In 1999, I was between jobs. For nearly five years I had worked at Microsoft in Redmond (which is a suburb of Seattle). It rains eight months a year in Seattle, so it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with several lakes, always filled with water, breathtakingly green with trees everywhere, with dazzling colours in autumn, and mild winters for a city that far north – only in 1996 was there heavy snow. There are two snowcapped mountain ranges to the East and West of Seattle, called the Cascades and the Olympics respectively, and a magnificent volcano called Mt Rainier about 70miles south, which was an awesome sight on clear days. It never rained heavily in Seattle, only mild drizzles.
Microsoft was mostly a wonderful place to work, and I was
astounded that I even got a job there in 1994, barely four years after reading
about in the small library at my college in Srivilliputtur. The campus was
beautiful, the software work was interesting and quite different than what I
imagined, but by 1999, I was probably saturated, though not quite burnt out.
But I was perhaps very depressed in 1999, not realizing it then, perhaps
because of the weather. Ten to twelve hours of looking at a computer screen, is
probably terrible for the human psyche, even with
But it was an exciting time in software, and the computer
industry, because the Internet had exploded with Netscape’s browser and a few
websites in 1995. The internet really started taking off in 1997. Coincidentally
that was the year cellphones also became affordable. Most of the action was in
Silicon Valley, in San Jose and Sunnyvale and Mountain View and Palo Alto and
the various suburbs south of San Francisco. By 1999, I was reading news and
essays from several websites, some of newspapers others of e-magazines. Two
prominent websites were Slate and Salon. Slate was run by Microsoft, most of
its staff was in Buiding E, in Redmond West campus, where I was working in the
MSN group.
In August, Microsoft fired me (the official reason was that
I was not good at writing software) and
after having no luck looking for jobs in Seattle, I decided to look for
a job in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was also trying to write screenplays
because I had become interested in screenwriting, both for movies and for TV. I
even attended a screenwriters conference in LA in 1998. I sent out spec scripts
to agents, which produced no responses. I was staying at a friend’s house in
San Jose, when I read an essay/interview in Salon.com about a guy called Elon
Musk, who had just sold his software company to Compaq, a major PC
manufacturing company. He had bought a McLaren street model car (similar to a
Formula 1 car, but a version which you can drive on city roads and highways). I
was an F-1 fan then, so this fascinated me. Musk was my age and he had already sold his
company for 300 million dollars. The interview mentioned he was starting a new
company, called X.com and it had his email address. As a lark, I sent him an
email with my resume and asked for a job (I am almost never this enterprising).
Yes. Elon Musk in 1999 was planning to start a company
called X.com, 25 years before he bought Twitter and renamed it X (now in 2024).
This was before he even started Tesla or SpaceX.
Surprisingly, I got a response to my email inviting me to a
coffee shop in Palo Alto a day later. So I went and met him. He was friendly
and genial, and spoke in that same series of staccato sentences, that you see
now on TV or youtube. He talked about his company, but I had no idea what his
business plan was. He explained, I just didn’t understand. I had just recently
read a book called “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” by Thomas Friedman, a New
York Times journalist, and I had realized I knew almost nothing about the
business world or finance or economics. After five years working for perhaps
the world’s most famous business at that time, I felt ridiculously ignorant
about money.
It was also perhaps the worst time in the history of the
human race to learn about money or economics or business, because at that time,
every company was trying to do everything for FREE. I had no idea where any
company’s revenue would come from. The two internet company crashes in 2000 and
2001/2002 suggest that most of the venture capitalists who invested in these
companies, and even those who managed or worked in these companies, had no idea
where they money would come from, either. They just ran out of capital, before
raking in revenue.
Musk got his coffee, I got hot chocolate, and then basically
he described the job he was hiring for. It was basically managing a software
team, most of the work would be testing software that the company developed.
