For the past five years in a row I’ve spent time interviewing with companies during the 4th quarter in preparation for the new year. It’s always good to seek new opportunities and have backup plans, even if you never use them.
Sometimes, the interviews turn into fun consulting roles where I spend anywhere from 10 – 25 hours a week helping startups build their online presence. Never have the interviews turned into full-time roles because I just can’t convince myself to go back to work full-time.
I start getting depressed thinking about having to commute, taking orders from people, wasting time in meetings, faking enthusiasm, kissing up, etc. Seriously, I don’t understand how people can survive the daily rush hour commute! Building someone else’s dream while getting 1/30th the amount of equity is tough for me to swallow.
What I do enjoy is meeting new people and hearing their stories about how they plan to change the world. At the very worst, I’ll have made some new connections in the SF Bay Area who might utilize my corporate consulting services or be potential new business partners. And almost always, I’ll have a new story to share with you.
Here’s a recent incident I will never forget. What I experienced revealed an ugly side of startup culture and what some men really think of women behind closed doors.
A Boulder On Your Shoulder
The second round of my interviews with a life insurance startup involved giving a presentation about what I’d do for them during my first 100 days. I whipped up a 10-page presentation from the consulting pitch material I already had while watching the Warriors blow out the Thunder the night before. The presentation was concise and to the point.
When I got to their offices, the Head of Brand was in the conference room waiting for me. He was a new hire whose résumé showed the typical job change every 1-3 years.
While waiting for four other people to show up, I asked him whether or not he also had to give a presentation and share all his secrets before getting hired. He said that he did. Then I asked him how long his presentation was given I had a suspicion mine might be too short. I had been out of the work force for so long that I forgot having a lot of fluff makes a difference.
The Head of Brand told me his presentation was 54 pages! Holy crap! It was a harbinger for a tough session ahead.
The CEO, two co-founders, and the Head of Growth finally showed up at 1:08pm; the meeting was supposed to start at 1pm. The head recruiter also walked in behind them and told me in a nasty voice, “You’re late,” when I had actually arrived at 12:55pm.
She had texted me at 10pm the night before requesting me to arrive at 12:45pm instead. We had agreed on a 1pm time slot after a lot of back and forth already. Was she seriously trying to change it on me again at the last minute? I ignored her text. Have some boundaries please.
I was looking forward to having one of the co-founders in the meeting, a man I’ll call Amit, because he had a very skeptical line of questioning when I met him 1X1 during my first visit. Think of Amit as a guy with an automatic machine gun gleefully firing endless rounds at a helpless puppy just for the fun of it. Without a machine gun, he would run away like a coward if you decided to confront him with your fist.
Amit had a chip on his shoulder because he was in his early 30s and spent six years trying to get his PhD. He finally gave up for a second time in 2012 and started some random company I’ll call Pewko, which he describes on LinkedIn as a company “where you can have meaningful interactions with your friends online.” It’s obvious Pewko vomitted all over itself and didn’t go anywhere.
Then in January 2013, Amit met up with his other co-founders and started this life insurance startup I was interviewing for. So far, so good. Although, it will be years before there’s any meaningful exit for them, if any at all, since most startups don’t have lucrative outcomes. If you’re in your 30s, went to Cal or Stanford, and haven’t hit it big in the Bay Area yet, it’s understandable to feel inadequate since there are so many success stories here.
I was one minute into my presentation when Amit started riddling me with questions again. It was hilarious! My second slide was entitled, “The First 30 Days,” and one of the bullet points mentioned me sitting down with everybody to understand what type of messaging they wanted to portray to the world. It’s good business practice to understand first, then execute.
Amit started asking questions such as,
“How do you plan to scale the content to grow exponentially?”
“Tell me how you are going to get this done?”
“What are the numbers behind your proposal?”
I gave him some answers and told him more details were to come in the following slides. He didn’t seem too pleased. He is the type of person who loves to talk in meetings just to hear himself speak. I suspect he also has ADD.
Then I got to a slide that highlighted an influencer I proposed to hire to help promote their startup. The influencer is a woman in the fitness/yoga/pilates space. My idea was to cross sell using influencers with healthy lifestyles who can promote some of the financial benefits of being healthy. It’s a smart way to capture related topics and rank well online.
Amit, of course, chimed in with another five questions. He was not convinced by my online strategy that has worked for the past eight years even though during that time he was still trying to pass his introductory PhD classes.
