It started with a placement that had nothing to do with the company, because the company didn't exist yet. I placed a young software engineer into a firm run by an executive he had never worked with, and the two of them became friends. The engineer later left for Microsoft — in the late nineties a move to Seattle was a career statement — and when he came back to Massachusetts, the two of them started a company to help travelers review hotels. They were working out of a small office above a pizza shop in Needham. The chief executive called me.
The first engineer
They needed their first engineer. That hire matters more than most. At a company that would become known for the quality of its engineering, the first engineer sets the standard that everyone after him is measured against. The man we placed is still there today.
The bar
We started placing people there when the company was tiny — under fifty people. What the tiny company already had, five years in, was an audience: millions of traveler reviews, a new one posted every minute, seventeen million visitors a month, and a parent company from the first rank of the internet. What it did not yet have was the engineering organization to match. Its open requisitions in August of 2005 describe "a small group of talented engineers who are passionate about building a great travel web site" — and every one of them is a senior hire, ten or more years of experience, down to the refrain that closed each specification: "Passion to build great software. Sense of humor preferred." The bar was not a conversation; candidates for some roles worked a written exercise built from the company's real problems before anyone talked about an offer. Hire number one set that bar. The sixty who followed had to clear it.
The next decade
The record of the next decade sits in our files as a stack of role specifications, and it reads like the company's own growth in outline. First the builders: senior Java engineers, the search specialist, the web UI developers. Then the first team leader — one engineer leading projects of one to three developers, the seed of a management layer. Then product managers, a dozen variations of them, and directors: engineering for online analytics, engineering operations, product. Then the map widened — engineering roles written for London and for Asia-Pacific — and the roles for a vacation-rental company the firm had acquired. We placed close to sixty people across that arc: the founding team, the first manager whose job was to lead rather than write code, and the vice presidents of engineering who came after the directors.
- ~60People placed over the decade
- 17MVisitors a month, five years in
- <50People in the company when we started
It was not smooth. There were hard stretches, and mistakes on everyone's side, ours included. What carried it was that nobody walked away.
Fees, not equity
I have one regret from those years. In the pizza-shop days our firm was young and fees paid the bills, so I took fees rather than equity in what became the greatest online travel company ever built. Anyone who has run a young business understands that arithmetic. What I received instead has, over a career, been worth more: the trust of two founders who kept calling.
We remain grateful for the opportunity, and for the access.