Space Fillers and Superstars: Silicon Valley's Divergent Career Arcs

Career Paths Are Often Circuitous Routes

My career in Silicon Valley started before I'd even graduated from college. Rather than plug away at Berkeley and try to get top grades, I split my time my senior year between going to classes and commuting across the Bay Bridge to Burlingame, working for a revenue light startup during the initial dot com boom. By the end of 2018, I will have completed twenty full years in the Valley.

In these twenty years, I've been laid off. I've been promoted. I've fought for raises and rejected stock offers. I've co-founded my own consulting business. I've worked at startups with three people, ten people and two hundred. And for the last six plus years, I've been at Google, which can hardly be called a startup.

In these two decades, I've seen companies lay everyone off firsthand, and had another acquired. I've pitched Sand Hill Road for venture capital funding, been part of corp dev talks about a possible acquisition, and even filed for IPO. I've worked with billionaires, millionaires, neighbors, and colleagues straight out of college, with debts to pay.

And while I've been lucky enough to accumulate 15 years of work at just two jobs, that is fairly unusual for the industry. Some estimate the average software engineer, used as a metric for the average employee in our tech-centric world, is only 1 to 3 years. (Source)

Underneath the headlines and noise of product announcements, and seeming get rich quick ideas, the reality is the overwhelming majority of Silicon Valley employees are role fillers, who just get things done. Some are living month to month, and others are more comfortable. But for each example of wunderkids who get lucky on their first try, you have cubicle dwellers whose LinkedIn history won't have you blinking an eye. And the Valley needs these people. Hundreds of thousands of them.

The Intersection of Skill, Luck and Loyalty

Marissa Mayer famously put together a rubric after completing a Symbolic Systems degree at Stanford to determine where she would take the leap from her 14 job offers, and Google was seen as having the greatest upside. Tough to argue against those results, and hindsight is 20/20. Yet a close friend of mine who graduated from the same school with the same major is as anonymous as they come, with a pedestrian career. There's no discounting Marissa's hard work and ambition, but not everyone gets lucky.

In 2009, I wrote about this magical intersection of skill and luck - where good people work incredibly hard at toxic companies, or doomed dinosaurs. There are tomes to be written about the worker bees of the Valley who come in and work hard for a full day's pay to make all the services go, but aren't job hopping for the latest startup du jour, instead hanging on with loyalty to the company even if the company doesn't return the favor.

Roll the Dice or Buy a Lotto Ticket

For every superstar like Marissa, there are thousands more stories like my friend and others who just missed. A decade plus ago, I had a roommate who passed up being one of the first 25 employees at Google, so he could instead finish his PhD. (He is now a professor at NYU)

The more cynical among us could say that aggressively enterprising workers should quickly hop from job to job and ride the rocket to financial happiness, and yet another group will say that if the current workplace isn't looking like a lottery ticket, you should quit and form your own startup. It certainly looks easy enough, with so many ideas landing venture funding.

Venture capitalists will tell you they are looking for that elite leader, the masterful person with unique product vision and market awareness - a founding team with impeccable credentials. But every decision is a bet. The VCs and companies make bets on the staff, and the staff makes bets on the companies each day they show up. Sometimes you win the jackpot, sometimes you push, and other times, you could lose it all and have to start over.

Among a world of aspiring superstars, a much more common, but also important, role played out daily amidst the rows of cubicles and open office spaces in the Silicon Valley is an army of people making it all run, quietly.

Disclosures: I briefly overlapped at Google with Marissa from 2011 to 2012. Also, if you must know, I attended UC Berkeley, a natural rival of Stanford. But that's not really super relevant.

Trump's Looming $100B+ Distraction and Productivity Crisis

Each year, American businesses are confronted with estimates that upwards of $2 to $4 billion in worker productivity is lost thanks to employee office pools around March Madness, the month-long college basketball championship tournament. Conventional wisdom has it that the tens of millions of players may physically check in to the office, but mentally are somewhere else, working at half speed, sapping dollars from their employer.

That single digit billion dollar gap is trivial compared to what the country has likely already seen after a year-long torture test of a presidential campaign, followed up with the looming tenure led by a person whose unpredictability and lack of respect for historical precedent, combined with a filter-free ability to share his half-formed thoughts with the world has everyone guessing what headline will flare up next.

The fidgety and distracted half-attentive employees in corner cubicles who may have been pulling for upset picks to win their bracket are instead replaced by entire teams of workers who are on edge - possibly unsure whether their place in the world is safe, whether their rights are going to be protected as new leaders rewrite and repeal the laws, or simply numb and horrified from the scandal of the day. And, if the 2016 campaign and post-election news cycles have been any hint as to what's to come over the next few years, this feeling, resembling post-traumatic stress disorder, will be felt in some capacity for a large percentage of the population for some time.

"Sharon, you've been watching CNN for about 8 weeks now.

Don't you want to watch something else?" -- South Park

If it's at all possible to act as if politics were not part of this discussion, leaving aside my strong support for Hillary and revulsion to Trump... putting aside the real life-threatening possibility that he and his team will ignite wars, stir up hatred against people who don't match his criteria of perfection, and the domino effects of reducing health care for millions and denying environmental impacts that threaten the very world... the very spectacle of distraction alone will seep in its darkness, sapping morale and focus.

The volume of noise and conflict around Trump is unprecedented in a connected age, when everyone can consume and share information instantly. And while Twitter has had its challenges, it has become the epicenter for the latest volley of noise from the president elect. Buzzfeed recently said noise around Trump had crested 10 times higher than the previous first family of the network -- the Kardashians.

At this point, even logging in to a social network, be it Facebook, Twitter or any other, runs into the possibility someone is talking about who Trump might be or what he might do. The campaign even brought the debate of whether you could trust news sources to the fore. The entire Web is infested.

Conversations among friends, neighbors, and colleagues either tiptoe around the election or confront it head on, but it's always there, in the way the tragedy of 9/11 was on everyone's mind for the months and years following the attacks. It's a distraction not just for a few hoops jockeys or degenerates, but for tens to hundreds of millions of people, and won't just last a month, but, most likely, for years.

Maybe this administration isn't going to be as alarming and disruptive as we all predict. Possibly after we all look at this like passing a smoldering wreck on the freeway, we can continue forward, but the rhetoric and policies promised to hit us seemingly have us positioned for a half decade of PTSD, which will impact everyone. This madness won't end with a buzzer beater from Gonzaga.

Disclosures: I work at Google, a perceived partner and occasional competitor to Twitter, which I use constantly. I was also more than happy to donate to Hillary's 2016 campaign.

Real Valley Stories: The SVP of HR and a Bunch of Lawyers Will See You Now

Editor’s Note: Part 11 in an irregular series of stories from my many years in Silicon Valley. Part 10 talked about the time I left my job for a competitor and rescinded the offer. This time, a story involving industrial espionage, the SVP of HR and way too many lawyers.

If I could show the leads from the lawyers’ lists were gone from our system,
we’d be on a path to redemption.

