There’s a sickening moment in the life of a high-flying startup when you can feel gravity reasserting its inevitable grip. One moment you’re accelerating into the future, the next you’re suspended, at the apex of an unexpected plunge back to earth. For years you’ve kept your rocketship thrusting up and to the right: higher revenues, bigger financing rounds, more new hires, loftier valuations. But then comes a reckoning – a cloudy sales projection, a round of unusually querulous investor calls, a restive board meeting. Something’s changed, and fixing it feels out of your control. Your rocketship has become a falling knife.
I’ve experienced that dreadful moment at least three times in my career. The first was at Wired, when our high-flying magazine attempted to go public and failed to produce an order book that let us ring the bell. The second was at The Industry Standard, when advertising sales fell off a cliff just as the dot com boom went bust. And the third was at Federated Media, as Facebook consolidated its grip on the burgeoning social web, and our partners began to move their budgets from blogs to Zuckerberg’s magical Newsfeed.
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