Landing a Job at an Internet Start-up

When Eleanor Roe moved to California in October, 1997, she had just left a wine and spirits import firm in New York where she worked as a product manager. Although her prior position was what she now describes as "traditional marketing"--in other words, a job with little exposure to the Internet--she knew that she was looking for a job at an Internet start-up company. "I was starting at ground zero," Roe says, "but I knew that was the environment that I wanted to be in."

Internet start-ups are a diverse group, encompassing retailers, information vendors, and software developers. What's more, there's no guarantee that a business will stay in one category. For example, Robert Olson, co-founder of Virtual Vineyards, an on-line marketer of wine and gourmet food in Palo Alto, CA meant for his Web site to be a demonstration of the software that drives its on-line sales rather than a Web-based purveyor of fine goods. It wasn't until almost two years after its inception that he decided the site itself should be the company's focus.

The one thing all Internet start-ups have in common is the medium of on-line communications. So where does someone without a background in the high-tech industry fit into such a firm? Is lack of prior experience a drawback? According to Cyndy Ainsworth, Virtual Vineyards' marketing director, "We need people who keep learning. They need to be comfortable with computers as a tool, but they certainly don't all need to be engineers."

Some of a start-up's hiring practices depend on timing: most are the brainchild of one or two founders, which then germinate for the first few years in someone's garage.

"Actually, it was my bedroom first," remembers Olson, who founded Virtual Vineyards in early 1994 with Peter Granoff. At the start of 1995 the company had three employees, two of them focused on the technical side of the site. But by the end of the year there were 11 employees, "maybe one-third engineers and two-thirds everybody else," says Olson. Those 11 employees spent the holiday season of 1995 in a single 1000 square-foot room.

When asked whether start-ups wait to hire employees until they have room to grow, Cyndy Ainsworth is skeptical. "Judging from a casual observation of other companies, people tend to hire when they need employees," she says, "even if that means they're scrunched." (Virtual Vineyards has since moved to a larger office and has around 30 employees on staff.)

Eleanor Roe learned about Virtual Vineyards through her contacts in the Bay Area wine industry. She contacted the company in December, 1997 and, because there were no openings at the time, made a note to resend her resume in April. When she did, she heard back the same day from Ainsworth, who asked her to come in for an interview.

By May, Roe had been hired as marketing manager. She credits her persistence in helping land the job, but also suggests spreading the word on the kind of position you want. "Your friends and contacts may not know what you want to do," she notes, "and these are the very people that may be able to move your search along to the next step."

Robert Olson suggests that applicants ask themselves a question before joining an Internet start-up: "Do you want your part of the company to be mission-critical? Match your expectations with the company's ambitions. At your interview, ask, 'What's the mission of the company? How do you know if it's successful? How do you measure success?' [A start-up company] succeeds by virtue of all people in the company being entrepreneurial."

Sean G. Thomas, Sean Thomas, Sean Garrett Thomas