The day had started innocently enough. I was hosting our company’s public relations firm at the office, as we worked with our product marketing and management teams on interacting with press. At a break, I stepped outside of the conference room and found the longtime senior vice president of HR waiting for me — usually not a good sign.

“Louis, please come into my office,” he said, with a tone that made it obvious this wasn’t really a choice. So I followed.

We entered his office, only to find another man in a suit was waiting. The HR SVP shut the door behind us, and then turned back to me. “Louis, on the date of (whatever it was), did you upload a list of contacts to Salesforce.com from (an account manager)?”

“I Don’t Recall”

I paused. In my marketing role over the last few years, I had used Salesforce.com practically every day. It was our customer contact tool that hit all aspects of our business, from prospecting, to forecasting and demand generation. So it sounded like something I’d do. But I couldn’t tell him yes or no without looking.

I heard the words escape my mouth as bluntly as Oliver North in the Iran Contra hearings: “I don’t recall.”
But I promised to check — not knowing exactly what they were expecting to find. Somewhat shaken, but mostly mystified, I opened up Salesforce.com, logged in, did a query, and found I had uploaded a list of contacts into the system on that date. But it didn’t have any significance for me than any other list or date. It was just one of the regular requests I’d gotten from our director of Sales Operations, who often asked me to do the imports or set up reports in the system that she was responsible for, but didn’t completely understand.

So I went back to the SVP of HR, a little more nervous now, and said that yes, I had uploaded the list on that day. So what was going on?

Unwittingly Aiding Corporate Espionage

It turned out that, unbeknownst to me, an account manager acquired a customer list from his previous employer, complete with contacts and titles, and shared it with his inside sales representative — whose job it was to email and call these prospects to sell them our products. The ISR then sent the list to the Director of Sales Ops, who forwarded the request on to me. So while I had been fulfilling a standard request, I was, in effect, aiding what amounted to corporate theft.

The SVP of HR was clearly not too excited with me about my role in the upload. But he was more annoyed by the director’s not investigating the source of the list, and her not being in tune enough with Salesforce.com to do the upload herself — not to mention his being beyond furious with the account manager and ISR who had put us in this mess. Unsurprisingly, the suited man in the HR SVP’s office was on the company’s legal team, and our competitor wanted us raked over the coals for the impropriety.

Immediately, on the spot, the account manager responsible for obtaining the list was fired. The ISR, whom I considered a friend, was also fired, knowing what the contacts contained and calling against the list. He packed his personal items into a box, took a very lonely stroll trough the parking lot — and I never saw him again.

Running Queries to Solve the Whole Mess

Now I was back in the HR office. Having somewhat absolved myself, our efforts turned to limiting the damage. The press training boondoggle I’d been working on with the PR team was practically a memory at this point. I told them they could leave whenever they were done as I was busy, but didn’t tell them just why I was now occupied.

The HR SVP, and our attorney, wanted to know if I could find all the records that had been uploaded from that list, if I could find out what action had taken place — and if possible, could I remove those records from our company database. Of course, the answer was yes, so long as I knew what questions to ask Salesforce.com.

I started to run the queries, with both him and our attorney looking on. I ran a query showing what Leads had been added to Salesforce.com by my account on that day — and came up with a few hundred. A few clicks on each lead would show if they had been called, or emailed, if any meetings had taken place, and if we had any resulting sales pipeline in our forecast from the illicit list.

I produced reports that showed how many records were in the system, with both he and the attorney taking note of what I found. I was told to take no action on those records, and to be ready to come back into the office at the crack of dawn the next morning to begin the purge.

With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility

After a night to repeatedly think over the previous day’s events, I got up early, dressed much better than normal, grabbed my work laptop and headed back into the office to join the SVP, that same attorney, and surprisingly, about a half dozen more lawyers, who represented the competition, and had been sent to confirm we were in compliance. We entered the boardroom, centered with a long table seemingly carved from a massive cedar tree, and I had the projector all to myself.

Whether I could perform the next tasks correctly were central to showing if we were acting in good faith.

My task was clear — explain to everyone in the room what had been uploaded, show how it could be extracted from our main database, and then destroyed forever in a way that was unrecoverable.

After an opening introduction from the HR SVP, I fired up Salesforce.com, ran the same queries as the day before, highlighted the records, and started the purge. As I’d delete 100 records at a time, the attorneys for all sides would mark it. I’d pause for agreement to continue and move to the next set of 100. Soon, the records were out of the main DB, and into the Trash.

Then, with everyone around the table nodding in agreement, I emptied the system’s Trash, so the records were truly gone. Then, the attorneys flipped through hard copy printouts of the offending names and cherrypicked customer data to see if could be found. “Jane Smith of Acme,” they might say. I’d search. No records found. “Evan Jackson of Key Labs?” No records found.

The Salesforce.com database was clean. I was pretty much off the hook — having shown I had the capability to both get us into the mess and get us out of it. But it didn’t mean our company was found without fault. Those prospect companies on the lists were added to a “Do Not Contact” registry that fell across our entire sales organization for at least a year forward, and had us saying no to many different potential sales opportunities as a result.

In the next few years, the SVP of HR left our company and later became the Executive Vice President at a pre-IPO firm that eventually went public and made him undoubted millions. The director of sales operations didn’t last long, finding her role replaced by her predecessor, who was returning to the company — later telling me how stunned he was that personal keepsakes he’d left in his desk drawers remained untouched while he was away. I stayed another five years or so, exceptionally more skeptical now about importing any leads to Salesforce.com from any source that Marketing didn’t explicitly gain ourselves. And that ISR, according to LinkedIn, seems to have recovered and since enjoyed a solid career in sales management.

The experience was not one I had expected to have when taking such an active role with our customer relationship management system, but with great data comes great responsibility. When it came to proving ourselves in a room full of lawyers, we had survived.

Layoffs and Loyalty in a Liquid Valley

Layoffs Are Painful. Even if the X Doesn’t Land on You
(Image: Dreamstime)

In seventeen years of work in Silicon Valley, I’ve only left a job by choice once — in 2011, when I made the jump from being a partner at my own consulting group to join Google. The other three times, my employer informed me my time was up, and at that my services were no longer needed, loyalty be damned.

In two cases, the startup I worked for ran out of funding, and once, the new VP wanted to change things up, bringing in somebody they previously worked with instead of going with the team they inherited. When it comes to a debate between the company succeeding versus your being comfortable, the CEO will never pick you.

---

Layoffs Suck.

Layoffs initiate feelings of numbness and outrage, fear and self-doubt. People cry at almost every layoff, even if their jobs were spared. Others yell or curse under their breath as they are escorted out of the building, having already handed in their security badges and seeing their work files, along with hundreds or thousands of email threads, no longer relevant, slip from their view.

I’ve seen companies hire armed guards to patrol the building, in case of retaliation, and once arrived at work the morning after a reduction in force to find a brick had been hurled through the HR VP’s office window, making the premises a crime scene.

