Tech Debt

Insomnia kept me tossing and turning, and sometime after two in the morning I caved and walked to my couch and got on my laptop. I'm not sure how I got to it, but I ended up thinking about past jobs and job applications and Googling "Jana Boston." I had applied to the Boston-based startup Jana in 2016, and now I was seeing on Crunchbase that they had raised a $57 million Series D round in 2016.  Having moved from Hong Kong to Boston a few months before, I was desperately trying to land a data scientist position and ideally at a place with an international reach. I had come across Jana from job boards and read about their work providing digital access to the developing world, mainly rural India. The main product was a platform that enabled users in areas where mobile data was expensive essentially to trade ad views for free data. Everything seemed incredible - mission-driven smart people using software and data science to fight global inequality, all from a cool Downtown Crossing office with glass whiteboards and ping pong tables.

It did cross my mind that in recent memory, internet accessibility had increased dramatically in rural China without Jana's platform. But surely this fancy cool well-funded startup had already succeeded, and would be an amazing place for me to learn data science. I reached a final round interview before getting rejected. I later worked as a data scientist for GE and CiBO, getting laid off from both.

It was irritatingly difficult to find any news about Jana since 2016. There were a bunch of mixed reviews on Glassdoor, the historical funding information on Crunchbase and little else. On a hunch, I then googled "Jana Boston layoffs" and I came across some Boston Globe articles behind a paywall. At 2:30am I became a bostonglobe.com subscriber. 

It turns out that mobile data indeed had gotten a lot cheaper in India. Jana which had raised around $90 million overall had died an ignominious death. Our  $30m CiBO disaster looked like a fender bender compared to this train wreck. The tech startup world was a cruel one. I thought about the number of employees who had bought into the mission and ended up disappointed. I thought about the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that have been painfully written, tested, edited, deployed and discarded.

I came out of that wee hour search rabbit hole pretty jaded. I had very much bought into the story of Jana and was only now discovering that I'd have cast a losing wager. As I had done at CiBO. The following Thursday, February 13th, I learned that a company I nearly worked at, Wayfair, laid off 350 people in the Boston headquarters. What is it with all these layoffs? What did it portend for my current mission-driven tech startup? If these company failures are so common, how does anyone in tech make any money?

They say startup founders can go from feeling like they're creating a unicorn to worrying they'll go bankrupt in the same week. I seesawed similarly - about our financial success, our environmental impact, and my personal impact. What scared me the most was my willingness to ignore skeptical safeguards. Optimism had obscured my sensibilities in the past, and it could be doing so again.

There were ways for me to rationalize the macro view.  I could take the odds view, that the venture capitalists behind these companies were making bets hoping that 1 out of 10 might win - my work effort was a part of that calculus. 9,999 cancer researchers might fail to find a cure, but society needs them all to work hard for the 1 researcher who does succeed. I could think about the work that these startups do accomplish, which even if aren't directly built on, prove out a direction to either follow or avoid. Then there are the lessons learnt for everyone involved that potentially could help guide future endeavors.

Ultimately there are so many factors outside of your control that it becomes illogical to base too much of your sense of self-worth on the company that hires you. Job-seekers are rarely in a position of power, and though I tried to be extremely judicious in my last job search, I ended up needing to take the best position available to me. There's a fine line between being passionate and dedicated about your career and letting your company's success and impact define your dignity. Work hard, earn those wages, be realistic about what you can accomplish and influence what you can influence.

In another post sometime I'd like to dig deeper into the deluded nature of thinking we can solve world hunger from a computer screen in America. For now, I'd like to note that I find it far healthier to feel grateful for all that I have gained from my past jobs instead of dwelling on the lack of sustained impact.