Starting up
It was a hot spring day in Los Cristianos, Tenerife. I had been working as a freelance web developer for a couple of years and now I had a regular client who wanted me in-office for the whole day. I had a one and a half hours commute each way and the buses ran at a one hour interval. It was 2007, I didn’t have a smartphone or a data plan, so I was waiting for the bus listening to music sitting at the bus stop, safe from the sun.
I got on my laptop and starting working on a random personal project I had, when I noticed this guy holding a thick web development book. He had tattooed arms, short hair and was wearing sport sunglasses. I was curious, since he didn’t look like a regular nerdy programmer and closed my laptop to go talk to him. Mind you, I was a 20 year old, blond, long-aired, band t-shirt wearing metalhead who looked as atypical as him so I guess it was like Beavis meeting Butthead.
I asked him if he was learning to code, if he’d like some help since I had some time to kill waiting for the bus. He said he had something big in mind but couldn’t tackle it yet since he didn’t know much about databases, MySQL and so on. When I asked about it he said he wanted to build a fully online operating system, where nothing would be stored on the hardware running it. I thought it was a bit to ambitious and wished him luck as we exchanged e-mails. We only e-mailed each other a couple of times and I kind of forgot about the guy.
Fast forward a couple of months, it’s summer and I’ve finished my gig at Los Cristianos. I’ve been jobless for about a month and I’m enjoying the summer but I’ve also applied for a couple of par-time jobs and I’m waiting for the interviews. I’m playing basketball in Santa Cruz and I get hit, dislocating my right thumb. I panic and put it back in place. I stand stupefied looking at my hand. Maybe I’ve imagined it and my thumb wasn’t hanging in that weird angle just a moment ago. I start to feel the pain so I leave the game and start heading home. My phone rings. I can’t hang hold it with my right hand, which by this time looks like an inflated latex glove. Turns out I have an interview tomorrow. I look at my hand and say I’ll be there.
The next day, after a visit to the doctor and some ibuprofen , my swollen hand and me make it to the interview. The guy interviewing me is the head of design. After fixing some bugs on the project like he asked me, he now wants me to implement a feature. My thumb is hurting and I get the feeling I’m doing their work for free — the code I got was from a live website where he FTP’d my changes right after I was done — so I tell him that’s as far as I would go, they could make me an offer if they wanted more.
One week later they fire the other programmer in the company and ask me to bring a new one up to speed. This was my first lead role and I enjoyed it for a bit, but I got tired quickly. I wanted a more flexible schedule since I had gone back to college and had some classes in the morning. I was worried about my attendance rate.
Finally, one of the many nights I found myself sleepless, I took out my laptop and started looking for a new job. I started looking up ads in Loquo, a site similar to Craigslist, when I stumbled upon this:
We’re looking for programmers who rock the keyboard like Jimi Hendrix the guitar. Who handle the mouse like Dali the painbrush. Work from your home or from the beach. We offer you a laptop and fully flexible schedule.
I was ecstatic. This ad was meant for me. I quickly summoned my pdf CV wrote a quick cover letter and sent it in. There was however one thing bothering me. The ad only listed an e-mail address. No company name, no phone number. The domain name for the e-mail address was something like jobs at changeyourperspective dot com. I fired up their webpage. It was simple, it looked like a computer program. Chek your perspective, it said. There was a single button there. When I pressed that button, I saw a small caption “checking perspective…” and then “perspective: negative”. What the hell was that? I used Firebug and searched for a network request that got that result, but there was none. There was only a small JavaScript block that always did the same thing. I did a whois on the domain and found a company name, Solfenix, and an address in the south of the island, near Los Cristianos. Luckily for me, there was a fax number listed, and searching for that fax number I found a phone number for a company with a different name. That was odd.
The next day I went to a payphone and called the phone number.
-Hello?
-Hi there, it’s this Solfenix?
-Uh, yeah it is, who’s asking?
-Hi, my name’s Orestes, I sent you guys mi resume yesterday I wanted to make sure you got it and could read it without problems.
-Yeah, let me check. Orestes you said? Do you have long hair? — by this point I thought they have heard of me from any of my other jobs, were my looks had been something that people didn't quite like, so, thinking this might be another stuck up boss I replied kind of mad —
-Yeah I do. Is that a problem?
-No, I’m only ask you because I think I know you. This is James, from the bus stop.
Mind = blown. We talked for about five minutes, and we were both so excited I went to Los Cristianos that same afternoon. We started talking at 8PM, and by the time we finished it was 3AM. He told me he had raised some funds for his project and he wanted to get started ASAP. He was building a team. We talked about the huge technical challenge that would be, but I was feeling confident that we could build something that worked and then keep making it better. We talked about how we could change the world with something as big as a web-based Operating System, about the competitors, about the semantic web which was all the rage back them. I wanted to be part of that so badly. This was exactly what I wanted to do with my life, build cool stuff that blew people’s minds.
I took a taxi back to Santa Cruz — which ended costing me 80€ but were refunded — completely blown away. This could be huge. I couldn’t wait to go back to work the next day and quit on the spot.
To be continued …