Layoffs suck. Getting laid off sucks. Seeing coworkers lose their jobs sucks. Laying people off.. sucks. When a company cuts staff, they are admitting something has failed and needs to change. They’re not growing fast enough. Too many people were hired to do not enough things. Something isn’t working. Today, Twitter laid off 336 people. That’s a lot. Not the 30,000 reported layoffs at HP, but a significant number, one that wasn’t supposed to happen at one of the tech industry’s most discussed companies.

In recent months, gallons of digital ink have been spilled on the frothy technology market we see today. Talk of unicorns and skyrocketing Bay Area housing prices focuses a microscope on the top one percent of success, while many on the outside look in wonder why they haven’t joined the vaunted three comma club. Effort and skill aren’t enough. You need luck too.

I’ve been lucky enough (so to speak) to be present at a number of layoff rounds in my near two decades in the Valley. Let’s talk about it. It’s human.

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May 1999

After eight months as an E-commerce analyst at a low-revenue startup during the dotcom heyday, my boss rolled up to my desk in his chair, and in halting English, crowned by his Russian accent, told me the lead investor was done with his little experiment, and we, in two weeks, would no longer have jobs.

His crowning quote: “You and Ferris (my colleague) are laid off. I am fired.”
More: Real Valley Stories: You Stay, Your Boss Has to Go

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January 2001

Somehow I escaped that layoff with my desk intact. I took a different role with the sister company in the same building. While that was unusual, and I put in nearly two solid years at the company, it too fell on hard times.

Our $1 million in seed funding (at a $10 million valuation) was running dry. By the end of 2000, we were asked to work without salary, waiting for a follow-on round that never came.

A few weeks into the new year, my boss, the VP of Marketing, called me into a meeting to say he was laid off. In fact, all of sales, business development, and marketing, myself included, were done. Only the engineers would stay behind to clean up the mess.

I lingered around the full workday, wasting time on the Internet, until a friend flew into the San Francisco Airport, as we were set to go to MacWorld Expo the next day. He helped me lug my PowerMac G4 and monitor to my car, and I was done. The next day we saw Steve Jobs introduce iTunes.

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November 2001

After a brief three weeks out of work, which seemed like an eternity, I landed at a fast-talking hardware storage startup with $30+ million in the bank, en route to a 72 million Series C round that May, which valued us above $300 million. But our gaudy goals, combined with product slips, ruthless competition and a shocked economy after 9/11 meant we just weren’t meeting expectations.

With rumors buzzing in the hallways for weeks, we cut 15–20% of staff on a Friday after Halloween, said goodbye to our crying coworkers, and were battered by a huge reality check. Our charismatic CEO swore up and down in a mandatory all hands meeting that afternoon in the company breakroom that we would never have to experience this again. He was wrong.

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April 2002

Five months later, we had another all hands meeting. But our CEO was missing. In his place, the chairman of the board, who informed us that he, not kidding, was the new CEO and that our previous CEO was visiting family, in Italy.

There was no mob hit, but the following week, we browsed the Active Directory from our Windows machines at the office, and quietly sat shocked as we saw red minus signs on dozens more of our coworkers, whose accounts were immediately made inactive.

I looked up to see two of my best friends in the hard working Inside Sales team grab boxes at their desk, and punched the cubicle wall.

That afternoon, our Marketing Communications Manager, on his honeymoon, called me at my desk to ask about the rumors. I couldn’t tell him that by the time he got back to the office, he’d be without a job. The next Monday, he packed up and joined the ranks of the unemployed.

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June 2005

Having somehow lived through the post 9/11 recession, raising money when we needed it, and delivering a product that just enough customers liked for us to keep the VC checks flowing in, we were on our third CEO, fifth head of marketing, and fourth sales lead. Or something like that. Our stock options had been reverse split twice, first at a 550–1 exchange, and later, 40–1. They were worthless. So there was a lot of grumbling.

Amidst the grumbling, some things were working. The product was starting to find a niche. A few verticals swore by it. And we were able to raise a series AA - a recapitalization that essentially rebooted our financial valuation, and trashed the cap table, wiping out previous investors.

One of the requirements to the raise? Another reduction in force. But this time, instead of sacking the underperforming or most-recently hired, the company excised the bad apples who talked badly about leadership and expected failure.

When their pink slips came, they were happy to get them, and the company was happy to see them go. My old boss, and the IT manager, who closed his own account, literally had tee times set up at the golf course that afternoon, and groused about how long the layoff was taking, so they could make their appointment.

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February 2009

As I pored over the tech newswires, I saw news that our chief competitor,NetApp, had missed earnings, and cut hundreds of jobs. Our newest marketing VP, the sixth to hold the role, had joined us from the NAS storage giant, so during our sales meeting, I tapped her on the shoulder and gave her the news. Her eyebrows shot up. She got up from her laptop, grabbed her phone and went to the hallway to start making calls.

One of those calls was to an ex-colleague of hers who had been impacted. The new marketing VP’s vision? Bring her old friend in as someone she knew, and give me the gift I’d watched play out in front of me many times — the layoff.

By April, I too got pink slipped and was on my own. My running clock of eight and a half years of loyalty got reset to zero.

You can lament the frequent job changers,

but the company doesn’t have loyalty to you.

In business, and particularly in the insular, navel gazing, Silicon Valley, it’s easy go Pollyanna and only talk about good news. The billionaires. The parties. The VC funds and App Store rankings. On the flip side, it can be easy to demonize the bad actors or complain about traffic, and the ripples of corporate decisions. But the truth is always in the fuzzy middle.

Loyalty is wonderful when you find a passion and team you can believe in. But it can all be discarded in an instant, through a fight with a manager, or a merger or acquisition that sees you as redundant. A stock market crash. A change in heart. A bad quarter.

Layoffs happen. They can make you question everything you worked for. All the thousands of hours you put in caring about the little things that got you to where you are. All the conversations and debates that made the product you own.

You have to reexamine what’s important and decide on a new trajectory. And it’s okay to take time to both feel and to heal. Being emotional is part of what makes us human, even in a data-driven world being taken over by robots. So yes, it hurts, and you are going to be angry. Furious even. But being laid off in 2015, in an active tech job world is a much different event than in the tighter, pessimistic environments of 2001 and 2008.

Twitter’s job losses today won’t be the last we’ll hear from current and past unicorns. Those who ride the highest, like Icarus, can be burned by the sun.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which is an occasional partner to Twitter, and assumed competitor in some ways. I have friends at Twitter. And any examples I use here related to my previous work experience are intended to be accurate, even if I missed a date or anecdote.

When Priced for Perfection, Startups Not Given Room for Error

While I maintain the meme of a "billion dollar startup" is a myth, there's a clear reality that some early stage and often pre-revenue, companies are quite publicly obtaining historically high valuations. These big bets by angels and venture capitalists are made with the expectation their investments will pay off, and masterfully well.

Sometimes they do, but often, they don't, and the gap between initial expectations and reality can put incredible pressure on the funded company - not just from those who put money in, but from a closely watching press, and users who want to be part of something exciting.

