| The Covad takeover of InternetConnect I never did like sad endings.
With Covad Communications' acquisition of InternetConnect practically complete,
I am saddened by the end of a company that felt like an ex-wife to me. As many
days as I had, frustrated to tears at the standards and practices there, both
as an employee and a customer, I loved the people there. I believed in their
products. I enjoyed working for their founder and President and it was with
mixed feelings that I left because I did have my own career to take into
consideration. I did see doom on the horizon. However, that didn't make it
any less painful to leave the company with the red billboards coast to coast.
The company that gave me a chance to become the IT professional that I am
today. The many, many familiar faces. The fact that I even fell in love with
one of the directors. The love-hate feelings I had while working there left me
feeling like a divorced husband.
I worked there for two years, to the day and was hired when they occupied the
Northeast corner suite on the 20th floor of the Wilshire tower where the
company got its start. Before our takeover of the two adjacent suites, before
the move to GeoCities' old headquarters in Marina del Rey, prior to the move to
the Epson Printer building across the street from the Torrance Police
Department. When there was a sales man and his manager, two guys in technical
support, a single person handling billing, customer service, and collections,
and, my old-school, network engineer boss (for six months) was a cantankerous
voice on the speakerphone. The data center was an 85 degree back office with
desktop towers underneath and on top of utility tables, between which, two
telco racks that housed routers and the Redback switch to be the origin of the
company's premier product, DSL.
The situation between a start-up and its employee is somewhat of an
embarrassing agreement. This is especially so if you are a tech. It's the
understanding that the employee probably doesn't have the experience, let alone
the college degree or even a diploma to work at a long-standing, reputable IT
firm--but, that employee wants to learn. It is also the understanding that the
start-up firm probably doesn't have the money for a more experienced or
educated tech. Not unless, of course that high-end IT person is led to believe
the company will end up big some day and they've been promised a high level
position from the start like CTO, Director of IT, etc.
So, both parties are in the precarious situation of evaluating two things; the
employer needs to trust that just because he or she is new doesn't mean they're
unqualified. So, they have to look at things like ambition, history, and what
they're doing. Sometimes they have to go through a bunch of bad apples before
they find one who is interested in helping the company grow. While on the
other hand, an employee might put in long hours for below-industry standard pay
that they, albeit, agreed to given the fact they can't command major IT
salaries for whatever reason. However, they could also be the victims of many
circumstances. For example, incompetent people could run the company so
they eventually go out of business and your effort is for naught.
That's what happened to many during the dot-com collapse era. In many ways,
however, InternetConnect was not just another dot-com, for better or for worse.
One of the ways is that employees hired before they left Wilshire hit a glass
ceiling due to many factors. The main factor was that, in the interest of
attracting investors, we inherited foreign upper-level management from Nextel's
southwest operations upon moving to Marina del Rey. At this time, we had
everything from a new CEO to VPs of Customer Operations and Sales with an
injection of customer service representatives to become the new Installation
Coordination department.
This was good news in the way of bringing order to our chaotic operations.
This, however, stunted the growth of employees that deserved promotion because
of their determination to do a good job in the face of what appeared to be a
never-ending trial of phone problems, angry customers, and shrinking
office-space. Everybody who didn't quit before the move to Marina del Rey went
through hell, and came back for more--even on weekends.
While debuting the DSL product, I became the sole member of the technical
support department because one of the three men in the department quit at the
beginning of 1999 and my partner went onto create what would become the
Provisioning Department. Provisioning, at the time, operated in the same
capacity as the Installation Coordination department to come later that year.
The CTO hired two directors and one manager from a telco company where he used
to work. The idea was to bring sanity to the technical operation of the
company. One of those three ended up being my boss and, eventually, I did get
help. A total of four employees were hired to join me as technical support
representatives.
Somehow, my position ended up directly on top of the fault line of an issue that
proved to be the nagging tooth ache in the would-be DSL giant. Webhosting.
DSL eventually got streamlined into a logical process: the sales department
took the order, installation coordination worked with our partners and the
customer until the service was completed, provisioning would create the
service, billing would bill it and technical support would support it. (Henry
Ford's ingenious assembly-line process in action.)
Not webhosting.
The order, coordination with the customer and our partner (Network Solutions in
this case), the creation of the service _AND_ the support of that product
through incoming phone calls, e-mail and trouble tickets rested in the hands of
my department.
I was the only person in that department, the webhosting department, from about
April 1999 until about late October when my boss hired a temp to help with the
non-technical aspect of my duties that reduced the number of suicidal thoughts
I had (just kidding). It really was that bad, though. Once, I caught the flu
in October of that year and nobody noticed that orders for websites and their
e-mail addresses were piling up for three weeks. Customers were livid and our
sales people were so infuriated by this that, I think, if it weren't for a
programmer there at the time, one of our sales guys was going to take me out
back and deck me. Finally, I get that temp.
Despite my warnings, management was constantly waiting until circumstances
reached a critical condition before conceiving and implementing solutions.
Long after we'd hired the temp. permanently and two others, plus a transfer
from technical support department and then hired two more temps, eventually
permanently--we finally did something right... Almost.
There was an attempt to integrate webhosting into the provisioning department
and push off the jobs of taking the order, coordinating it, and supporting it
to the same departments that did the same things for our DSL service. However,
this failed when both installation coordination and technical support engaged
in passive resistance, essentially refusing to learn the process. The excuse
was that they "don't know this webhosting stuff" which flies in the face of the
fact that almost all of them used to be cell phone customer support people
before coming over here to start working something they didn't know:
high-capacity leased lines. However, the blame lies with the other fact that
executives elected to roll over on the issue. Instead of saying, "You learned
DSL, you'll learn webhosting," me and my tiny band of stooges were back to being
a smaller, duplicate copy of the rest of the company, minus systems
administration, marketing, sales and billing.
