Founders at Work.pdf

Joel Spolsky 347
The consulting market is the derivative of every other market. When a company
is growing, they will hire a few consultants to help them grow a little bit
more rapidly. When they’re shrinking, they’ll instantly fire all consultants. If the
market is even going down by 0.002 percent instead of growing—which it did,
because there was a sort of dot-com nuclear winter—then the first people to go
will be the consultants. So the consulting business completely collapsed, and
every company in that space more or less collapsed. The ones that remained—
Razorfish, Scient, Viant, whatever—all sort of conglomerated into one
company with about 120 people, and that was it.
Livingston: Were you and your cofounder working out of your apartment at
this point?
Spolsky: We never wanted to do that. We had certain philosophies. Working
out of our apartment was never a possibility; we got office space from the first
day. It was somebody else’s apartment, but we weren’t living there. It was an
office.
Livingston: It was someone else’s apartment? Did you sublet it?
Spolsky: Yeah, it’s a long story. We wound up getting ripped off. We actually
sublet it from another company which, in turn, went bankrupt in a sort of disrespectful
way where they just disappeared and didn’t even bother to go bankrupt
or give us back various deposits we’d made. But we survived that one.
Livingston: You had three initial consulting clients. Were those people that you
had known while you were at Juno?
Spolsky: No, I think all of them I found. I am pretty sure those were Joel on
Software readers who emailed me and said, “Hey, we’ve got a project for you.”
Livingston: You had been writing Joel on Software back then?
Spolsky: Yeah. I’d left Juno around the beginning of the summer. I spent the
summer writing a bunch of articles on Joel on Software, just because I was
taking that summer off, living in a beach house. By the end of the summer,
when we started, it already had enough of an audience that it was pretty easy to
find people who wanted to hire us as consultants to build some stuff. But like I
said, that market went south really, really quickly.
Livingston: What did you do when you didn’t have any clients?
Spolsky: The market disappeared in November of 2000. I’m using specific
dates because it really disappeared in that month, but nobody knew that it had
disappeared until April. All the businesses’ perception was that the amount of
time it takes to sign up a new client was going up by about 1 day per day.
They kept saying things like, “It used to take us about 2 months to sign a
client. It looks like it’s going to take a little longer. The sales cycle is up to
3 months.” Then the next month they would say, “Looks like the sales cycle is
up to about 4 months.” Nobody was ever saying, “We’re never going to hire you.
Go away.” But that was the reality.