Some of it would be developing in-house tools and some probably acquiring
software from other companies. Software companies spend 90% of their software
effort in testing software and only 10% in actual development. Even software
developers spend more than half their time fixing bugs in software that they or
others wrote. Now, I had five years of software development and testing
experience, but only two years was in the internet division, and they had lower
standards than boxed software like Microsoft Windows or Office or SQL Server – software
products that were common before the internet. And I had no experience at all
buying software or even evaluating it. And I had very little experience hiring
people – I had only interviewed a few candidates for hiring at Microsoft. Even
as he was speaking, I realized Musk was looking for someone two levels above
me. This was not suprising. Company founders look to hire top level people, not
low level developers, except a very few brilliant people. So, I leaned
backwards, understanding that I was underqualified for the job.
Nothing special so far. But the next few minutes have
haunted me. Not immediately, but about five years later. Because while I
thought the interview ended, and the disappointment in my face obvious, but
hopefully not too melancholy, Musk kept talking. He didn’t finish his coffee,
he was just sipping it, I had barely sipped my drink either. And he talked
about several aspects of what he was visualising. Some of it was abstract and
way over my head, some of it was concrete and I could grasp some of it (I don’t
remember any of it). But I didn’t get an overall picture. I vaguely think it
was some sort of money related software, but much more than that. But I had no
real understanding of what it was. I had interviewed with several other dotcoms
at this time: Calpurnia, Yodlee, Decide, PartsRiver, are some of the names I
remember; for a few months I worked for decide.com, before quitting software and
returning to India.
Musk just kept talking, sometimes smiling, sometimes
serious. I had dismissed myself as a candidate but he hadn’t. I suspect he
liked something about me, and was just hoping I would say something like, “Look
just hire me now and we will figure out what I can do later.” He was looking
for someone who was willing to take a career risk (after all I had emailed him,
which was taking a chance). But I am not that kind of risk taker, I suppose. I also
think he had some great idea for software and he just wanted to explain to a
fellow geek and share the excitement, without revealing much. If I figured out
what he described, he would have offered me a job.
Remember, he was not famous then. I didn’t know what Musk
was hinting at. He would go on to build
PayPal, but I don’t think that’s what he described to me. PayPal is easy enough
to understand. It seems that he joined PayPal and took over. According to
Wikipedia, Musk had founded a banking company called X.com, which he merged
with Paypal, and ran it for sometime, before Peter Thiel took over. Paypal
became extremely succesful, becoming the first paymetnt alternative to credit
cards and electronic transfer from brick and mortar banks. Musk started SpaceX
from the money he cashed in from Paypal, and revolutionized rocket launches.
And later he joined and then took over Tesla, and revolutionized the car industry.
I have no regrets that Musk didn’t hire me – I don’t know if
I would have been successful. I also realized I was bored of the software
industry after I returned to India, and didn’t miss writing software. I was
perhaps burnt out.
 |
| 1999 in my Seattle apartment |
My only other encounter with a global celebrity was perhaps
a sideline chat with Bill Gates at a Microsoft developer in conference in
Bellevue. This was a internal company conference, for software developers, in 1996
I think. Some demos, some discussion of general strategy, but mostly a full day
of talks by executives and software experts. During lunch and tea breaks,
several of the star developers and execs were surrounded, mostly by fresh hires
or those who really wanted to be heard. Gates was surrounded by three rings of developers,
and he was hotly debating a few of them who thought Microsoft should switch to Java
or something different in the Internet space. Microsoft was the most admired company
by investors and most engineers outside the USA and somewhat feared but totally
hated by competitors in the USA. I snatched the chance at a pause to ask him a
technical question, and he dismissed it as not significant.
All my other interviews in the software industry were far
less dramatic. I don’t think anyone else has become a global celebrity. Anyway,
I thought this encounter might interest some readers of my blog, though not
much happened.
Links
- Email encounter with John McCarthy, creator of LISP
- The SQL Server box with team autographs
- Personal Essays in this blog
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