The Day I (tried to) leave EMC

In college I tried to start a company three times.  Twice I entered local business plan competitions.  Once I applied to this new cool thing in Boston called Y-Combinator and got called in to meet a couple nice guys named Trevor and Paul[1].  All three times I came up short, and never got around to scratching that entrepreneurial itch.

In high school, I impressed my AP calculus teacher by completing the textbook in a weekend (I got grounded for swearing at my sister and had nothing else to do).  My teacher’s husband was a Director at EMC.  He got me an internship in the Performance Engineering group.  I interned there throughout college and worked there full time for almost two years after completing my Masters.  It was a fun environment full of great people — not exactly the doldrums depicted in Office Space.  But at the end of the day, it was a large corporate environment.  And no matter what I did, I never could shake that feeling of being out of place.

After a little over a year I put in for a transfer into a new “startup within EMC.”  There were three different product lines in EMC’s midrange storage division.  The mandate of this “startup” was to merge the codebases of all three lines and produce the ultimately flexible storage system.  The “startup” was pulling in top talent from all over EMC and bringing them all to the same building in Southborough, MA.  This felt right.  It felt like a place I’d really fit in.  It sounded awesome.

It wasn’t.

Only 6 months went by before I was beginning to see the writing on the wall: anything I did wouldn’t see the light of day for another 2 or 3 years.  Even though I was surrounded by kind, bright people — I just didn’t fit.

Aside:  I want to take a second to admit that I know how this all sounds.  I’ve always been a stubborn, playfully-arrogant little bastard.  When I would explain my situation at the time to some of my friends,  some called me right out on it: “You’re complaining about a great paying job working with great people that respect you.  STFU and get back to work.”  But it wasn’t enough to make me happy.  And I think that — that feeling of not fitting in, that feeling of not being happy, that drive to do something about it — is an important part of what makes an entrepreneur.  I’m not going to apologize for it.

So in October I went out and got myself a job offer.  It was a monster offer.  The company was small, but they had raised a bunch of money and been around for a few years.  It wasn’t exactly a “startup” but it also wasn’t a huge corporate entity.  I walked into Jeff (my manager) office, and told him I was done.

And then we talked for a while about why I was leaving.  I told him I wanted more responsibility; that I didn’t feel like I fit.  And Jeff said we could work on that, that I could move around, that EMC had a lot to offer.

And then I met with his boss, Doug.  I told him I was being offered a monster increase in salary, and Doug said they’d work with me in terms of salary, bonus and stock options to increase my compensation.

And then I met with one of the other managers under Doug Wood.  We talked about moving into his group and giving me some exposure to building web services and writing C++ and learning Flex.

It took just about two hours.  I changed my mind.  By the end of the day, I told the other company I was turning down the offer.

I chickened out.

A couple months went by and there was no change in my responsibilities.  I was in the same group.  I was given a few more stock options.  Still didn’t fit in.  Still didn’t feel right.

I want to be fair to everyone at EMC.  I don’t think any of them outright lied to me that day.  I just think we were speaking different languages.  I was probably the one that did most of the lying.  Lying to them when I feigned excitement at what they were offering, and lying to myself as I drove home telling myself I did belong at EMC.

In the end, everything worked out the way it was supposed to.  Going from one company to another wouldn’t have made me any happier.  I wasn’t just afraid that day, my gut was also signaling that I was about to make a mistake.

When you’re about to make a life-changing decision — like leaving your job for a new opportunity — there’s a difference between being afraid and your gut telling you that you’re making the wrong decision.  That day at EMC I had both.  The next time I tried to (and did) leave EMC, I only had the first one.  I was afraid, but I knew that I was doing the right thing.  But that story is another day.

Moral:  Listen to your gut, and tell fear to fuck off.

References
[1] For those not aware, this is a joke.  Y-Combinator is a huge deal.  I happened to apply the first year they existed, and I met Trevor Blackwell and Paul Graham.  It was pretty cool :)

Thanks
Thanks to Kate Angilly for providing feedback on drafts of this post.