To any impressionable business school student who grew up on Philip Kotler, the name “massmedium.com” is irresistible. It says that the company is heavy into all the sexy marketing concepts taught in school. It also says that there was this person who had the good foresight of locking in to the name very early on. I liked them already.

I just got my grades from semester six of grad school, therefore I am due for reimbursement from my old employer and can run out immediately after. The headhunter told me about two spots: one for Morgan Stanley and another for massmedium. I asked her to schedule me for an interview for the Morgan Stanley position first so I can rehearse for the massmedium spot. I was interviewed for 2 ½ hours in the Midtown offices of Morgan Stanley by four different men, for a spot which would have me do mostly the same crap I had been doing at my current job, with tough tech and even business questions (what is a short sale?). It was exactly the kind of dress rehearsal I needed where almost all things that can go wrong will so that I’d be ready for the tech interview I needed to ace. It also increased my resolve even more to get out of the high-paying, but dead-end New-York financial-industries-rut I had been suffering from.

The massmedium interview went nowhere as bad as I thought it would. It was only thirty minutes long and was perhaps one of the more pleasurable, pleasant job interviews I've had. There were no questions to which the answer was “encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism”. Chris Wallace, the head tech person at massmedium, simply wanted to know if I was a self-starter, was self-motivated and wanted to learn new things, aside from verifying my background in systems analysis and design, SQL and database design and my foray into web development. I thought they liked me --- which doesn't necessarily mean anything as I have had to learn painfully from years of interviewing. This time, it turns out that they really did.

Next I came back to meet Chris Heintz and Paul Fino, the founding partners of massmedium, and Wallace again. Paul Fino had the standard walk-us-through-your-resume opening. The first question I got from Mr. Heintz though, from whom the business plan for the company and website (milesource.com) was born, threw me off: “So Terry, how do you have fun?”. I am really going to enjoy this startup gig, I smiled to myself.

Heintz was a Phi Betta Kappa Brown University undergrad and has a Harvard Business School MBA degree. He is all of twenty-eight years old, smart and brilliant, athletic, good-looking and almost too disarmingly charming. Fino is the Chief of Operations and is a lawyer by background, very orderly and formal compared to Heintz, and is just twenty-seven years old.

Before I even reached my desk after getting back from the interview, my phone was ringing. It was the headhunter informing me of the details of the job offer. I let it sink in overnight and called Heintz the following day to inform him that I accept the job offer, in spite of the paycut, the promised 12-hour workdays and all the lost benefits. He answered with, “Congratulations, that’s great. But first things first, would you like to go camping with us next weekend?”. There he was again, throwing me off.

I started on Monday, June 19th. It turns out that I was going to occupy Heintz’s old desk and was going to share a small office with Wallace and Fino. massmedium currently occupies four small rooms on the same floor as the law firm White, Fleischner and Fino (Paul’s dad) in downtown Manhattan. I am employee number twelve; there are three people to room, one phone per room. Supplies are in an old PC monitor box though I do have to grab Paul’s stapler from his desk whenever I need one. There were clipped toenails on one of my drawers, and a toenail clipper on Wallace’s desk (Heintz’s; both the nails and the clipper). I met everyone right away, they all stopped by to introduce themselves. I have always boasted of the fact that I was always the youngest in the company I’ve been accustomed to being with but this time I do believe that I just might be the oldest one in this group, and feel appropriately insecure.

Because I sit with Paul in the same room, I am privy to a lot of interesting conversation. I know of their lease problems (for the space we were supposed to be moving into in July, now August), internal politics and dissatisfaction (already!), shaky next round of funding, even an impending marriage proposal. I had wanted to work for a new company like massmedium for interesting IT work with web development and to get rid of the cumbersome almost maddening state of red tape that befalls any huge organization, much more an organization going through merger pains. I was dying to work for a web startup to learn how each department works on its own and with each other. Right now we have Business Development, Marketing, Operations, Strategy and Finance. Technology falls under Operations for now and is made up of (1) Wallace and (2) Terry. HTML and graphics is done by a 16-year old whiz kid named Tyler in Florida. I wanted to know how the creative process comes up with economically viable concepts and gets translated finally into HTML code, table columns and GIFs. For instance, I witnessed how James from business development was explaining to Paul a possibility he was exploring through scribbles on the whiteboard about SportsSleuth --- a site to follow different sports teams and the valuable information massmedium could accumulate if they have a relationship with the company in terms of demographics (young educated male, into sports) --- and then finally to a space on the milesource.com website in all of two days. Internet time, baby.

To any business school student, this is all watching practically everything they teach about marketing, competition, negotiation and strategy in action. Even if I usually have my back to them during their discussions while trying to figure out nested HTML tables on the page I’m working on, I eavesdrop on their meetings and conference calls too. I’ve predicted that I was probably going to learn more in my short stint there than my entire two years at Deutsche Bank. I was correct.

About the technology, Chris Wallace, who used to develop applications for the defense department at Lockheed Martin, is a stickler for everything being elegantly simple and easy. But at the same time protecting the site from malicious users. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out the application, his programming and database design style. I have already learned a lot of neat stuff --- including how to expire pages, not keeping state, and changing the theme of the site daily through a cron job --- just from my first hour of working with him. If I come back to work at the Tax App at my old department again --- a web project we were supposed to roll out in September --- with a mere one week after I quit, I will definitely come up with a better yet simpler solution I would never have come up with on my own.

At 5 p.m. on my second day at work, Heintz called everyone to the conference room. I thought it was the “daily strategy meeting” I had read about in the new employee packet. We found Paul pouring cheap champagne on plastic stems. It turns out that we were toasting the $5.25 million funding which was wired to the company account that day. Heintz, Fino, James, Rich, Hillary, Blane, Erin and Stephanie recalled tales of how each joined the company --- I believe that this is their version of a Powwow Session I’ve only read about. There were plans for a dinner the following week with the lawyers and the VC firm, a webwarming party, a launch party, a party when we have one million members (we are 500,000 strong now) et al, the sorts of things they do for public relations; and a bunch of twenty-something startup entrepreneurs’ idea of fun.

I’ve said that I find their business model quite flimsy. I have not acquired the passion and single-minded fanaticism they seem to all share about Heintz’s original business plan. After months if not years of laid-back hours at my previous job, I am not used to this much continuous mental stimulation. I’ve said as much to them, that I have yet to get used to these 12-hour days again, but find the learning extremely interesting.

I may be two, three years too late getting into this startup gig now that the NASDAQ has bombed, dotcoms are closing shop and the funding environment has dried up. But then again my one week at this new job cannot even begin compare to my two years at my old one, in terms of all the things I’m only beginning to learn.

On my first day, Fino and Heintz were having one of their intense discussions in our room as is obvious from their lowered voices and inordinate amount of expletives, and I felt like it was polite to step out. I took a seat at the lobby of the law offices, overlooking the view of midtown Manhattan, and played with my Palm. James and Rich were having a meeting, saw me and they called me in from one of the conference rooms. We talked, these two talented, hardworking guys in their mid-twenties, and the conversation went to the camping trip I missed. They told me about their fellow campers, a South American family who played the “Thong Song” over and over again at 6 in the morning. So Terry, do you know the Thong Song?, was how the question went, I shook my head, and James even sang the chorus for me, but I still shook my head, laughing harder.

Less pay. More work. Fun though.