When a private company sees incredible media visibility, and scores a fast-ramping, highly active customer base, it's usually assumed similarly climbing revenue isn't far behind. For game changers like Facebook and Twitter, who commanded sky high valuations privately before earning them publicly, this made sense. But for companies who are seen to have missed expectations, the descent in public perception and media love can be fast and steep - forcing pivots and other odd behavior  that can be somewhat puzzling to the outside world.

Hey, Didn't You Use to Be Cool?

Image via Dreamstime

This awkward stage is where you see one time shoo-ins for the next big thing, including names like Foursquare, Path, Fab.com and even Square - who now have many people scratching their heads. Instead of talk of near-term IPOs and exceptional user adoption, you see things like Foursquare taking on debt financing and spinning up new apps that bear little resemblance to the much loved 1.0,  Path taking money from an Indonesian VC most people in the Valley have never heard of, Fab.com enduring many rounds of layoffs and Square also taking on debt financing after a rocky year. None of those moves are what I'd bet their founders were hoping for just two or so years ago - when they were rumored to be turning down acquisition offers and debating preferred ticker symbols.

These mega-hyped startups aren't "too big to fail", but they just might be "too big to pivot", and expectations are so stratospheric, that anything less than perfection is perceived as failure.

My Own Experience With a Priced to Perfection Startup

If you allow for a little self-indulgence, I experienced this very thing at BlueArc early in my career, at the end of the first dot com bubble, when next generation storage companies seemed poised to take advantage of unprecedented data growth, and quite possibly unseat market behemoths like Sun Microsystems, EMC and NetApp. In May of 2001, we raised a stunning $72 million round, for 20% of the company, valuing us at about $360 million. Adjusting for inflation and the sky-high valuations of today, that's probably comparable to being valued above a billion now.

The New York Times Coverage from May 2001

Our $360 million valuation was based largely on promise. We had exceptional technology, smart leadership and a good customer pipeline - or so we thought. But we didn't even have revenue yet. And over the next few years, as things didn't go perfectly, we saw the CEO replaced more than once, and later funding rounds forced employees to accept reverse stock splits - first at a whopping 550 to 1 exchange, and later, at a 40 to one exchange. This made my 15,000 options I'd gained when joining the company essentially worthless, and there wasn't a week that went by when we weren't confronted with press inquiries or rumors on the street that we were about to go out of business. (See: How My Stock Got Reverse Split 22,000 to One)

While the company was eventually sold (and not for pennies) to Hitachi Data Systems in 2011, the decade-long road, executive turnover and significant rounds of layoffs weren't anything like those first investors had hoped. The people behind funding our Series A, B and C rounds were largely absent in later raises, as was practically the entire management team. Our customer base also was radically different, as were the market players, with peers like 3Par and Isilon seeing significant success (and larger exits). While we didn't crash and burn as naysayers thought we might, we were victims of our own predicted fast route to success.

So What's the Solution?

There are multiple views to raising and using venture funds. Some would argue to raise only what you need to get you to the next stage, to reduce dilution, maintain control, and lessen demands from outside influencers. Others would say to get as much funding as you can, to provide a long runway, allowing for tinkering and learning what works best. Others still say to raise about 18 months worth.

By taking the big money at big valuations, you're essentially asking for the spotlight, and if things take longer than expected, or aren't as dramatic a success as expected, people's patience grows thin, and the gap between reality and expectations can take a toll. It seems the biggest complaints about these awkward companies who were once youthful darlings isn't that they don't provide a good service now, but that they're not what we expected. After all, you can still get great tips on Foursquare, buy interesting products on Fab.com, take payments on Square and share your moments with friends on Path. But doing so in 2014 feels a little different than it did in 2011, when you were the start of something new.

In some cases, the startups (if that's what they are) are victims of their own rapid rise to success and visibility. If they had instead raised less money, at lower valuations, and not milked the hype machine for what it was worth, they'd be given the benefit of a longer road to success. What I'm seeing now is that we expect them to grow up fast - and if they don't hit it big, we're on to the next thing. But industry interrupters like Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and their equivalents don't come around all too often, and they have become household names in large part because they are the unicorns - the exception to the rule, and not the rule itself.

Just like individual investors can get caught up in fast-rising markets, and find themselves buying at the peak of the market, their funds trapped as value of their owned stock decreases, so too can company executives and employees, with underwater options, or VC partners holding underperforming funds. After a while, you just want to make something out of that investment, just to see some kind of return. And when that pressure finally reaches a tipping point, it gets really uncomfortable. If priced at perfection, there's really no pleasant alternative to just getting it all right.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which partners with and competes with many of the companies mentioned here. No bias intended. I spent 8 1/2 years at BlueArc, and we also occasionally competed with or partnered with the many storage companies mentioned. I did get a check as a common stock holder of BlueArc shares when HDS finally bought them in 2011, but I certainly wish it had been bigger.

What's The Approved and Accepted Way to Make Money?

There's been a lot of talk about money lately here in the Valley, it seems.

Whether it's a product of the exceptional $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook, Google's $3.2 billion Nest buy, the IPOs of Twitter and Facebook, sky-high valuations of private companies, or a real and growing gap between the 1% and the rest, discussion of venture funding rounds and money often appears to be as big a conversation point as the products and innovation that's made this place unique.

As my colleague +Scott Knaster often notes in his blog "Witless to History", he and I are good examples of the typical longtime Silicon Valley employee - people who have been close to the action, but never quite in the center of it. No acquisitions to our name. No multi-million IPOs. But it's not necessarily a lack of effort on our part.

As I wrote nearly five years ago in "Good People, Bad Companies", one typically needs both skill and luck to deliver a dramatic change in life status. Great employees work for mediocre companies, and mediocre employees are sometimes rewarded handsomely for being in the right place at the right time.

So I posited the question, if we celebrate our financially successful entrepreneurs, what about those who've toiled away with similar effort for similar amounts of time, but never got that financial windfall? And in the reverse, what about people who have made quite a bit of cash, but didn't go the textbook route?

What if a person who had put in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, got lucky by striking it rich on the Lottery and, instead of making $20 million via some acquihire, they made $20 million by picking the right six numbers? Is that someone who should be held in the same level of esteem?

What if they took a two week vacation and played their cards right, making millions at a World Poker Tour event? You may not like watching poker on TV, but you'll find some of the best players come from the Ivy League schools with top degrees, but they prefer pocket Jacks to JavaScript - so they're smart folks practicing their craft.

What if their "Poor Aunt Hortense" passed on and left them some money, or  what if they correctly saw that marijuana related stocks were going to go nuts on the NASDAQ this January, and they made ten times their money? Would they be congratulated?

Silly questions, maybe - but not any more silly than writing posts about how Box CEO Aaron Levie has a "small" position of around 4 to 5% of his white hot company. If we are at the point now where having single digit percentages of stock of a company worth billions of dollars is to be mocked, I too look forward to being mocked in the same way.

It seems to me that while we recognize the true value of an individual extends well beyond their bank account, the entire plot of which companies are raising funds, which funds are raising rounds, which companies are valued at what, and which people made cash is outstripping the story behind why some of them are making money.

