Well, I officially turned down the offer from the high risk digital music venture I mentioned in my last post.
The truth is, my decision was not based entirely on the fact that I've become less risk-averse since escaping listen.com, buying a home and having a child. Although, that definitely had something to do with it. It was hair-raising enough as a single guy living through unrealistic revenue expectations that resulted in quarterly layoffs, five bosses in three years, and pay cuts instead of raises at the end of each review period.
What sealed it for me with this particular high risk digital music venture was that it (a) was not particularly well-funded, and (b) there were serious concerns about their ability to produce a compelling product.
In this space, I'm convinced that you need huge cash reserves to compete. This company does not share my convictions, and only has enough money to last about six months after launch.
On the product side, these folks are using MusicNet as their backend, which is always a red flag. Nice, smart folks at MusicNet, but for whatever reason, every product they've worked on has been late to launch and extremely buggy. Part of the reason has to be that half of their team is in Seattle, and half is in New York City. Digital music applications are pretty complicated to get right, and I firmly believe everyone needs to be in the same place to make it happen. On that note, it didn't help that this particular high risk digital music venture in question had half of its team in Tel Aviv and half in Manhattan.
And then, there's my current position. NPD is not cool. NPD is not chock-full of intelligent, driven and interesting people. Coming from three years in the Bay area working in the hottest sector of the hottest industry, that's occasionally hard to swallow. That said, NPD has pretty consistently given me good opportunities to do things that I was unable to do in previous jobs. I have definitely grown here. And, despite a few slights here and there (not to mention a fucked-up resource issue that has persisted for two years now, and that sets me up to be, shall we say, less than successful, no matter how hard/smart I work), the company has been very good to me. The kicker is their tuition reimbursement program, of which I do plan to take advantage in the near future.
So, here I stay.
The truth is, my decision was not based entirely on the fact that I've become less risk-averse since escaping listen.com, buying a home and having a child. Although, that definitely had something to do with it. It was hair-raising enough as a single guy living through unrealistic revenue expectations that resulted in quarterly layoffs, five bosses in three years, and pay cuts instead of raises at the end of each review period.
What sealed it for me with this particular high risk digital music venture was that it (a) was not particularly well-funded, and (b) there were serious concerns about their ability to produce a compelling product.
In this space, I'm convinced that you need huge cash reserves to compete. This company does not share my convictions, and only has enough money to last about six months after launch.
On the product side, these folks are using MusicNet as their backend, which is always a red flag. Nice, smart folks at MusicNet, but for whatever reason, every product they've worked on has been late to launch and extremely buggy. Part of the reason has to be that half of their team is in Seattle, and half is in New York City. Digital music applications are pretty complicated to get right, and I firmly believe everyone needs to be in the same place to make it happen. On that note, it didn't help that this particular high risk digital music venture in question had half of its team in Tel Aviv and half in Manhattan.
And then, there's my current position. NPD is not cool. NPD is not chock-full of intelligent, driven and interesting people. Coming from three years in the Bay area working in the hottest sector of the hottest industry, that's occasionally hard to swallow. That said, NPD has pretty consistently given me good opportunities to do things that I was unable to do in previous jobs. I have definitely grown here. And, despite a few slights here and there (not to mention a fucked-up resource issue that has persisted for two years now, and that sets me up to be, shall we say, less than successful, no matter how hard/smart I work), the company has been very good to me. The kicker is their tuition reimbursement program, of which I do plan to take advantage in the near future.
So, here I stay.
posted by isaacjosephson at 7:55 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home