EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 6: COMING TO AMERICA

“

Once again, the final negotiations happened at the chicken farm. All of the paperwork was expected to go through before mid-night, but it got delayed and conversations dragged out the whole night.

I didn’t sleep, but it didn’t matter. The next day we drove down to the beach at the western side of the peninsula for a barbeque lunch. The weather was fantastic, we were eating new Danish potatoes directly off the grill, and the kids were running around butt naked playing on the shoreline.

My father-in-law asked me about what happened the night before. I tried to explain the $6 million investment, but I couldn’t make it make sense.

“How much again?” he asked. He was clearly excited about the big number, but also completely perplexed by the nature of the deal.

To him, it was so abstract. The world of the Internet is surreal to someone whose work is so grounded in the practical arts of keeping animals. All of his life he got up at 5 a.m. and went to bed at 11 p.m. and worked every hour in between. There was a fixed correlation with how hard you worked and how much money you made. And it was very physical.

My work was so different. We worked from anywhere in front of our laptops and connected to people all over the world. There was no physical product to hold or ship, but people, smart people, just invested crazy amounts of money into it. Perhaps the only thing that made sense about it was that it didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

”

EXCERPT FROM STARTUPLAND

“

After we closed the seed round, we publicly celebrated with a press release, which Christoph sent to his network in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. He pitched it to various tech blogs, most notably GigaOM and TechCrunch. GigaOM got back to us pretty quickly and asked for an exclusive. We were thrilled. Om Malik did the interview himself. Then, right before it ran, TechCrunch reached out.

“We want to run this story. Give us the details.”

Christoph wrote back, “You didn’t respond, so we gave the story to Om Malik.”

That kick-started an exchange with Michael Arrington that had me shaking in my sneakers.

“Don’t ever email me again,” Arrington wrote.

I tried to step in and smooth things over between Christoph and Arrington, emailing some funny remarks. They were no better received.

“Take me off your email list,” Arrington responded. “This is not a joke. Don’t ever call me again.”

I was profoundly worried. TechCrunch was the mother ship of everything startup—I needed for us to be anointed by it, not annihilated! I was not well prepared for this game. Sitting in Alex’s kitchen, I had to admit that I had no idea what I was doing.

“Oh my god, Michael Arrington just blackballed us from Silicon Valley,” I announced.

The only consolation was that later, Om Malik did publish a nice post. “It’s not sexy, like some social networks, but it is useful and fully featured,” he wrote of us. “Zendesk would fall into our ‘small really is beautiful’ category of startups.”

It wasn’t a total disaster.

”