The technology that many of these newly rich people have invented or impacted is changing people's lives for the better - be it in connecting people around the world, saving energy, or keeping memories safe forever. They're taking risks and solving problems that are hard - and that dedication is being rewarded. And that should be okay - as should the rare soul with the mathematical chops to make it big in the professional poker world (it's super duper hard), or the guts to pick stocks worth less than a penny, and see potential. If you do it right, consistently, why not reap in the rewards?

What I think we risk by acting as commentators on what people make as much as we are commentators and users as what people actually create, is that we start to reinforce a false mantra that those with greater wealth are those with greater worth. People who do exceptional things have been compensated at exceptional levels for a long time, be it in business, sports or entertainment. And there are no guarantees. As I wrote back in August, it can take an equity event (or two) for an entrepreneur to even afford to stay in the Valley, so you're seeing people play Frogger on LinkedIn, moving from hot company to hot company, hoping to stay on the right one that helps them leapfrog tax brackets.

The 20th hire at a multi-billion dollar acquisition will always make more money than the co-founders of a non-profit, no matter how hard either of them works. That they ensured the financial well being of their family, possibly for generations, is to be lauded. But it doesn't make them better human beings. It's important for us to not lose sight of those for whom there are other goals, or for whom luck has not always been there. It's very hard to win the Lotto.

Disclosures (per usual): Google owns Nest. I own Nest products. I'm not great at poker, but wish I were. I do play the stock market, sometimes even those penny stocks - because, why not.

Either you are in Engineering, or you are in Sales.

At BlueArc, our longtime CEO and executive chairman Gianluca Rattazzi had a saying which he often weaved into his presentations at our company all-hands meetings. "Either you are in engineering, or you are in sales."

The idea was to have employees from all corners of the company take ownership of our shared revenue goals, or think about what each of us could do, whether we were in Marketing, HR, Finance or Support, to encourage us to meet our number. Even if we weren't dialing for dollars or meeting with customers, if we weren't the people actually building the product ourselves, we had to think like salespeople. It also was aimed to reduce conflict between teams, as we wouldn't shake our heads at the antics of account managers, or point fingers when one territory or account proved harder than expected.

Meanwhile, engineers have to keep being focused on what they do best, which is design and deliver incredible products. Most engineers, as Dilbert often points out, make terrible sales people. They would likely rush to tell you the product's latest flaw or highlight the bug list of the week instead of working to find a way to make the current offering fit your needs - which would delay or block the sales cycle.

As I see it, product managers are the buffer between engineers and marketing. Marketing is the buffer between product management and the real world (aka the customers and press). Between those two hops, code turns into features, and features turn into benefits. If lucky, those benefits can turn into revenue, and as most companies tell you, revenue solves all problems.

Which brings us back to the split - either you are in engineering, or you are in sales. Even if you don't carry a quota-bearing number, as an employee of a company, you take some amount of pride from the work delivered there. When the company is having a hard time, you have a hard time. When the company is preparing a new product, you are probably eager to try that product, and tell the world about it.

At Google, as I mentioned last November, that process includes early access and beta testing, which we call dogfooding. Many of us are lucky enough to get early access to things like +Google Glass or the Chromebook Pixel. We are more likely to be using a Nexus 5, Nexus 7 or Moto X than the average +Android user, and have a more-encompassing understanding of the company's vision and products than those outside the company.

As an early adopter and technology enthusiast, promoting products I like is second nature. I've been touting ChromeOS for years. I switched to Android well before picking up a Google badge. I always tell people when products I like are fantastic. And that extends to visionary new ideas like Google Glass. I've recently seen some memes on various tech blogs about a perceived dropoff in use by Google employees of this early version of the product - saying the product should be so fantastic that people clamor to use it, and trying to read the tea leaves into saying the product won't succeed - a curious proposition considering it hasn't even launched yet beyond a small circle of Glass Explorers.

My Kids, Racing #throughglass

Without diving too deep into those weeds, I can say I do use it, and I find having a first-person view for recording video and taking photos incredibly valuable. I get instant notifications of email and texts and can respond by voice, hands-free. And wherever I go while wearing Glass, the questions are from excited people who are delighted to see how simple it is to use, not to mention how it non-intrusively lets me continue a conversation, while making eye contact, with the small viewer being out of the way. I take Glass with me on walks to the park with my kids. I took Glass with me to the +San Francisco Zoo on Monday. It becomes another lightweight way to capture the experience.

A View of My Wife and Twins #throughglass

If you're inclined to be skeptical, and that sounds like sales, that brings us back to the original thought - as an employee of a company that makes things, you represent the product. You can help others see how a product can be used, and if you're spotted using the competitor's phone or OS, or you prefer a competitive service or platform, people see that. That's part of why Steve Ballmer's kids weren't even allowed to have iPods and Bill Gates' kids used MSN search instead of Google. Those kids didn't work for Microsoft, but by extension, it would be a fairly bad case study to see them using competitive products.

The good news is I don't believe I'm at a place where I'm asked to use low-quality products like the Zune and MSN Search. It's easy to get excited about products that are making it easier to get information and share updates more quickly, or to get to my data no matter where I am, from any device. I can't go back twenty years and become an engineer, taking all the required computer science courses needed to be the true alpha geek, but I know I can do my part to improve the product from the inside, and tell the world about it on the outside. Think about yourself in your role. If you're not in engineering, aren't you in sales?

Disclosures: I work for Google, obviously. I often get to dogfood our products, like Glass, the Chromebook Pixel and others, free of charge. I paid retail price for my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7, and prefer Android to alternatives. If I forgot a disclosure, I should disclose that too.

Real Valley Stories: "The Missiles are in the Air... Please Stay"

Editor's Note: Part 10 in an irregular series of stories from my 15 years in Silicon Valley. Part 9 talked about the time I emailed the entire company about impending layoffs days before they took place. This time, a story about how, during a stressful time at the office, I got a job offer at a competitor, and over not much more than a weekend's time, rescinded and stayed instead - all while gaining new promises for career growth.

Ten years ago was a time of change, or so it seemed. I'd just gotten married, and Silicon Valley was in the throes of a deep recession. The once-packed highways became easy to drive again. Parking lots were empty and constructed buildings didn't have any tenants. Two-plus years into my job, we'd already seen our unfair share of peaks and valleys. The CEO had been replaced, as had our VP of Sales, and the Marketing team had almost completely turned over, making me one of the more senior folks, surprisingly. But while I believed in our technology, our future was not certain, so when a former colleague gave me a call, asking me to interview at his new startup, I figured I'd give it a try.

At the time, amid a national recession, and extreme risk aversion by our target customer base to test and deploy equipment from startups, meeting our numbers each quarter was challenging, to say the least. On the marketing side, we found our budgets compressed down to nearly zero, and our options were increasingly limited. Our trade show and travel budget was eliminated. Our online advertising budget was deleted. We even took our PR work completely in house, paying only for the typical wire service fees, followed by strategic emails or phone calls from me to press to push the success stories we did have, or try to take the reporters off the scent of how dire things seemed.

