead of the Curve (18 page)

A large group of us then drove over to see Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. The company’s headquarters was a complex of boxy glass buildings fitted out with yellow-and-purple furnishings, as if Barney the Dinosaur had moonlit as the decorator. There were playrooms with table football, free coffee, and mini basketball hoops in the corridors, telltale signs of a company that would rather its employees not go home. Despite the infantile décor, ten years after its founding, Yahoo! was part of corporate America. We were addressed by a senior vice president at the firm, in charge of mergers and acquisitions. He described his rapid ascent. After university in Britain, he went to work for Goldman Sachs, then earned his MBA at HBS. After graduation, he worked at Allen and Company, a media-focused investment bank in New York, then at an Internet venture fund run by Terry Semel, a former Hollywood studio chief who was appointed CEO of Yahoo! The senior VP rattled through his presentation in a whisper and seemed horribly pleased with himself. Perhaps he had a right to be. He was exactly the same age as I.

The following morning I woke up with a start at eight thirty. It had taken me hours to fall asleep, stewing over that precocious Yahoo! VP, and I was supposed to be at Kleiner Perkins by 8:45. I washed and shaved as fast as I could, pulled on my clothes, and ran to the elevator holding my jacket and the directions. I sprinted over to the parking lot and launched my rented Impala out onto Route 101. It was 8:40. The receptionist had told me it would take half an hour to get to KPCB’s offices on Sand Hill Road. I burned down 101, climbed west to the Junípero Serra freeway, past Stanford University, and then from there onto Sand Hill Road. By the time I pulled into the KPCB lot, in between a Mercedes two-seater and a Toyota Prius, it was shortly before nine.

The main office building resembled a large Swiss chalet. Two dark wooden beams, soaked with rain, pitched steeply over the glass entrance hall. A towering orchid display greeted visitors. I breathlessly announced myself to the receptionist.

“They’ve already started,” she said, sourly. “In the conference room to your right.”

I opened the door, and the speaker paused while I pushed my way to the only available chair, tucked away in a far corner of the room. Those of my classmates who had snagged one of the high-back black leather swivel chairs around the conference table moved gently from side to side, looking thoughtful yet inquiring, as if auditioning for a future there. The table was a single cross-section of what must have been a colossal tree, at least six feet across. It had been polished, but you could still appreciate the knots and the grain of the wood. I wondered how many great businesses had been plotted out at this table. Kleiner Perkins, after all, had funded so many of the great technology firms, from Sun Microsystems to Amazon to Google. Our speaker was Russell Seligman, an engaging man who had graduated from HBS and spent several very successful years at Microsoft before becoming a venture capitalist. He said that he was amazed by how many people wanted to be in venture capital these days, seeing it as a straight shot to vast wealth. It wasn’t, he said. Of course there were people who did astoundingly well. And being at a top firm with access to the most brilliant technical and commercial minds in Silicon Valley made the odds of success that much better. But he had been at Kleiner Perkins for four years and he was still two years away from knowing if any of his investments would work out. Compared to working in operations at Microsoft, this was lonelier, less involved, less exciting work. Your main role was to find the right people and the right venture and make the right investment. After that, providing you had done your job well, you should get out of the way and wait. You were not there to meddle daily or weekly. You were there to help when required. I looked through the glass wall of the conference room to the offices, laid out along another glass wall facing trees. It was raining outside and there didn’t seem to be anyone here besides us. VCs do not need to come to their offices to get things done. I understood Seligman’s point about the detached nature of his role. If you were really into business and good at it, this was no life. It would be like being Michelangelo and suddenly finding yourself a patron, no longer painting or sculpting but merely issuing checks for other painters and sculptors. You either had to want to be a patron to start with or else had gotten to a point in life where you preferred investing to building, and your advice was actually worth something. Lots of Harvard MBAs wanted to become VCs straight out of school because it seemed to offer large rewards for basically opining and playing with other people’s money. But they were really not ripe for the job yet.

