I did tech support for VMware for a while a little over a year ago. It was Ross who found the job for me, and the thing is that I was in no shape to work full-time and interact with the public like that. I tried to explain this to Ross but he told me that it was time that I got my act together again. The thing is that I never remember a time when I did have my act together. But Ross swears that such a time did indeed exist. The company was expanding rather rapidly because of the whole cloud computing thing, so they took me on without too... read full review »

I worked at SciQuest a couple of years ago when nobody had ever heard of the company. Most of the time I was out at customer sites training people to use our software. It was easy enough work and it kept me away from the office most of the time, which is how I like things. I remember once they sent me out to this community college in Fremont that was just getting off the ground. You have to remember that this was back when the economy was still doing well, or well enough that people were still spending a lot of money on such big project... read full review »

I was an instructor with Vitria for a short time a little over a year ago. We were just rolling our classroom instruction program, so we only had classes in a few places in California along with Phoenix and Las Vegas. Most of the time I stayed in Sunnyvale and worked out of a space we had set up in our own head office. I had spent most of my career as a writer, but the other people involved in this pilot project had come from sales. They were much better at the job than I was. I was working at this job for about six months when I had a... read full review »

I started working at Sequoia Capital a little over a year ago, when the company was experimenting with a new type of fund that was intended to attract investors that were willing to contribute small amounts to low-risk start-ups. That is to say, we needed people who could chip in a bit of money to companies that were almost guaranteed to succeed. You know how people were talking back then, as if another Great Depression was about to descend upon us. We had to get creative to survive the times. I'd just moved to the Bay Area from the... read full review »

This is a story you have to hear about a company named Constant Contact, which a friend of mine named Getty worked at for a couple of years before he went off to one of the big financial firms on Wall Street. Getty's in bad shape now. He lost his job after the big meltdown in 2008 and now he's in a hospital where they have to make sure that he doesn't harm himself. I keep meaning to go up and see him, but I live in Hawthorne and can't exactly afford to go. I'm not doing so well myself, if one were to look at my... read full review »

I haven't been in touch with Gage since I moved out of the Bay Area. Back then I was living in San Mateo and working at a grocery store, while he was at Digg in San Francisco. Both of us wanted to be writers. Gage succeeded at this, while I did not. But I'm not upset about that fact. I gave up writing when I knew I wasn't motivated to do it anymore. I had everything written down that I would ever want to write down, and maybe it's a shame that I couldn't get any of it published. But that's the way thing... read full review »

I started working for LinkedIn Corporation after I moved down to San Jose. I had grown up in San Francisco and had lived there for my entire life, except for four years spent in Berkeley. The thing is that I would say that I was getting tired of the place, and maybe that would make sense. But the fact is that living there was beginning to make me feel physically tired, a phenomena for which I still cannot find a reasonable explanation. I knew a lot of people, of course, since I was a native and there were always new folks streaming in... read full review »

I worked at Sequoia Capital for about a year back when the economy was still good. This was when I was living in Union City, which seems like ages ago to me now. So much has changed since that time and it's hard for me to even figure out how I got from there to here. I was a bit player at Sequoia, meeting mostly with people from local start-ups that were looking for money in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. To Sequoia such funding is no big deal. It's practically charity. You spread some cash around to make some of... read full review »

Last year I managed to get a contract writing job with a company called Zynga, which makes all those games people play online. I was still living in San Mateo so the commute up to their San Francisco office wasn't too bad. I was renting the same place I'd moved into when I first came to the area five years earlier. That wasn't exactly something I had anticipated at the time. But life works out that way sometimes. The funny thing was that Lee had been working at Zynga for more than a year when I showed up. We had lost touch... read full review »