Despite these ominous signs, I gushed to friends about how I couldn't wait to take leave from medical school to start my exotic new job. Sounds crazy, I know, but I can explain it in two words: Jim Jones. It was like everyone in the dot-com world - from board members and investors to employees paid in soon-to-be worthless stock options - had imbibed from the same keg of Kool-Aid. The result: mass delusion as sweeping as that at Jonestown. In order to join a dot-com, you had to completely suspend your disbelief. We were, after all, "venturing into uncharted territory," "breaking away from conventional paradigms" and "tearing up the old rules."
And I was willing to drink the sickly sweet punch - if only because everyone else was. I'd never worked at an Internet company, or a startup of any kind, and frankly, these people seemed to be doing well. They drove $60,000 cars. They thought nothing of spending $20 on lunch each day. Our CEO had started a company that sold to Mattel for $26 million. Our investors included former Netscape guru Jim Clark and the most prestigious backer of all, the valley's VC firm of the moment, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Who was I to question their wisdom?
I didn't panic. Then on my first day on the job I learned that Kibu's business model was just that - a model. Our plan was built on something called "online integrated marketing," but no one seemed able to explain what this meant in practice. According to our CEO, it had something to do with girls getting redeemable points for responding to surveys furnished by our sponsors. Never mind that we had neither sponsor surveys nor an audience of teen girls. Apparently, we would also make money through e-commerce. The only problem was, we didn't have any products to sell. As far as I could tell, the only thing Kibu actually produced - and quite successfully, thanks to our savvy publicist - was an avalanche of splashy press releases promising both a unique Web community and a revenue stream. It was genius: from the Wall Street Journal to the Hollywood Reporter, the PR blitz spawned dozens of fawning articles. Over time we began to believe our own hype. In fact, we became our own biggest fans.
Which is why I still wasn't particularly worried when on my second day, the weekly companywide all-hands meeting consisted of singing "Happy Birthday" (no one broke 30), complimenting a staffer on her "hot" red leather pants, sharing "your most embarrassing story" (most had something to do with wrap-around skirts falling off at inopportune times) and congratulating ourselves on how great we were. It reminded me of being in a room full of cheerleaders. No matter what someone said ("It's Tuesday," "That's Shannon's sushi"), it was always followed by a cacophony of high-pitched whistles and applause. This was our company "culture." And according to our CEO, the culture was as important as the product. As a result, we accomplished nothing at these weekly meetings, but boy, did we love ourselves.
So I was surprised when the editorial meeting I called the next day turned out to be not another chummy lovefest, but the most frustrating meeting I'd ever run - and this includes the time I volunteered to lead a group of troubled teens in prison. After some witty introductory remarks, I handed out proposed deadlines and production schedules for each channel, which were met not with appreciation or relief ("We need structure!" the Faces had beseeched at the prelaunch party), but with dead silence and blank stares. The only noise in the room came from a dropped metal hair clip that the Face of Hair was using to style the Face of Books' hair.
I explained that I would help the Faces brainstorm, generate ideas and refine their pieces, but it soon became apparent that the Faces thought I'd be writing their copy for them. It was like an encounter group gone awry: Tears were shed. Voices were raised. Whining resounded. I went from savior to devil in 30 minutes. Still, I thought, everything would be OK. We'd just launched; people were understandably anxious. To calm everyone down, I decided to meet with each Face one-on-one to discuss his or her role.
But first, I wanted to check in with our CEO, who had pre-emptively declared that she didn't like to get "bogged down with details." I gave her the big picture: We didn't yet have the budget, staff or sponsors to support 20 channels. I suggested consolidating some channels and discarding others - like Animals - that seemed doomed to unprofitability (most 17-year-old girls are more interested in penises than in pandas).
That meant some Faces would have to be fired. "OK, you can let them go," the CEO replied. I mentioned that maybe she should be the one to do that since, well, I'd barely met these people, nor did I hire them. But she was adamant that I wield the ax. "And they're not being fired," she corrected me. "They're being unhired." Apparently, "firing" was bad for the culture.
The Face of Animals took her unhiring gracefully (she had a day job at the local zoo), but the Face of Advice immediately burst into tears. This was followed by pleading ("The girls need me!"), hysteria (hiccupy sobbing), threats ("I want my image taken off the site immediately!") and although I'm no therapist, what seemed like suicidal ideation ("This job meant everything to me! It was my life!"). To make matters worse, I canceled the Face of Advice's upcoming story, "How to Deal With Rejection." A couple days later, I called to see how she was doing. "I still can't believe I'm being fired!" she wailed. "Oh, no," I assured her. "You're not being fired. You're just being, you know, unhired." It didn't sound that strange at the time.
The Kool-Aid's buzz really began to wear off after I met one-on-one with the remaining Faces to discuss their respective channels. To be fair, all of them were incredibly nice and talented people. But by no fault of their own, most had been hired to do a job for which they weren't qualified. Over the course of these meetings, I learned that the Face of Horoscopes didn't "believe in astrology"; the Face of Fashion (who drove a Porsche and had a condo in Hawaii) kept forgetting that teen girls shop at Gap, not Gucci; the Face of Beauty used the word luscious so incessantly (luscious lipstick, luscious liner, luscious lids) that when I did a search for "luscious" and left "replace with" blank, her word count shot down by 30; and the Face of Guys (a Backstreet Boys look-alike) thought I was being unreasonable because I wouldn't let him wax poetic about his favorite men's magazine, Maxim, on a site that was supposed to be providing "insight" and "inspiration" to teen girls.