Google, which we visited later in the day, was how I imagined Yahoo! must have been five or six years earlier. Same glass campus, same childlike atmosphere, but somehow more authentic given the age of the company, its founders and employees. You did not sense that the toys and free coffee were there for show, while the grown-up executives were actually chomping cigars in a wood-paneled suite. There were Segways in the lobby, people could bring their dogs to work, and a line snaked past the cubicles of employees waiting for free massages. The company threw a reception for us and a group from MIT. Sadly only five of the eighty or so Westrekkers showed up. Most had chosen to go to happy hours thrown by banks and consulting firms in San Francisco. We were saved by the MIT students, who arrived in force and excited.

I was standing eating a chicken satay and wondering whom to talk to when a young-looking guy in a blue “
Blogger.com
” T-shirt tucked neatly into his jeans shambled up, scarfing everything he could grab from the buffet. It was Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google. All six billion dollars’ worth of him (at the time). He looked about fifteen, his skin glowing, his thick black hair brushed back from his high brow. I pointed at his T-shirt and asked him which blogs he read. Technology ones mostly, he said, but he doesn’t even read too many of them. There was too much else to do besides reading blogs. Quickly, we were surrounded by eager MIT students who all stood there, bouncing on their toes, staring at him like hungry cannibals.

Google’s cofounder Larry Page arrived wearing jeans and a tracksuit top. He and Sergey gave a droll presentation, exchanging remarks and asides like an old Vegas double act. They were happy we were there, they said, because Google was at the beginning of a grand adventure and there was plenty of work to be done, especially if we were ready to start up their operations overseas. It was funny to think that just five years before, these two men were getting to know each other in Stanford’s computer science doctoral program, and now here they were, the objects of such intense fascination. “But we’re not here to give a talk,” Page said. “What we’d really like to know is what you think of Google. So what is your least favorite Google product?” Lots of hands shot up. The MIT students were intense, steeped in Google and its technology. They had queries about algorithms and functionality and business models. I imagined what a similar group of HBS students might ask. “How do we get to be in your shoes?” “What do you think of India and China?” “Do you think it’s a good idea to go into consulting first to get some more experience before bolting together some servers in a computer science lab and setting up a world-changing technology?” I asked Page what he saw as the future for Google News. He rambled around the subject as if he weren’t that interested before concluding that he’d like it to be a way of making reporters more accountable.

Google felt like an incredible place. The energy was palpable and the institutional weight that had smothered Yahoo! had yet to impose itself. As I was leaving, I saw a woman clearly very upset sitting on a low wall beside one of the buildings. She was staring at the ground and holding a tissue to her nose. Sergey Brin was crossing the lawn in front of her and he sat down beside her and put his arm around her. It was still that kind of company.

At eBay, meanwhile, the zombies had taken over. Twenty HBS alumni, roughly the same number as those of us attending the presentation, were lined up to talk about their work. They stood in a long row, like police suspects, and explained what they did. By the end, I couldn’t figure out who was a product manager, who a product marketing manager, and who was in charge of marketing jewelry products. Maybe it was the lighting and the thin gray drizzle falling on the floor-to-ceiling windows, but no one looked well here. Suddenly a door opened in the back of the room and in marched Meg Whitman, the CEO. She spoke of the great career opportunities at eBay, but I looked at her and kept thinking back to the video in LEAD where she said, “you probably won’t look back and wish that you’d worked harder . . . In the end your families and friends are the most important thing.” By those criteria, and given her own experience, why would I ever move to San Jose and work here?

That evening, I found myself lost in Palo Alto with Nico, a Romanian student. I had first noticed him during Analytics when several of the military veterans who had served in Iraq decided to give a talk about their experiences after class. One man who had worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority described the conditions on arriving in Baghdad in 2003 as “the worst imaginable.” The administrative hit squad flown in from Washington to establish a postwar Iraq found themselves huddled around a single light in a vast, empty palace. Their computers had been left on the airport runway and had melted into the asphalt. They had no means of communication. While most of the room gasped at these tales from the front, Nico put up his hand and asked if the former CPA guy thought the invasion was the inspiration of American oil companies. He was given a very cold shoulder for this, but he didn’t seem to mind and stayed for the rest of the talk, leaning against a column at the front of the classroom. I thought his question was poorly timed, but I quite admired his cool.