Installation coordination received folders containing an order form for DSL and
another one for webhosting but for some reason, the webhosting forms were being
lost, lying on someone's desk unprocessed, etc.
Technical support would receive telephone calls for webhosting issues but the
standard practice was to issue a trouble ticket with little or no information
other than a statement with the equivalent of "customer is pissed, call soon."
Instead of training these two departments, the responsibilities were just
shifted back to us.
The end result was that issues were routinely escalated to top brass. This
caused the heat of a spotlight to come down my tiny gang because it looked like
we were falling down on the job from the hundreds of tickets pending.
It goes against my nature as a tech. to receive a request to resolve an issue
and ignore it while promising the customer the problem will be corrected.
However, that is what I was asked to do to more quickly close trouble tickets.
Half the time, the issue concerned a matter of our back-end infrastructure and
getting an answer out of the systems administration group was virtually
impossible. Usually because they were hardly there so tickets hung open for
weeks, making me and my team look bad. It didn't help that because tickets
contained seldom useful information, we were asking customers to repeat
themselves when we finally did get them on the line.
I found calling customers back with empty promises as pointless as running
around an ocean liner full of holes with duct tape, trying to patch up the
entire ship. It made more sense to me to kill all the birds with one stone and
solve the problems where at least half of them originated, the back end.
I wanted to join the systems administration department to have the authority to
make the kinds of corrections on the back-end that would solve a lot of our
woes. I also wanted to join because I stopped learning technology and started
learning politics. I wanted to join because I knew I was going to be there
until the two existing members of the systems administration group strolled in
at 10 and 11am. I wanted to be there because what I wanted to do something
about the problems I saw, immediately. I believed in proactive resolution of
potential problems because reactionary fire fighting is not how to delight the
customer.
That was our new CEO's motto: delight the customer. However, we had standards
and practices in place that, basically, didn't do that. A quality assurance
department in the rest of the business world is the group of individuals who
beta test a product or service to help R&D work the kinks out before marketing
rolls it out. Instead, QA was our company fire department. Instead of using
funds for R&D on streamlining and automating processes, we spent money on
hiring people for the QA department, whose job was to listen to customers
lambaste us and then get someone in provisioning, technical support or my
department to drop whatever we were doing and help that customer. Instead of a
fair, first come-first serve system, our policy was whoever screamed the loudest
got to cut in line.
The President and CEO of the company were on the same page as me: if customers
are getting escalated to QA or themselves, something is seriously wrong. What I
couldn't seem to get any action on was the issue that NOT integrating webhosting
into the same process DSL service went through was the cause of all this. Not
my team not returning enough phone calls fast enough. There would be no phone
calls to return if customers didn't have to wait upwards of three weeks before a
domain name was ready to use. The new internal customer database supported
everything but our duties in the webhosting department so orders were still on
paper. At the Hosting Services Department's peak head count, we were doing over
400 orders a week by hand with no automation WHILE juggling trouble tickets.
However, as I said, we were not like most dot-coms, and when I said for better
or for worse, this is where I say for better.
Many internet companies got the wake-up call of a lifetime when while doing 90
on the so-called information superhighway, they suddenly saw their tachometer
pegged at about 6000 RPM and a bell shaped object in the road behind them in the
rear view mirror. They found out that there's no way in the world shares for
their information-based, data-oriented organization could be worth more than an
energy company. Remember when Yahoo! and Network Solutions were at between
$100-$150 a share while Chevron was at a little over $53? They also found out
that smoke and mirrors can only work up to a point. We weren't the only ones
promising the world and not coming through. We weren't the only one with faulty
internal processes that made delighting the customer an unattainable goal. When
the hot air was let out of NASDAQ, it was only a matter of time before it was
our turn. So, after I quit, 19% of InternetConnect's staff was ejected into
outer space on January 4, 2001, a grim year for a lot of us. More got flushed
later that year.
However, inside sources and a brief visit to resolve my own billing matter with
them revealed something wonderful the summer of that hellacious year. They
got humble. They also stayed alive. They were the few survivors during the
dot-bomb blast and that's no accident. Despite the chaos in my world, in the
universe of webhosting and dialup and then IP block assignment, the company was
going on strong. Millions in venture capital, the largest footprint of any DSL
company with 60 cities at its peak. The strength in that organization was a
few different things. Market position, a great product nobody else had and the
most charming team of ambitious employees I've ever worked with in my six years
in this industry. By the end of that summer, InternetConnect finally became
the company it was supposed to be. They had about a hundred employees who were
actually happy, their technology pristine, and customers were actually being
satisfied.
And then came Covad and the rest was history.
I salute the men and women of InternetConnect in all their future endeavors. I
still feel lucky to have worked there. Soon after we broke the DSL line of
products and services, there were dozens of players on the field but we knew we
were the leaders. We knew we were the winners. I still think their founder was
the best man for the job. Despite what anyone might've thought, as a customer
or as an employee, when you do something that no one else has ever done before;
when you try to build a nation-wide network from the ground up using a tiny team
of wacky sidekicks, the journey ahead will be turbulent. But to see it through
the way their president did took vision. How any man could see the company the
way it was when we left Wilshire Boulevard and not jump ship is amazing, but if
he had've done that, it wouldn't had become the 350 person powerhouse it was
when I left. He really did something great back there and I can appreciate it.
Not just anybody could do that. |