The Friend Throws Me a Job Opportunity

Then came the phone call. A former director of product marketing who'd found a new home asked me to come in and interview for the role of digital marketing manager. I polished up the resume and started the process - talking to the hiring manager by phone, and eventually coming in for an interview.

Stepping into the competitor's office was a dramatically different feeling than the quiet library-like ghost town of the startup where I worked. This one sported bright colors and the fresh smell of new venture funding, being bankrolled by one of the Valley's biggest names. The interviews went well, and I remember specifically driving them to be a pioneer in the space, using Google's AdWords, which at the time were untapped waters for the industry, and could be a fast way to get inexpensive leads.

A few days later, on a Friday, I got a phone call, and they wanted to move forward. I got the job. They wanted me to start as soon as possible, which put the ball in my court, to call HR and let my employer know I was leaving. So the next day, on Saturday, I called the VP of Human Resources, catching him at a kid's softball game. I told him I didn't want a lot of drama around my leaving, that I just wanted to be done by that Friday of that week. The sooner out, the better. I was excited about moving on.

The Best Phone Call from HR Ever - and a Note from the CEO

The next morning, Sunday, I checked my work email and saw a rare message from the CEO, with a simple subject line: "please stay". The body of the message too was short, but said he was traveling to Europe, didn't want to lose me, and to reach out any time. That was interesting.

Later that day, the VP of HR emailed to say he wanted to talk that night. So I awaited his call. Overnight, I'd gone from having two feet out the door and feeling like a low-level peon to someone who'd gotten the attention of senior management. My wife, appropriately, rolled her eyes, and told me to be wary.

Which Direction to Take?

That night, he called. It was after 10 in the evening, and I paced back and forth in my apartment kitchen, telling him how with our company's situation, and recent changes in the marketing team, I just didn't see a route for us to be successful. Citing Bush's comments at the time as we started battles in Iraq, I said, "Marketing needs a regime change." Seconds later, he answered with the coolest line I've ever heard from HR. "Louis, the missiles are in the air."

From that moment, the tone changed - not from one where I was on the way out, but to one where I said what I would need to stick around, including the obvious meeting or exceeding in compensation, but additional responsibilities, and transfering to a new boss, whom I'd already had a ton of respect for.

Never Take the Counter-Offer?

That made Monday awkward. In addition to putting through my usual tasks, I met quietly with the HR VP again and practically every roadblock I saw as preventing me from staying was knocked down. I was promised the salary match, a title change, and a changed reporting structure. The people who had limited my ability to succeed were going to be out of the way. And all it took was my sending a note back to the competitor that I had rescinded the offer. I obviously couldn't tell them why, but I had to let them know.

You read in career guidance books to never take the counter-offer. Despite any financial gains, the reason you were interested in leaving is usually still the same. The people are usually the same. But I drafted a "Sorry but..." letter and sent it off. This no doubt surprised them, and it really burned my friend, who'd brought me in, as he left me a livid voice mail which landed me on his bad list for years to come.

And yes, I was immediately worried I'd flubbed the decision - especially as I saw this company eventually launch, put out their share of positive releases, and have glitzy booths at our mutual events. But their star faded, even as I got more opportunities to own our strategic direction and help the company grow out of its darkest points through new product introductions, several cycles of upgrades, dramatic customer expansion and eventually, an IPO filing - although we never did quite make it.

The biggest surprise in all this, even during the darkest times for us as a company and as an industry wasn't that I could find a new role, or that things ended up right after all, but that I had allies higher in the food chain than I had ever anticipated - people who agreed with my views, and respected me to the point that they would give me an opportunity to succeed on a path I saw made sense.

And those missiles that were in the air? They landed, and eventually the people that were slowing us down and making roadblocks for me and the company found new roles somewhere else. As for the company that almost pulled me away? They never went public, instead selling back to their primary investor. They burned bright for a short minute and eventually faded away. It turned out I had made the right choice.

You Don't Get Any Participation Medals for Just Showing Up

"I need some record of you being in this class," hissed my 8th grade math teacher, looking at me and pointing to my lowly 5% grade to date in his course after ten assignments, by far the lowest mark in the class. My not so glowing 50 points out of a possible 1,000 was the product of many days' not turning in homework, as my continued refrain of "I'll get to it tomorrow" started to become an impossibility to tackle.

Each day I told myself I'd eventually get to the previous day's assignments, taking a penalty for my lateness, but part of me knew I'd just float through the day to day and try to make it up on the tests. For me, it was proving I knew the answers - conveying mastery of the subject. Yet for my grade, it was proving that not only did I know the answers, but I was willing to do the work. Just showing up wasn't enough.

For the past 15 years, I've been working in Silicon Valley, and I've encountered an incredible mix of people who perform as if they are on different gears. Some work incredibly hard, and are driven to succeed at practically any cost, refusing to let traditional limits get in their way. Others seem almost crestfallen if they can't keep up with those gracing magazine covers simply by being in the right place at the right time. And the truth is that life's not perfect. There is an intersection of skill and luck that very often sees great employees at bad businesses punished for their career choices, while less impactful employees at incredible companies gain the benefit of their colleagues' work.

From the outside looking in, Silicon Valley might look like a technology-centric Disneyland, where the future can be experienced today, where dreams can get funded, and you can't walk down the sidewalk without knocking shoulders with millionaires. But every success story you read, and those people who become household names, be they Steve Jobs, Meg Whitman, Larry Ellison or Marissa Mayer, came not as a product of pure luck, but the application of effort against risk.

Risk Is Often Required If Something Is Worth Doing

I remember sitting around our corporate boardroom one afternoon ten or so years ago, as an account manager on our team explained why we had been unable to close a once-promising deal. He said, paraphrasing with some angst, "In his business, the IT manager's job is to reduce risk. At our stage, we're all about risk." And it was true. While our more established competitors didn't have all the whiz-bang capabilities our devices did, what they did offer was a track record of success, integration with top partners, security, and all those things that moved risk out of the data center. We had to look elsewhere to find customers more willing to take a bit and absorb some risk, in exchange for our differentiation.

Which brings us back to "just showing up".

I spent my first three years in the Valley working at two very small startups. The first didn't have any revenue, and some odd ideas. When the founder was let go, the sister company asked me to stay on, and we worked hard at bringing traditional office tasks to the Web. The work was good, and our customers liked our products, but we weren't growing fast enough. When we went out to raise a $10 million B round, we came up light, and that was the end of my tenure. But as we were plodding along with our incremental growth, it seemed like everyone around us was going public, making money and buying homes - which to us was pure fantasy. Some of our best engineers took other jobs, and spoke openly about the frustrations they felt when all their friends were getting rich, while we were still bringing our food in a bag lunch and eating at our desks.

Even in a bubble, showing up wasn't enough. At my next company, where I spent 8+ years, we had enough spikes and troughs to fill a novel. Maybe some day I'll write it. We scored several rounds of venture funding, several rounds of layoffs, and filed to go public, not once, but twice. The company eventually sold for a good amount after I had left, but not before a number of upstarts had soared past us, having much more profitable exits, at valuations anywhere from 4 to 5 what our exit had been. And while we could feel bad about not having hit a home run, I was all too aware of the many other players in our industry who had already gone bankrupt, or returned money to the original VCs, lacking a business model, and other former colleagues who had bounced from company to company in search of something that stuck.