We were trying to find a bar where the trek organizers had arranged a mixer for HBS and Stanford MBAs, but we had become hopelessly lost in the suburban twilight, driving back and forth between the elegant streets surrounding Stanford and the Hispanic edge of Palo Alto, searching for our destination amid the taco stands, gas stations, and sprawling bungalows. Nico told me he had left his friends and family in Romania to give himself a few years in America to earn his MBA and work for a big American firm, either in technology or finance. Then he would go back home. He had found HBS to be a mostly ludicrous experience. “The Americans just talk even when they have nothing to say,” he said. “I feel like I’m paying all this money just so that these American kids can have an audience and say they know this Romanian guy.”

Like many of the foreigners, Nico had found HBS’s claim to be an international school bogus. Many of the purported international students had spent so much of their lives in the United States that they brought very little international flavor. There were Japanese students who had lived in the United States since they were ten, Nigerians who had moved to Texas in their teens, Princeton-educated Indians. These students may have dressed up for International Week, but they were culturally close enough to the Americans as to be indistinguishable from them.

By the time we found the mixer, it was almost over. There were three forlorn-looking HBS-ers perched around a small table. None of the Stanford students had shown up. Nico and I thought about buying a beer, but it was too sad. We got back in our car, drove away, and got lost again.

You thought we were going to be the intellectual elite. Well, we’re not. We’re not the hereditary elite, and we’re certainly not the artistic or creative elite. What we’re being groomed as is the competent elite. Get used to it . . . we’re being trained to be the guys who stay sober at the party. We’re being handed the tools to get out there and run things.

—TH E BIG TIME: THE HARVARD
BUSINES
S
SCHOOL’
S
MOST
SUCCESSFUL CLASS AND HOW
IT SHAPED AMERICA
,
BY LAURENCE SHAMES

Just before returning for the second half of the RC, I met Justin, my friend from Analytics, for breakfast in New York. We went to a Cuban café on the Upper West Side. Soon we would have to find jobs for the summer, and he was trying to figure out how deep into business he wanted to go. The same people who had encouraged him to go to business school were now advising him to spend a couple of years in investment banking. People in New York took you seriously if you had spent a couple of years on Wall Street, they said. If nothing else, it showed you could work hard and survive. Justin was not so sure.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he told me, sipping his Cuban coffee. “You’ve seen me doing finance. It’s just not my core competence. Listen to me. I never said ‘core competence’ before HBS.”

“Do you want to make a career in finance?”

“Not really.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because it might be useful. I feel like everyone else at that friggin’ HBS has done two years in banking or consulting, and if you haven’t, companies just won’t take you seriously.”

“Fine, then go ahead. Climb into the belly of the beast.”

“Don’t just say that. Why don’t you climb into the belly, too?”

“Sometimes I want to. I think it would do me good. But then I hear about what it involves and I just know that I can’t. What’s the point in hearing everyone say ‘put your family first,’ ‘be around for your kids while they’re growing up,’ and then taking a job when you know you’ll be working nonstop? I’d like to do it for my career, and I think it might be interesting, but I know I’d hate the demands.” Whenever I was tempted to try for a well-paid but punishing job, I recalled how I felt as a journalist being sent on a fatuous assignment, how I loathed sitting in a hotel room or on a plane, doing my employer’s bidding and missing being at home. Could I tolerate the life of a junior banker? Hours staring at a screen, drinking stomach-rotting coffee, building model after financial model that no one would read and then listening to a senior partner bitch about his disintegrating marriage. Even for all that money, why would I ever do that to myself? But then again, having bothered to come to HBS, what did I think business was about? Greek islands and poetry?