This is when the CEO, whom I’ll call Raj, suddenly spoke up. (Note: Raj had walked in and out of the conference room three times by this point to take calls)
He said, “I HATE women! I don’t want female customers. They live too long, which means they pay less premiums for life insurance. They also take forever to sign up. I’ve only got a finite amount of sales people and can’t be bothered trying to hold each and every woman’s hand.“
I was in shock. This life insurance startup’s whole value proposition was all about being able to offer lower life insurance premiums for those who are more health conscious due to a proprietary mortality table they’ve been building.
Now the CEO is telling me he doesn’t want female customers because their returns aren’t high enough to bother?! I felt like I was in an episode of Silicon Valley on HBO.
A normal person who respects women would say something like this instead, “Women aren’t our target customers at the moment due to X, Y, Z” or just keep silent instead of saying how much he hates women and then go on a long rant.
I looked at Amit, who was smiling gleefully because he could tell I was finally feeling uncomfortable. He was that pimply kid with wide eyes squishing ants!
Then I looked around the room and realized nobody flinched at Raj’s outburst because all five of my interviewers were men.
So THIS is why some women complain about a lack of diversity in the work place. The three main co-founders were Indian men. The Head of Growth was a Chinese guy. The Head of Brand was a Middle Eastern guy. Good luck being a woman at this startup!
The saddest thing is that there are female employees at this startup who probably have no idea about what the founders truly think of them.
The overly enthusiastic head of recruiting is a woman who believes her CEO views women equally. As a result, she has no problem trying to recruit other women for the job.
I also spoke to one of their female employees who is two years out of school. She said she works past 8pm all the time and loves the opportunity. Little does she know that there’s a thick glass ceiling waiting for her in several years due to the management makeup.
Companies give incredible lip service towards hiring women. The reality is that everybody is biased for people who look and talk like them. It is no coincidence all the founders at this company are Indian. And it is not a coincidence all their senior management are men too.
Here in Silicon Valley, I’ve noticed that once a computer science guy comes to power, the workplace dynamic gets quirky because either the guy was socially awkward in school who feared talking to women, or has some kind of chip on his shoulder because no women talked to him growing up. It’s like that loser in high school who can’t wait to show up to his 10 year high school reunion in a Lamborghini and tell everybody what a success he is.
Blaze Your Own Trail Women!
I think about women’s issues a lot because I have a sister who is a single mom. I sometimes worry about how she plans to make ends meet living in expensive NYC. She spent eight years out of the workforce to raise her son. And now, she’s trying to catch up to make it as an illustrator, author, and freelancer.
I also have a wife who went through a difficult period back in 2013. She worked like a loyal juggernaut for eight years at her firm only to be passed up for a promotion when her firm promoted two men a couple years her junior instead. It was total bullshit, especially since one of the promotees left the very next year.
I also felt like a failure because I didn’t properly coach my wife to totally get what she deserves. She’s too nice to ask for what she wants, and naively believed that good work was all that’s needed to ascend.
The great thing is that we finally negotiated a nice severance package for her in late 2014 to be free with me. Part of the negotiation was receiving her full salary for the last four months while she only had to work two days a week. She also received a nice lump sum severance and got hired back as a part-time consultant 10 months later for 50% higher pay!
I also believe that one day I might have a daughter. Like every father, I want my daughter to have all the opportunities in the world. I fear how other men will treat her personally and professionally. I’m afraid she won’t fulfill her dreams due to some sexist management team who secretly looks down on females. But if she falls, I will always be there for her.
Finally, many of you are women who’ve shared with me your struggles. Please continue to do so. I firmly believe the stress from work is one of the main reasons why people are so unhappy with their lives. There’s too much backstabbing, political jockeying, and cronyism to make work a long-term happy place to be. Even harder are those women who are trying to balance their careers and motherhood.
I can tell you how awesome it is to be your own boss. But you won’t really know how awesome it truly is until you give it a go yourself. If you don’t want to go at it alone, find some co-founders who share your same traits and build something together. The entrepreneur hurdle has never been lower thanks to technology. If you fail, you can always get another job.
If you are a woman, be wary of a company with a homogenous management team. Group think is inevitable when everybody comes from the same background. “Locker room” talk is embedded in many men’s DNA. I’ve played sports all my life and have sat in on all-men meetings plenty of times before in my finance career, things are not always what they seem from the outside.
