Delivering Happiness

2
You Win Some, You
Lose Some
Out in the Real World
Sanjay and I both got offers from Oracle.
I had a few different job offers, but it was a pretty easy decision to
accept Oracle’s. Not only did they offer me the most money ($40k per year
in 1995 was pretty good pay for a job straight out of college), but they also
were going to pay for moving all of the stuff I had accumulated during my
college years to California, plus put Sanjay and me up in corporate housing
for free for a few weeks while we were going through the training program
for new hires.
I felt that I’d succeeded. I’d won the game of what I was told college
was supposed to be all about: getting a job that paid as much money as
possible. As I compared job offers that my other roommates had gotten, it
was pretty clear that Sanjay and I were both going to be making more
money than any of the rest of them.
A few months later, Sanjay and I were in the same new hire training
class at Oracle together. This was a three-week program, and we were with
twenty other people who had just graduated from college as well. Those
three weeks flew by. It was basically a crash course in database
programming. We had challenging and exciting projects. I really felt that I
was learning a lot, making new friends, and most importantly, making good

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money. At the end of the training class, I was looking forward to meeting
my new boss to start my new job.
I actually had no idea what I would be doing or what to expect. I really
hadn’t done any research on Oracle. All I knew was that they had sent
someone to interview me on campus while I was in college and that they
were impressed by my transcript. They really didn’t know who I was, and I
didn’t really know who they were. I just knew I was supposed to be a
“software engineer” and that they were paying me $40k.
On day 1 of my real job at Oracle, I was shown my desk and told what
my ongoing tasks and responsibilities would be. Basically, I was supposed
to be doing technical quality assurance and regression tests. I had no idea
what that meant but it really didn’t matter. I was making good money. And
within a week, I learned that it was actually easy money too.
All I had to do was run a couple of tests every day. It took about five
minutes to set up a test, and then about three hours for the automated test to
run, during which time I would just be sitting around and waiting for the
test to finish. So I could only run two or three tests a day at the most. I also
realized that nobody was tracking what time I came in or left the office. In
fact, I don’t think anyone really even knew who I was.
For the first month or so, I felt incredibly lucky. I couldn’t believe that I
was getting paid good money to do something that took almost no effort.
Sanjay and I had found an apartment that was seven minutes away from the
office, and we were roommates once again.
Within a week, I had my daily routine down:
10:00 
AM
—Show up at my desk.
10:05 
AM
—Start running one of the tests.
10:10 
AM
—Check my e-mail, send e-mails to friends from my training
class.
11:30 
AM
—Go home for lunch.
12:30 
PM
—Take a nap.
1:45 
PM
—Head back to the office.
2:00 
PM
—Start running another one of the tests.
2:05 
PM
—Check my e-mail, respond to e-mails from friends in my
training class.
4:00 
PM
—Head back home.

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I felt that I had lucked out because I had such an easy schedule, whereas
Sanjay usually wouldn’t get home until 7:00 
PM
. I would occasionally ask
him how his job was, and he’d shrug and say something like “It’s okay. Not
that exciting.”
I told him that my job was really not that exciting either, but maybe we
could work on something during the evenings and weekends together for
fun to help combat the boredom. There was that thing called the World
Wide Web that was starting to become more and more popular. Sanjay was
really good at graphic design, so maybe we could start something on the
side where we could create Web sites for other companies.
The idea of starting our own side business sounded pretty fun. We
decided to name the company Internet Marketing Solutions, or IMS for
short. We created our own Web site, ordered a second phone line for our
apartment, and went to Kinko’s to print out some customized business
cards. We were ready to start signing up some customers.
We had a plan for how to sign up customers: First, we would approach
the local chamber of commerce and offer to build their Web site for free.
Then we could tell all the local businesses that the chamber was a customer
of ours (avoiding any mention that they were not paying us), sign up as
many local businesses as possible, and the money would start rolling in
soon after.
So, first things first. We had to get the chamber of commerce to let us
build their Web site. Even though our pitch to them involved no money,
approaching them was my first cold call over the phone, which led to my
first in-person sales call. I had set up a meeting with them for 12:30 
PM
,
which would fit in perfectly with my daily Oracle routine.
On the day of my appointment, I was nervous. I had never made a
successful sales call before, but I knew my mission was to convince them
that they needed a Web site and that we were the right partners for them. I
knew that appearances were important, so when I left Oracle to go on my
lunch break at 11:30 
AM
, I went home first and put on the suit and tie I had
worn for graduation a few months earlier. I made sure that I had plenty of
business cards. And I brought a few of our brochures that Sanjay had
created and printed up a couple of days earlier.
Although I was nervous, the meeting went well. They were particularly
receptive to the fact that we were offering to do everything for free. Over

