How to tell that your startup is struggling

The Beginning

I graduated from college in 1999 and was greeted by a job market that could only be described as blissful. I did not know HTML, Javascript or CSS but I knew a touch of SQL and a few oneliners in this thing called PERL. That is all I needed, I had start ups dying to hire me, talking about sign-on bonus and all the benefits. Big salary & perks, I worked in a start up that was providing Breakfast, Lunch Dinner, we had snacks, arcade games, hammocks everything that would entice a 20-something to put in 12 to 16 hour days.

FAST FORWARD 9 months, not even 1 year and i was jobless and on my mom's couch. I honestly did not know what had happened. My company was hiring 3 engineers per week for months, we kept moving offices and every time we moved the new office was heavily customized to our needs.

I want to use this time to walk you all through some signs and clues that I completely missed due to total lack of experience and naivete.

Staff Member POV

CLUE: Everyone is suddenly talking about the stock market going up and down.

Back in the those days everyone working for a startup also traded stocks ( sound familiar ) . Not mutual funds but dotcom stocks like etoys, yahoo and all that. I recall a few senior staff members started mumbling about how some stocks had dipped but would be bouncing back up soon. I remember hearing this kind of chatter at lunch or near the water cooler.

CLUE: Leadership is compelled to touch on stock market and how none of that impacts the organization at all.

A couple of months went by and I recall our Senior Leadership had an all-hands meeting and amongst many other agenda items they touched on the stock market "volatility" this is french for our portfolios are screwed. We were told that is just normal behavior, I came from a working class first generation immigrant home, I had no clue what was normal behavior and what was not. Either way our new offices were ready for us to move in so that news took center stage in everyone's mind.

CLUE: Breakfast and Dinner would no longer be provided.

We moved into our new office and work continued on as expected. We had nerf gun fights, everyone seemed to get around the office in razor scooters, lots of shorts and slippers...you know normal office life. Then one monday we noticed that for the past few weeks breakfast had suddenly turned into Bagels or Donuts instead of egg burritos, and fancy yogurt and stuff like that. Someone complained about this to our office manager and then we got an all company email saying that the company would stop providing Breakfast and Dinner since not enough folks were participating and to lower food waste. Lunch would continue on.

CLUE: Mistakes suddenly count, and incompetence starts to matter.

Several rungs above me was a HOTSHOT straight out of MIT product manager. Seriously, this dude finished his bachelor degree in neuroscience a second ago and was now leading a team of 5 ( yeah, how??). During a client dinner he agreed to horrible terms put forth by the client, my guess is that he thought he was wheeling and dealing. In this past, this would have been shrugged off and since money grew on trees ( called VCs and out-to-lunch investors ) none of this mattered. Suddenly , this was a bridge too far. The morning after the visit to the client our CFO stepped in and the dude was fired. Fired! Suddenly mistakes made that have a direct revenue impact went straight up to the senior leadership team.

CLUE: Your boss suddenly checks out or decides to leave for personal reasons.

My boss was extremely engaged and responsive, she started skipping regularly scheduled meetings and calls. She started sending her leads or even me to meetings in her place. It looked like she was making personal plans at work. I thought to myself maybe she is taking care of bills or dealing with a health issue, it was not obvious to me what was happening. Eventually, after a couple of weeks of being very checked out , she called a meeting and told us "I am leaving LA to move to Europe to learn how to cook". Sub-clue: They did not replace her, my team was moved under an existing manager.

CLUE: Filling up daily quotas. Look busy.

Once my manager left a lot of the older folks at the company seemed to impose a lot of self discipline on themselves. Us 20-somethings thought it was silly. Folks that were older and had worked in corporate America started showing up on or before 9am all of a sudden. Before that it was whatever schedule you wanted. I noticed the older folks kept out of the break room and stopped messing with nerf guns, doing indoor golf, or spending hours playing ping pong. By now, the older folks were clued in to what was happening...but not me. For the first time on the job, my work tasks were being picked up by others and I would go for days without having tasks. I later realized that the senior folks were ensuring they hit daily totals (or exceed them) something no one had ever mentioned to me. A older man that noticed I was completely clueless, recommended I looked busy throughout the day.

CLUE Old HR exits, new HR agency is hired.

Our HR was a warm and fuzzy group. A gregarious large ex-college football player was our Head of HR. His job was hire, hire and hire. He had a team of beautiful young HR coordinators ( 99% female staff) who were hard to say no to if you were a mathy, 20-something young man. That group was let go one day as a part of a carefully planned "evolution" of our HR department. And in their place our CEO announced a professional agency would take over. This was a new team that looked and sounded like a team of attorneys vs what we were used to having. They seemed to be concerned more with state regulations and employee hand books and less with hiring talent. Looking back on it, this was the biggest clue that the good times were over. The new HR team stopped the free lunches, halted nerf guns and scooters in the office. They used words like insurance and liability . As this started happening several senior engineers voluntarily left the company.

CLUE: Members of founding team exit. Senior Execs exit.

An unplanned all hands meeting is called an in a very celebratory, think graduation style. At this meeting high level members of the leadership, announce they are moving on to focus on volunteering in their communities or something to this effect. No one says they are leaving a sinking ship. The tone of the meeting, set by senior management that is speaking, is very upbeat and happy and exiting members are framed as though they are graduating from high school. The team served cake and champagne at this meeting so that it does not set off any alarms bells in anyone's head. It worked, most of us looked at it as a "onwards and upwards" type of thing. None of the members that left were replaced.

CLUE: Pettiness and co-worker drama.

As we got towards the end of life of this dotbomb instead of the staff members bonding together to help each other out folks started to backstab each other. Unbeknownst to me, my teammates had complained about my work ethic and attitude. These were folks that would smile to my face then go around and burn me to management. In hindsight, what was happening is that they were making sure that I fall off the ship before them. Some random supervisor had a meeting with me and gave me a verbal warning. The claims were all baseless and completely unfounded. I went back to my desk and confronted a couple of folks I suspected , and they all denied saying anything. It was end of the road.

By now, I had started hearing about friends at other start ups losing jobs, the news media was starting to register a crash....mainstream news stopped treating internet technology company's as a separate category of companies.

A week after this incident, I was called into a conference room along with 25 other folks by the new HR team member and was handed a packet with my severance and instructions on how to get unemployment benefits.