Career life is much easier if you can find a mentor who shares your same interests. More often than not it’s a person who looks like you. If you can’t find your champion, move on.
I’ll leave you with a great quote I saw online:
“Job you love? GOOD. Supplement it with a side business.
Job you hate? GOOD. Pays bills while you start a business.
No job? GOOD. More time to start a business!”
Recommendation If You Want To Move On
Negotiate A Severance: If you want to leave a job you no longer enjoy, I recommend you negotiate a severance instead of quit. If you negotiate a severance like I did back in 2012, you not only get a severance check, but potentially subsidized healthcare, deferred compensation, and worker training.
When you get laid off, you’re also eligible for up to roughly 27 weeks of unemployment benefits. Having a financial runway is huge during your transition period.
Conversely, if you quit your job you get nothing. Check out, How To Engineer Your Layoff: Make A Small Fortune By Saying Goodbye.
It’s the only book that teaches you how to negotiate a severance. In addition, it was recently updated and expanded thanks to tremendous reader feedback and successful case studies.
Recommendation To Build Wealth
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After you link all your accounts, use their Retirement Planning calculator that pulls your real data to give you as pure an estimation of your financial future as possible using Monte Carlo simulation algorithms. Definitely run your numbers to see how you’re doing. I’ve been using Personal Capital since 2012 and have seen my net worth skyrocket during this time thanks to better money management.
Updated for 2020 and beyond.
Sam, I know you would never do this, but boy I would love for you to call this company out publicly. I think women really need to know to avoid this place because a work environment like that can ruin lives. I wonder how many female employees have suffered there mentally, emotionally, reputationally, and financially?
I have a sister who is in insurance. Fortunately, she doesn’t work for a startup. But if I ever found out that her company treated women that way while she was working there, I would be LIVID.
Hell, I’m not sure what I would have said during the presentation if I were in your shoes.
Sincerely,
ARB–Angry Retail Banker
It’s ironic because women should be saving a lot more than men on average to make up for the gap in pay and promotion, but women on average save a lot less than men, thus further disadvantaging their finances.
Have you ever read a blog written by Penelope Trunk? She writes about counter-intuitive ways for women to get ahead, like getting plastic surgery and having children young. Would love tog et your thoughts on her words.
This must be the culture of Silicon Valley. I used to work for a boring, financial services company where the IT was ancient but the management was patient and diverse and the work/life balance was amazing. I traded in that security for more money and exciting technology and now moved to Silicon Valley to work for a tech giant. There are absolutely no boundaries here – I get texts at 10PM for no reason (everyone is drinking the koolaid that to be successful you need 24/7 communication with each other) and the culture of firing questions at you and putting you off guard in both meetings and emails is rampant. I do think I am respected (as a woman) but I pretty much hate the aggressive culture. It’s too bad that making someone uncomfortable and putting them on the defense is the culture. But hey, “we use technology to change people’s lives” so the culture must be what is making that happen and we wouldn’t change people’s lives without it – If you can’t toughen up and get with the program then get out! LOL Can’t wait until my relo is up and I have more options.
I would be so annoyed if I got consistently 10 PM text messages and request to do things. I don’t respond to anybody that’s not family after about 7 PM.
Do you enjoy your role though? I’m five years removed from this hustle and bustle of corporate start up worklife culture so it is becoming more foreign to me every single day.
I go back and forth. Sometimes I get that rush like “wow, I’m a part of something really cool” and then sometimes when I get micro-managed, I hate it and can’t wait until I can quit without having to pay back the relocation. It’s complicated.
Cool. Maybe it’ll feel really, really amazing if your company gets bought out for big bucks or something. I’ve never experienced that type of exit, but that would be sweet. Then it would feel like whatever more you made AFTER the sale is like gravy!
Wow. Crazy to believe that any CEO would have that type of reaction. Sounds like a place you don’t want to be a part of.
This is really rough in my industry. My company does a decent job of hiring and promoting women, but they rarely stick around. I work in the structural engineering field and do public onsite consulting. It is usually the public perception of the abilities of women engineers that drives them away.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have pulled up to a jobsite as an assistant to my female engineer manager and the people onsite automatically assume I am the engineer and my manger is my “help.” These are college educated architects, project managers, insurance adjusters, and attorneys. It embarrasses me every time. I can tell it weighs on my manager as she feels like she needs to “prove” herself to everyone.
