May 24, 2005 - Lunch at Faz Restaurant Sunnyvale

May 24, 2005 – Lunch at Faz Restaurant Sunnyvale

I had lunch today at Faz Restaurant in the Sheraton Hotel near the junction of Mathilda Avenue and California Highway 101 and 235 with Mr. G, a VP at a small start-up company in Mountain View making audio accessories for the burgeoning MP3 player market. I first met Mr. G when he was a VP at a larger Silicon Valley semiconductor company and I was a magazine editor over fifteen years ago. As with most folks who have kicked around the Santa Clara Valley electronics industry, we kept running into one another until one day in 2000 we found ourselves at the same company, a start-up with ambitions of being acquired for an ungodly amount of money. By this time we’re both older employees in our 50s, but age was not a consideration on a job market where talent was scarce and wages were being bid up to acquire that talent. All things come to an end, as did the glorious days of the venture capital inflated dotcom bubble. As the implosion took place I was first to be let go and he followed soon after.

Mr. G’s strength is his Rolodex and his years of experience selling semiconductor high tech. His contacts provided him a sporadic stream of consulting gigs. He explained that he often worked on projects for a few months and was let go when the project completed. He recounted the one consulting job where he was doing the job for someone the new CEO of the company wanted but had to wait for. The job he has currently, he came by during an angel investor gathering, “speed dating but the participants are interested in a financial relationship.” Mr. G asked the CEO about his company and afterwards asked him what he needed beside money. “I need a VP of Business Development.” Mr. G said, “that's what I do, hire me.” The CEO was interested and several meetings later, Mr. G has a new business card and is selling consumer MP3 player accessories. He’s in good humor today as he recites his story.

I asked him about his experience with start-up companies—he’s been through quite a few in the past several years as an employee as well as a consultant. “Start ups are always looking for money,” he said. I imagined an infant’s craving a constant flow of milk. “You need money to get the product developed, then money to market the product. It never seems to stop.” Was that the case for his new company? “They developed the product on their own funds, he says after being encouraged by a customer who needed what they were building. The product got developed and the customer purchased enough product to get the business started. The one order begat more orders and the company began to grow. The need for money never goes away, Mr. G pointed out. Now, the money is needed to expand production and continue R&D for the next new product.

I asked him what it was like trying to find work. It wasn’t pleasant he recounted. It seemed that all the places headhunters sent him to interview, the guy on the other side of the desk was a 35-year-old, who looked at Mr. G and saw his father. Mr. G looked across the desk and saw his son. I knew the feeling. I had seen a number of 35-year-olds behind desks myself. It’s age discrimination pure and simple, but if I were the younger guy or gal, I probably wouldn’t want to hire my dad either. During the last time I looked for work, I was advised by a headhunter that at my age I needed to find people I knew who would create a job for me to take advantage of my skills. As I look back on my life, the first few jobs out of the Navy and later when I graduated college were the only ones I ever got using my resume.

Mr. G observed that headhunters had likewise changed. No longer were they the independents that used their Rolodex and relationships to place guys like Mr. G and me. Most had gone out of business in the last downturn or were absorbed by larger ones. And behind the desks of all those larger firms were 35-year-olds, who saw a difficult placement on the other side of the desk. Someone looking for a job in this market can expect to spend up to two years trying to find permanent employment, Mr. G contends. Still, the market is not biased when it comes to getting work. College graduates are looking at the same difficult job market, not because the economy is depressed, but rather because of increased competition from outsourced labor abroad. Why hire an American worker with a college degree and demanding a high salary and benefits package when you can hire an equally qualified employee abroad for a tenth the salary and benefits cost.

And those benefits are the next casualty of the American way of labor. Retirement plans at giant corporations, most recently United Airlines, so grossly under funded that workers can only expect a fraction of what had been promised them. The situation isn’t much better for workers who invested their 401K money themselves. Mr. G recalls a friend of his who had worked for a large telecommunications company and had banked their entire retirement on company stock when shares were selling for $100 a share. That stock now is worth $3 and that nest egg has been destroyed. Pick a name for the large company: Worldcom, Enron, the list goes on. I had a friend who had banked heavily on Cisco and had lost considerable value from his retirement account.

Our lunch was over. My salmon wasn’t bad and Mr. G’s Mediterranean platter was adequate as well. You might think that our conversation would have left me depressed, but I was quite the opposite. I had enjoyed the company of someone of my generation, who shared the same life experiences and who viewed the world from the same frame of reference. It didn’t hurt that he picked up the tab.