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the next few weeks, my lunch breaks got longer and longer, and I ended up
spending most of my time during the day meeting with the chamber to
make sure they were happy with what we were creating for them. Sanjay’s
nights got longer and longer, as he was the one staying up all night actually
creating their Web site. I was the sales and customer support guy, and he
was the product and design guy. We made a good team.
We launched the chamber of commerce’s Web site within a month, and
now we were ready to start getting paying customers. Our first target was
the Hillsdale mall, which was the big mall down the street from where we
lived. We thought that would make a good choice because if we were able
to sign them up as a customer, then we would be able to approach each of
the stores inside and tell them that the mall itself had signed with us so they
should as well.
Over the next couple of months, I spent less and less time in the office at
Oracle as I met with the Hillsdale mall and other small businesses. We
eventually convinced the mall to pay us $2,000 to design, manage, and host
their entire Web site.
We had done it! We had our first real paying customer. We could quit
our unfulfilling and boring day jobs at Oracle so we could run our own
business full-time.
And so we decided that’s what we were going to do.
I was a nervous wreck the morning that I was going to tell my boss at
Oracle that I was quitting. After procrastinating for half an hour, I
eventually worked up the courage to walk down the hallway to his office. I
was ready to give him the news. Through his office window, he saw me
approach and looked up. We made eye contact. I could feel my heart
beating faster and faster. And then he looked away. I glanced over and
realized at the last minute that he was meeting with someone else in his
office, so I couldn’t tell him right then. I felt a huge sense of relief, and
continued walking past his office, pretending that I was actually just on my
way to the bathroom down the hall.
So I washed my hands and waited inside the bathroom for another
couple of minutes to make it seem like I actually had gone to the bathroom.
And then I walked past my boss’s office back to my desk and spent the next
half hour e-mailing my friends. I figured that thirty minutes should be
enough time for the meeting he was in to be over, but then I decided to wait

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another fifteen minutes after that just to be sure, and then started walking
toward his office again.
For some reason, I was even more nervous the second time. I think
maybe it’s because I wasn’t sure if he was still going to be meeting with
whoever he was meeting with earlier. If he was still in that meeting, then I’d
have to pretend I was making yet another trip to the bathroom, and he’d
probably start thinking that I was maybe having some serious bladder or
stomach issues. He was probably also thinking already that it was weird that
I was using the bathroom close to his office instead of the one near my
cubicle. But maybe he thought the one near me was out of order or
something. I was pretty sure that all of these thoughts were running through
his mind, so I was trying to convince myself that it didn’t really matter, it
was going to be my last day anyway. But in the back of my head, I kept
thinking that all he would remember ten years later would be me needing to
use the bathroom multiple times within a short period of time on the wrong
side of the building. That would be disastrous.
So I resolved to make sure that his last memory of me was not “that
weird guy who needed to go to the bathroom a lot.” I had a plan. I would
walk straight into his office and get this over with. So I marched over,
telling myself that there was no turning back now. To make sure we didn’t
accidentally have any awkward eye contact beforehand, this time I walked
closer to the wall so that he couldn’t see me approach from far away. My
heart racing, I saw that his door was open this time, and when I was finally
in front of his door, I looked in, ready to tell him I was resigning.
Except there was nobody there.
This was going to go down in history as the most difficult resignation
ever. I guess he had gone to another meeting or to lunch, so I decided to go
to lunch as well. I would come back in the afternoon for Resignation
Attempt Number Three.
So I let out a sigh and turned around. And ran right into my boss, who
was behind me.
“Tony? Were you looking for me?” he asked.
I wasn’t mentally prepared for this scenario. I’d been thinking about
what value meal I was going to order from Taco Bell. Surprised and
flustered, I hurriedly mumbled an awkward “no, sorry” and walked away as
fast as I could without arousing any more suspicion.

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At Taco Bell, I made two very important decisions. I decided to try their
Double Decker Taco value meal, which turned out to have a surprisingly
calming effect on my stomach. I also decided that I would wait until
tomorrow to resign. Clearly I was being given signs that today was not the
right day.
When I got back to the office later that afternoon, I was a lot more
relaxed knowing that I didn’t have to deal with resigning that day. I headed
to the bathroom that was near my cubicle, only to be greeted with a sign on
the door that said it was being cleaned and to please use the other bathroom
—the one next to my boss’s office.
Luckily for me, I was now quite familiar with the location of that
bathroom, so I headed there. As I approached the bathroom, I saw that my
boss was alone in his office with the door open. I impulsively decided I just
wanted to get this over with, so before I could think too much about it, I
forced myself to walk into his office.
“Do you have a few minutes?” I asked. I closed the door and sat down
across from him. This was now the point of no return.
“I’ve… decided to resign,” I said nervously. I’d only been at Oracle for
five months and I hadn’t really accomplished anything there. I didn’t know
how my boss would take the news. I was worried that he might be upset
that I hadn’t been at Oracle for very long and was already leaving. Or
maybe he knew I had been taking long lunch breaks and was secretly happy
that I was leaving. Or maybe he didn’t care. The three seconds it took for
him to respond seemed like three minutes.
“Wow! You must be joining another start-up! What an exciting
opportunity!” He seemed genuinely excited and happy for me. He thought I
was joining a company that had millions of dollars in venture-capital
funding.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was just bored at Oracle and
wanted to have time to make more sales calls for the Web design business
that Sanjay and I were doing out of our living room. At the rate we were
going, we would actually be making a lot less money than we were at
Oracle.
But we wanted to run our own business and be in control of our own
destiny. This wasn’t about the money, it was about not being bored. Both
Sanjay and I had now officially resigned, and we were ready to begin the

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next chapter of our lives. We had no idea where it would lead us, but
wherever it was, we knew it had to be better than feeling bored and
unfulfilled.
We were ready for an adventure.