The Steamy Nature of Tapas
Reminiscing about restaurants in the past posts and spurred on by your quips and comments, another restaurant story came to mind with a slightly different flavor than the previous ones. On the surface, it’s a story about the unlikely combination of Spanish tapas and venture capitalists (VCs for short), but really it’s about the insane behavior of the internet bubble around the year 2000.
Not everyone has heard of tapas, including some VCs as you’ll soon find out, so if you fall into this camp: Tapas are
much like Spanish appetizers, and you often make an entire meal out of them. They’re quite tasty, but the important part
for this story is how you say “tapas”: It’s a Spanish word, and a reasonable pronunciation is “taa puhz”. Back then, you
were more likely to find them in bigger cities or college towns, but they’ve become more popular in the modern era.
Now for the story: In the middle of the year 2000, Laura and I left Bell Labs for Silicon Valley. (Bell’s mother company, Lucent, imploded over the following years, and I’ll let the reader decide if that’s correlation or causation.) We became cofounders in a startup building high-speed networking gear, and since it was the absolute peak of the internet bubble, it was a great time for raising capital. It was such a good time for raising capital that large throngs of people started companies right alongside us, leading to a fight for basic resources such as suitable housing and office space.
In order to avoid becoming homeless, we signed a year’s lease for an apartment sight unseen, which seemed expensive and imprudent, but less expensive and imprudent than navigating the insanity in the housing market at the time. For the problem of office space, the VCs helped by arranging for our company to sublease some temporary space from a software company they had funded, which turned out to be an absolute cliché of an internet startup. They had two founders who were the most senior of the tech team and looked like they might be about 25 years old. Moreover, a fair fraction of their employees were young guys skipping college in order to become internet millionaires. Nevertheless, we were grateful to have temporary office space, and the software team was certainly entertaining with a video game lounge and Friday Nerf gun battles, but they were especially entertaining when they came back from their company outings.
Company outings can be a terrific way to build camaraderie among a team, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for what it meant in that era. After pushing hard to meet a deadline, the software company would pack up and go to Las Vegas for a weekend: These outings were budgeted in the business plan by their prudent CFO, who also told me he had a line item for bail. Chatting with their guys after these weekends was even educational: It’s how I learned about the legality of prostitution in Nevada as well as the existence of the Mustang Ranch.
However, this is not the salaciousness that I wanted to tell you about today.
The cofounder role is pretty broad, and part of that entailed meeting with the VCs, selling them on our technology, taking their money, and then updating them on how the company was progressing. These updates happen in both a formal setting, like board meetings, as well as informal settings, such as parties. It was only a few years since Laura and I had finished grad school, and we kept our standard-of-living relatively modest, so the parties sometimes required jumping into entirely different economic strata.
As an example, one of our VCs (who we will name “Jim”) threw a party at the end of summer. Jim was a newish VC and his home might be best described as a starter mansion. He took some pride in the fact that he had earned money in college by bartending, so he started off serving behind the bar, and he had a large vocabulary of boozy drinks. I didn’t refuse Jim’s drinks (Why would I? That would be disrespectful) and there was a parade of people who we met at the bar. One of those was a gentleman from another of our VC firms (let’s call him “Mike”) who approached us and introduced his fiancée. It turns out the fiancée would become wife number 2 of 4 according to Wikipedia, but that had yet to be revealed.
There was some perfunctory discussion about our new company, but then the conversation turned more social: We were all commiserating about the difficult housing situation in Silicon Valley, that there was little to buy and the prices were insane. Mike’s fiancée latched onto this topic and for a while it sounded like we were all talking about the same thing until she said: “I mean, three million dollars will buy you a house, but it won’t be a 15,000 square feet mansion or anything.” (She was from an area of Georgia where, apparently, such money would buy 15000 sq ft in the year 2000.) This conversation was something of an eye-opener. It was an even greater eye-opener when, several years later, we read about Mike in the Wall Street Journal. The article included details involving an alleged paramour and alleged hush money and alleged sex slaves. Not long after the WSJ article, he and the VC firm realized X-rated articles and lawsuits tend to be large distractions, and so they parted ways.
However, this is not the salaciousness that I wanted to tell you about today.
Later that year around Christmas, there was another party where Jim and his wife (let’s name her “Alicia”) worked in some probing questions about our company culture. Jim was always a little bit concerned about team development because we had such a large percentage of PhDs, people from Bell Labs or equal caliber. Jim broached the topic by asking if we had gone out as a group, and I thought the timing was fortuitous because the company had recently gathered in a trendy San Francisco bar that serves tapas.
With that in mind, the conversation between Jim, Alicia, Laura and me went something like this:
Jim: “So tell us, what was the last outing that the company did as a group?”
JP: “Oh, our HR team organized a trip to a tapas bar up in San Francisco. I think we got almost everyone there, and it was a good time.”
Jim: “You said HR organized it?”
JP: “Yes that’s right, and the tapas bar people were great about getting everybody to mingle and interact.”
Alicia (looking at Laura): “And did you go too?”
Laura: “Of course. It was lots of fun.”
This had gone on for a while before Laura suddenly realized that Jim and Alicia were hearing “topless bar” every time we said “tapas bar”. After a quick explanation of the main differences between the two types of bars, all of the polite laughter and nervous laughter transformed into uproarious laughter. We often wonder about the alternative timeline where the confusion was not cleared up, and the conversation they might have had in their car ride home.
So that is the salaciousness I wanted to tell you about today: If you take $20 million from VCs and you’re hitting your company goals, feel free to go to topless bars on the company dime. You can even have weekends of getting arrested in Las Vegas provided that you’re building a solid esprit-du-corps. As long as you don’t make headlines in the Wall Street Journal, you’ll barely raise anybody’s eyebrows.
[Note: These initial posts are a series of stories on restaurants. They were originally posted elsewhere, and I wanted to revisit and collect them here.]