One attorney told me that they would rather I represent his client as an expert witness than my manager because the opposing expert is male and has many years of experience and he is concerned what the jury would think of an attractive female as his “expert.”
I take for granted how easy it is for me to walk up to my client and say “I will be the structural engineer on this project.” I even have my own issues of commanding authority because I look 25 even though I’m 32. But its nothing compared to being a woman in this industry.
I’m in my early thirties and a professional woman and a lesbian. I absolutely had to create my own business so that I can avoid this BS. I’ve lived all over the US and have encountered it everywhere. Nonprofit founders trapping interns in elevators at big events to proposition them. My words being repeated inelegantly by a man who received the credit. Male clients who have hired me for my expertise who are so unused to caring about what a woman says that I have nearly had to tell them to shut up so that I can tell them what they paid me for.
I am Indian and I do agree there are some deep seated bias-es in some Indian men. My husband is also a “revenue making” start up founder, and I kind of know people hate him, because he is a harsh boss, he says things for shock value, but yes he gets things done.
He could’ve said what this guy said, and he has told me in private that having to deal with his pregnant female employees leaving early or because they are tired, and dealing with maternity leave of his female employees is painful because a startup just does not have that kind of bandwidth, they expect everyone all hands on deck all the time. That’s the reality of it, given the break neck speed of how things work plus juggling finance, legal, there just isn’t enough bandwidth to run a start up like a large fortune 500 company with HR departments and such.
What I describe above is a different scenario from what you experienced and my husband mentioned this to me in private, but his arguments could be true of any start up.
He does also mention that if they were exceptional employees then he would bend over backwards to do anything to keep them, but he was talking about the average employee here.
Please tell your husband that unless the employee is exceptionally lazy and downright insubordinate, every employee deserves some respect and to be treated with some dignity at the workplace. Hasn’t he ever heard the old adage “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
Just because he’s having a bad time at the start-up and can’t keep it together does not entitle him to emotionally abuse pregnant women and others. He doesn’t know the pain and stress they are having to deal with in their private lives and then on top of that to come to work and have the boss dump some on you?
Remind him, what goes around comes around.
I’m actually surprised any pregnant woman has the capacity to go to work and be fully functional in her third trimester. It is so not easy being pregnant, and I don’t even know for real as a man! But, I’ve read lots of books and observed pregnant friends very closely.
The uterus pushes on the bladder, which makes women have to go pee much more frequently. If you have longer than a 30 minute commute to work, this can be VERY unbearable. If you have to sit in on a 1 hour meeting, you may have to walk out of the conference room half way.
Pregnancy can also goes constipation, make the woman gassy, more tired, and uncomfortable in general. The average recommended weight gain is ~30 – 40 lbs, or roughly 25% heavier for the average woman. The extra weight and the desire to protect your baby from harm takes extra energy.
I’d like to talk about this in a future post because pregnant women deserve more leeway, especially during the third trimester. If more people are aware, more people will realize what an inspiration it is that a pregnant woman is still coming to work.
I totally get that for a startup, it’s tougher to lose man hours than for a large, established firm. But he can work around the issue by being less harsh, and more flexible by having them work from home or work just set hours, instead of not coming to work at all sometimes.
I agree with everything you said about the third trimester. This is not about individual bashing but what a lot of “employees” from the outside dont realize is some people do infact shed blood, sweat and tears into a company and when you have sacrificed everything you expect a lot from your employees -pregnant or otherwise. I am not talking about disrespect or bad behavior, but rather having high expectations and in return being disappointed, and still having to make payroll. It is a dog eat dog world, a lot of people don’t get that.
I just started to read Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In. It’s fascinating to read through her experiences and how she navigated them. There’s a lot of similarities between your post and her book, although she obviously focuses more on how to succeed in the corporate world than you do.
I’m not surprised to hear that kind of woman hating talk. I hope that in 20 years or less it’ll be viewed with the same kind of distaste that racist talk brings out today.
As I investigate post-military corporate opportunities, many of which are quite lucrative, I read things like this and once again pause… and think again about my own business.
Hmm..I wonder if these Indian guys immigrated to the US recently. I find those people from South or East Asian countries have a more typical “traditional” mindset when it comes to men and women.