Chapter Nineteen #2
I go all day without logging in, and the next morning when I check in from home, I have zero Slack messages.
I feel a lot of solidarity with the team; what’s happening is absolute bullshit.
But a little time has dulled the shock for me.
Lettercat’s a startup, and this is how startups roll.
We have to be flexible and scrappy, always prepared for the next pivot.
I remember what Glenn said last time we talked: it’s never boring.
It’s still not that easy to talk myself out of feeling guilty for the coffee meeting I’m taking this morning. I have more than enough reasons to go at this point; career development and romantic entanglements aside, if Lettercat goes belly up, I’ll still have rent to pay.
So I take some deep breaths, I put on my product manager lipstick, and I head to the Blue Bottle in the Financial District to meet Faith and Layla.
I’m ten minutes early and they’re one minute late, so I’m fully prepared to dislike them for their unprofessionalism. But once they arrive, they’re both lovely and intelligent. All my nerves and tendency towards irrational hatred evaporate, and we have a terrific conversation.
They tell me about how they came to be co-founders (one was in ops at a travel site, one in marketing at an airline), where they are with the company (just raised a Series A) and the product (live, but struggling with adoption and retention).
I give a much more natural story about how I came to product management and what I’ve been doing at Lettercat than the one I rehearsed. We shift into their vision, how I’ve worked with founders in the past, and what we think working together might be like.
“I have to say,” Layla confesses, “Given how… tough Edmund is, I was a little worried about what type of person you would be. But I’m not just relieved, I’m genuinely excited after talking to you.”
I laugh and tell her how Edmund planted my kind and fantastic mentor, Glenn, at Lettercat.
“Edmund’s not easy,” I agree. “But he’s smart and strategic, so I’m inclined to listen to him. A thing I hadn’t planned on is how nice it is to have this conversation with two women,” I say.
“It’s kind of wild,” Faith says. “Just imagine never being the only woman in the room.”
Not going to lie, this kind of blows my mind.
“Fuck this place,” Dave says to me when I walk up to his desk to see what’s new. “Am I right?”
“Then why are you here?” I ask, startling him.
I’m not being a jerk, I’m genuinely wondering why he’s sitting in his chair in front of his computer if that’s how he feels. Plenty of people have decided to “WFH” again today.
“I figured we could still fix some production bugs and look at that performance issue,” he tells me, shrugging.
I look at his screen and see that he is, indeed, working.
So are Ingrid and most of the rest of my team, here making sure things are going well and improving what they can, even after Monday’s disappointment.
I love them all, even QA. A small wave of shame hits me when I think about the meeting I just had.
I feel a pit in my stomach imagining telling them that I’m moving on.
“Do you have any updates?” Ingrid asks.
“Nope,” I say. I heard about Jude’s trip to New York on a personal level. That makes it distinct from public information and not mine to share. “I’ll tell you as soon as I know anything,” I promise, and then wonder if it’s true.
As I walk to my desk, I don’t stop to chat with Kate because she’s on the phone.
Most of her team seems to be, as well. I log in and pull the numbers for this week.
Sales are up significantly, which is nice to see.
It would be nicer if some of the new customers coming in from Tooity had the chance to opt into our new platform.
I know from listening to Jude that an uptick isn’t what our investors are after; they’re looking for a major and probably unsustainable level of growth, but they usually fund it generously.
It’s not normal to demand a small team produce an absurd amount of functionality in one month.
I lose a good half hour trying to imagine what Edmund’s motivation could be to put us through this and pull the plug at the last minute.
I open up the projections Jude and I worked on together, that he presented to the board.
If we took five months to build it properly, and got just forty percent of our new customers to choose the new, higher-priced plan, we’d be looking at that mythical hockey-stick growth.
And that’s not even including our share of the ad revenue once that network was up and running.
Maybe Jude will come back with good news, and funding, but it feels dangerous to attempt optimism.
I sigh.
“What’s up, little bro?” Trevor asks me from his desk, where he’s customizing a pair of basketball shoes on the Nike website.
“I wish I knew,” I tell him.
“Word,” he says.
That afternoon I receive a series of voice memos. Yes, Faith and Layla are voice memo people. It’s fine. It’s efficient, I suppose, if you’re not the one listening.
Hi Lacey! This is Faith. Putting this in a group chat for the three of us to communicate. Just wanted to let you know it was great meeting you today
Hi Lacey, Layla here as well. Super nice chatting with you earlier. Faith and I had a chance to connect this afternoon and would really like to continue talking with you about joining the team
Faith again. Would love to book a few hours with you next week to really dive in. Please let us know what works for you!
I do multiple takes before I get my voice memo response sounding the correct amount of pleased and not dead inside. It’s just another conversation, I tell myself. Being open to other opportunities doesn’t mean I’m going anywhere.