I've always been raised with the mantra that nine out of ten startups fail. I've seen other ratios with different numbers, but the truth is that the overwhelming majority of small business concepts, even those with venture funding, don't have a positive exit, and it's a much rarer one that sees the founders and employees strike it big. For every market sensation like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tesla or Spotify, you have scads of others with software products few wanted, or website plays that have seen their URLs turn into dead links.

In the big race of keeping up with the Joneses, especially in an area ripe with exceptional people who have impacted history, seeing others' success can make it seem easy. Easy to start a company. Easy to start a venture fund. Easy to find customers. Easy to do practically anything. But it's not. I remember the wave of aspiring dotcom millionaires who came from around the country sporting MBAs, only to return when things got tough. And I remember the stories of former Business Development managers loading luggage at the airport when jobs were scarce. Success is not doled out equally and fairly, and the best products and best people don't always get rewarded. But the equation improves with incredible market study, exceptional effort, and the self-awareness to make change where it's required at the right time.

Do read up on the world's successful people, as I remember doing in college, checking out "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" from the Berkeley city library. Do make yourself aware of their smart strategies and innovative products. But don't forget the hard work and effort required that set them up with a greater likelihood to succeed. Or you'll be like I was in 8th grade -- getting dressed down publicly by my teacher who questioned why I was even there at all if I wasn't going to do the bare minimum.

Disclosures for fun: I worked at BlueArc from 2001-09 and owned options, as well as stock acquired in the company's 2005 AA round. These converted to shares when HDS purchased the company in 2011. I currently work at Google, and any references to their competitors or partners are just part of the story and presented without intended bias.

Balancing Act: Building for Both Future and Current Users

As companies mature and gain an installed user base, it can become easy to continue forward with incremental and iterative updates that bring features that improve customer satisfaction, but much more challenging to step outside the comfort zone and try something new. Usually, with rare exceptions, to create a new idea and marketplace, it takes new people and a new company with a new goal.

In Silicon Valley, it's more accepted that you will challenge the status quo and take a higher level of risk. Companies' ability to innovate is often measured by how much they spend on research and development, but new products that haven't yet debuted often take attention away from users on the products that are bringing in revenue today. How you manage this balancing act of preparing for a future, while managing the present, can have dramatic impact on your quarterly earnings sheet, and how you're perceived by your customer base.

One of the most well-known quotes bandied about in front offices comes from sports legend Wayne Gretzky, who said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been," which can be boiled down to preparing your company and product line for future years, not for what's already happened. Companies like Google (where I work), Apple, Tesla and others are well known for creating new product lines for future customers and helping convince new audiences that their inventions will have an impact on their lives.

But to create new services best categorized as potential can come as risk if you take your eye off the ball and discard existing customers and their interests. I remember having a discussion with Apple's Ellen Hancock way back in 1997, when she was speaking at Berkeley's Macintosh Users' Group (BMUG). To hear her story, Apple, deep in a mess of trouble at that time, had big plans to revamp their operating system to a next-generation OS called Copland, but hadn't planned any updates to their existing product for more than a year.

Her quote, from my story in the Daily Cal that day: "I said, 'What do we have planned between July 1996 and December 1997?' and they said, 'Nothing...' I said, 'I think that's strange -- we have 25 million users; don't you think they want anything?'"

Somehow, in the excitement over Copland, Apple had asked their 25 million user installed base to wait around and be patient for them to get their act together. Hancock, who no doubt painted her role as a glowing benefactor, pushed the company to make improvements to the aging Mac OS in parallel, bringing value to that installed base, while the company continued efforts on the future product that never did quite make it out the door. (Postscript: Hancock was later demoted by Apple CEO Gil Amelio and had run-ins with Steve Jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal) 

In my own career, I've seen this push/pull relationship between future product lines and enhancements to existing lines rear up regularly.

In my eight years working in Marketing at BlueArc, a network storage provider, from 2001-09, I often found we would put practically all our engineering resources on one product line instead of another, instead of assigning some product leads to one task and a second group to the other. We would go "all in" on the high end product, launch it, and then turn around and go full bore on the low end product, and then repeat. There was no balance at all - the result of having a scarcity of people available and trying to compete with market heavyweights with significant resources.

In the meantime, while working on the successor to the current generation of hardware, our existing users practically served to annoy us with their problems which we hoped to eliminate once the new new thing came out. There always came a point in the support chain when we would find them an upgrade path to the next generation - if simply to alleviate the problems with the existing one.

Even earlier, when I was at 3Cube from 1999-2001, we had two product lines. One was a Web faxing service that wasn't sexy, but brought in practically all our revenue, especially from broadcast faxing customers. The second was a conference call and early stage Web meeting service. As I highlighted way back in 2006, our meeting platform was the first volley into building an online office suite called OfficeCube. Our small engineering resources were all focused on this future product - to promote the next stage in our growth, even while our existing customers saw innovation in our core service stall. I remember aggressive and frustrating discussions from our business development and sales lead who begged for us to do something to promote the product we were getting our money from, going so far to call our future suite vaporware - which eventually turned out correct.

For smaller companies, especially startups, where revenue has not materialized, a change in course to a future product is well-known as a pivot. It's easier to pivot when you're not walking away from an installed base and needing to have revenue each quarter than it is to tell an established company to change course. Apple's pivot from PC maker to lifestyle device maker took years and incredible effort - and their success is so well-known in part because it's so challenging. Other companies previously well-known for their hardware and software leadership turn, like product managers going the VC route, in companies that live off service and consulting revenue instead.

The topic of branding and marketing is a long one, with libraries full of books on what defines a company's personality and culture. When I see brand extensions from companies I know, I'm always curious what they're trying -- if this new product is a move to evolve their story, a grab at a growing market, a desire for an increased balance sheet, or if they can solve an issue for customers that nobody else can. When you start to tell your own customers that you represent something new now, and that what they've known you as and expected from you is changing, you had better know you're making the right move, and not abandoning what's concrete for something grounded mostly in potential.

Usual Disclosures: I work at Google, which is in a variety of businesses. This isn't intended as a commentary on any of those projects. I don't currently own any stock in Apple or Tesla, but have before and might again if the price is right.

Don't Confuse Effort With Results

Posting that you're "Hustlin'" doesn't provide you with a higher paycheck.

"Hustlin'" doesn't make your product better, or your sales pitch any more strong. It probably doesn't have a lot of impact on the macroeconomic climate, and shouldn't sway consumers to your company instead of that from the competition. Similarly, there are no certificates given for the most harried-looking people, who can often be seen running around stressed from meeting to double booked meeting, and saying they can't possibly be aware of your last update, let alone the outside world, because they are snowed in under a mountain of e-mail.

What I've seen from my near 15 years working in Silicon Valley is that, often in concert with our "burn the midnight oil" philosophy, people aggressively try to prove their value through how busy they appear. Yet for every salesperson or product marketing manager who can't get back to you, there are anonymous genius coders who still manage to surf Reddit and take casual lunch breaks without the company falling apart.

