This is not a tech story. That’s not to say that we didn’t have our honest share of mistakes, missteps, misfires, and misnomers at Scripted. For stories on the ways that tech goes wrong, how the cornerstone of greed in venture capital bleeds out so many good companies, the fallibility of lofty ideals, or the gentle dangers of the ego implanted within everything crafted from those ideals, there are many well-written cautionary tales out there. We grow from the strife we find in these scenarios, but we live through the affection, support and respect of our peers and friends. I’d like to talk about that latter part. So no, this is not a tech story. This is a love story. I wasn’t supposed to be in the SOMA office that last day. I had the privilege of working from home when I got a call from my boss telling me that some considerations had been made, and to keep the vessel of Scripted going, a lot of us were being let go. He was kind and straightforward, knowing that I’d trust his words at face value. I didn’t need to come in, he said, but they were going to make the announcement in a few minutes, at lunch. It was to be the last in-office day. I asked him to stall, and after the click of the line, I redlined my motorcycle to the office, making record time, wild-haired, scruffy, breathless, to the laughter of my colleagues. The announcement wasn’t a bang, not a shock, but a whisper. We all knew this was an eventuality, and we just breathed the words our CEO slowly spoke out loud. The end of our tenure with Scripted was held within a breath, a circulation of oxygen in the lungs, finally sublimated and exhaled, taking with it stress and feeling. It’s hard to love and pour yourself into something for so long, then be told it is no longer your responsibility, now firmly in the past. So I looked around instead, at the people in the room with me. Scripted had taken a chance on every single member of the team, after a tough interview and a pool game (we used to joke that we couldn’t hire anyone actually skilled at pool, lest their abilities shine a light on our collective amateurism). To the last person, we were either green-gilled and blinking at the post-education sunlight, or following through on a tough transition from another industry, a later-game cross-train car leap of faith. We were hired on a simple promise: I will learn to be a pulling part of this team, not just a wheel that spins with the inertia of others. We believed in the mission, and we relied on one another to carry it through, picking up slack when someone’s burden became too heavy, always with good humor. Our Slack channels devoted to jokes outnumbered the serious ones a solid two to one. Scripted took a chance, as I took a one-way flight from New York City to San Francisco, when it hired me, a kid with degrees in physics and creative writing, fresh out of a discouraging stint in finance, to be a data scientist. They needed someone who cared about writing, understood experiments, could work on and between teams. In a sense, I’ve always been naïve. I believed the words I was told face-to-face by my future CEO, and my future boss, colleagues, because I judged them to be honest. “We have an important niche to fill. You’re the person for this job. We’re going to be a huge company one day.” I maintain that I did the believing because the ones that did the telling had a palpable faith in the ideals of the mission, the team’s abilities. I would learn to gladly share and encourage this faith over time, while always trying to keep an eye on just how much tech Kool-Aid I was drinking. With company maturity, we transitioned from speaking about the worth of our work as a function of the product’s features, to discussing the merits of our productive team dynamic. Having pivoted the entire underlying business plan, rebuilt the technology several times over, repurposed entire internal teams, we felt capable of handling any challenge together. That’s how family works. You tell your family the most hopeful version of the truth with their best interests in mind, and you support them. Trust was the day one gift and benchmark at Scripted, not code output or website performance metrics. Trust, not in the completion of literal line-by-line job description bullets, but in the abstract, as people growing, innovating, working hard to pull their best for the team. It took me a solid six months to write code that was lasting and useful (my coworker once described my early code as the best worst Java written in Python), but by my second day, I was already tasked and trusted with important projects. At Scripted, I was told: “Here’s a problem we can’t solve. This is why you’re here, we trust you can sort this out.” So I would, with many falls, many lessons, even a few triumphs. Even here at the end, there was this trust. After the quiet speech was over, there was no long, slow, awkward goodbye, no call to shake hands with someone you didn’t know well, no middle school dance-floor eye contact avoidance, no shuffling of feet out the door. There were looks of understanding in a quiet room as the last words hung in the air, tinges of sadness and relief, hugs, so many hugs, an auction house dibsing of favorite office seats, clever mugs, ergonomic keyboards and scuffed chargers. There was one last smoke break on the patio outside, one very different from the fretful smoke breaks of days past waiting on investor or funding news. There was laughter. Laughing itself felt different, affected by this systemic dismantling of the workplace reality around us. It was clearer now than before, unburdened, because now, at the demise of the contractual organization, we found that trust and affection remained. I’ve been to coworkers’ weddings (late to one, sorry Sarah!), fixed coworkers’ bicycles, sat down a little drunk on a beach during work retreats and discussed decidedly non-work life concerns, traded life, love, horsepower advice, coffee, slices of pizza, helped with and been helped through those days you don’t want to get out of bed and go to work, but you do anyway because you know the people there will pluck you up and put you upright again. We’d been part of something great at Scripted, we knew, and while we’d lost our jobs, we’d found a small family along the way. Is there advice to be had here? There’s the frustrating set of phrases that people who have succeeded in their goals have to say to the rest of us still swimming upstream. “Well, follow your dream and you can’t fail.” “Well, we put our heads down after every setback and worked hard and we made it.” But I urge, with the voice of someone still splashing around up that current, someone who didn’t find the Silicon Valley, cash-out-on-your-tech-startup dream fabrication, look around you instead, and see who’s there with you. If belief will guide your spiritual soul, and hard work will bring salvation to your capitalistic self, then maybe the support, camaraderie and love of your colleagues turned friends turned family might form your most human core.
