By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com
After receiving my umpteenth death threat, my carpool partners began to lag behind me each morning as we entered the Westlake Square area where our offices were located ... something about Dealy Plaza, they said.
It was true, after growing the largest Internet development company in the West, after banking millions of dollars for our employees and their families, and after establishing what was, at the time, one of Seattle's best new brands, it became apparent that I could not control the vicissitudes of the market at large. As the NASDAQ tanked, I became the bucket of cold water in the faces of hundreds of would-be millionaires, and, waking them from their dreams of fast cash and early retirement, they lashed out.
I pounded the LLC into a C corporation, so that there would be one board of directors (not three), I closed our offices in Bellevue and Chicago, paid off our bank debt, and, in order to ensure the survival of the company, went through the horrible task of making sure the staff size fit the revenue stream. The euphemism is "right-sizing," I believe, and it is one of the most genuinely horrible experiences a human can go through, no matter which side of the desk you're on. I went through it hundreds of times ...
I became, for the good of the company, a kind of piñata, and I made damn sure that at the end of the day, I was the last person to be severed in the wave of layoffs. There was no way I could effectively lead the company after all the bloodshed, and I resigned both my position as CEO and my seat on the board of directors.
And Saltmine, in some form or other, survived.
We were not alone in this turmoil: RealNetworks perp-walked its laid-off employees out of the building with rent-a-cops; MarchFirst's Eastside headquarters were closed overnight and the employees, arriving for work, apparently ransacked the building; laptops and expensive Aeron chairs flooded the market; the Internet world in Seattle ground to an abrupt halt.
Things went to pieces for a while, and I gladly will acknowledge to the satisfaction of anyone out there still holding a grudge, that I spent my fortieth birthday alone, broke, staring out of an apartment building window (after my wife had left me), wondering just what the hell had happened.
And I wasn't the only one.
So…what does one do when faced with humiliating defeat? Well, in the words of the immortal Ira Gershwin, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.