A prescient tweet from Hunter Walk, recent Xooglr.

Being excessively "busy" is not to be celebrated. Instead, it could be displaying that you are overmatched in your role. Work is not supposed to be a life of leisure, but if you really do have thousands of unread items in your email box (I've seen people with almost 100,000 and usually have zero myself), or can't find a hole in your calendar to "catch up", there's probably something wrong with your time management.

Meanwhile, the simple fact that you took an effort isn't something you can cash. After one too many failed demand generation campaigns or trade shows that didn't pan out, I remember my boss, the VP of Marketing, saying "Don't confuse effort with results." Just because I, and my team, had worked hard didn't mean the numbers were there to justify what we had done.

Admittedly, it's especially easy in Marketing to do activity for activity's sake. How many weekly status meetings have I endured, hearing people run through their list of completed tasks that may not have pushed the ball forward, but instead kept them occupied the previous week? How many client meetings and vendor calls and messaging workshops were less than impactful? After a while, it's as if there are three different groups in the room - those who realize the activity is just to say something happened, those still talking, and the last people who haven't gone yet, waiting to fluff up their own reports to outdo the last guy.

The secret comes in determining the right measurements and data that shed light on where you can make impact. Carving away the bits that are trivial, and hitting the Archive button instead of reply, can be transformative for you and your goals.

That's not to say a strong work ethic isn't valued. I've never been very good at taking vacations and often joke that if you are a salaried employee, there are no days off, as you're paid the same any hour of the day, year round, not just Monday to Friday. But being good at what you do is made even stronger when you're efficient at it, and accomplish all you need to. That means not feeling the need to tell the world you're "Hustlin'", not having to declare email bankruptcy, or looking like you're in the midst of drowning when deadlines approach.

Being busy doesn't make you incredible. Being incredible can make you busy. Some of the best people in technology know when to turn off all the distractions so they don't crush everything in their path. Even Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, famously leaves work at 5:30 every evening, and maintains successful life balance. The thought is, "if she can do it, why can't you?", but the underlying issue is one of prioritization, filtering and execution when much is expected.

Just because you put in the hours, hustled a little bit and did what was expected, doesn't always mean the results will be there. You have to know what your goals are, and watch your results constantly to tie activity to impact. So the next time you read that someone is "Hustlin'" or run into a colleague who can't wait to tell you how busy and overloaded they are, just wonder why that is, and how you can avoid it.

Real Valley Stories: Rejecting the Closed Envelope

Editor's Note: Part 8 in an irregular series of stories from my 13 years in Silicon Valley. Part 7 talked about the leveraging your assets to get your way. This time, a real example of knowing when you're undervalued, and how to get what you deserve.

Not every Silicon Valley company has a smooth trajectory, and neither does the average career. Startups fail and career paths stall. You can run into bosses that don't get you, miss promotions, or find yourself excelling as a rare star at a company that simply isn't going anywhere. Fairy tale stories are often just that - fairy tales. In the real world, you need to be executing on what you've been asked, but constantly assessing your place, if you are rightly fit, or on a path to what you want to achieve.

Being a long-time employee for most of the last decade at a startup that went through many funding rounds and saw a practical carousel door in the VPs and CEO office, it probably comes as no surprise that I accrued a solid amount of company history and irreplaceable knowledge, but had to continuously reprove myself to new people who had just joined. Sometimes, the convincing was easy, through consistent work, but other times, it seemed nearly impossible, as if we were two people speaking a completely different language.

If explaining one's work product or role in a shifting company was hard, it was equally challenging to assess if an employee was compensated appropriately relative to their peers, if promotions had regularly taken place, and if one's stock options were valuable or worthless, depending when they came into the company, what round of funding we were aiming for at the time, or how well they had negotiated coming in the door.

After one recapitalization round, which had essentially wiped out our existing shareholders and started over, I found myself in a meeting with our VP of Marketing, talking about my job performance and how the company planned to reissue options to employees so we weren't completely underwater, having watched our existing stock reverse split to hell. As he tried to put me at ease that I was being taken care of, he reached forward, past his computer monitor, to a stack of white envelopes, the top of which had my name on it.

Inside the envelope, presumably, was the latest stock option grant - a new gift of shares in the company, which, once again, would maybe be worth something if we went public or were purchased, but were just as likely to expire worthless, as all the others had. As he lifted my envelope up and tried to give it to me, I interrupted and said, in a rare point of clarity, that I didn't want it, and no matter what it said, it wasn't what I deserved.

This startled him a bit, and I explained that I was familiar with how stock options were allocated, with the CEO and board of directors taking their share after the VCs had their stake, followed by the senior management team, the VPs, the Directors, and eventually, the working stiffs like me. I knew that my previous humility and hard work had set me up to get screwed, again, because I hadn't fought harder for a bigger title and all the rewards that came with it, from salary to stock.

Following on, I addressed the issue directly, saying I'd never been one to fight for promotions and titles, that I just wanted to do a good job, but that I had seen the only way one could get promoted or get a raise at the company was to solicit an offer from a competitor, only to rescind it later. I looked my boss straight in the eye, and coldly said, "Let's skip that step."

The move was a gutsy one, but one I felt I had every right taking, having committed untold hours and several years of my career already into the company, without being promoted, and getting the stock options others with higher job titles were no doubt getting. My boss and I spoke further, and he heard me loud and clear. The envelope went back on his desk, and we wrapped the meeting, my heart beating quickly, but my mind feeling steady. As I headed back to my desk, he did exactly what I had hoped he would, taking a two door trip down to the VP of HR's office to discuss the situation.

A few weeks went by, but shortly afterward, I was invited back into his office, this time with a plan that included a new envelope, with new numbers on it. In addition to the new stock options offer, I was given a promotion, and a plan to work my way into a second promotion the following year, that would see a commensurate salary increase and stock option bump. As time went on, true to his word, and due to my own efforts, of course, that too took place - as the company, with my VP, recognized the value I had brought for years, and continued to bring, and helped me take on more responsibility and finally be compensated the way I thought I should.

As I wrote in July about leveraging one's assets to get one's way, the risk I took was one where I was arguing from a position of strength. I was confident that I was delivering good work that I could be proud of, which could be measured. I had seen other great colleagues get stuck in their careers, and have to get alternative offers from competitors before seeing a career bump with our firm. I knew nobody wanted that headache, and that I could get other jobs if my brazen act went sideways. But it didn't. I knew the sealed envelope didn't have what I wanted, and I knew I was in the position to call them on it.

There are times to be humble, to keep your head down and do your work. There are sometimes economic realities at companies and industries which might prevent you from getting what you think you deserve. But if there's a mismatch between what you're delivering, and you see an opportunity, assess where you are and take the opportunity to make it right. Good people and good companies never want to see the strong talent go out the door, and happy employees usually end up working even harder and being more loyal. I'm glad I finally found a VP who got it and was willing to listen. And that's a real Valley story.