My FON story, Part 3
I joined FON with no commitments and a very vague description of future compensation that changed dramatically after the company was funded (a fairly normal occurrence in startups). The only thing that was guaranteed was the excitement of getting in on the ground floor of a interesting project. I was passionate about the idea and the possibility of helping people, providing affordable access and putting an end to the WiFi rip-offs that consumers suffer from today. I was also passionate because Martin was passionate and passion is contagious.
In a startup you lead with passion and follow through with product. But without passion your team won’t be there for you when times get tough. Once I was hiring a developer at Securitylab when I first started the company. He wanted a salary of 100K plus options when at the time I was taking no salary and was working out of my apartment. In his defense he did have a family and a mortgage so I can’t blame him all that much but it was clear he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice anything for a new employer, especially his family. I respect him for that. But with startups you have to be prepared to make some sacrifices if you really believe in what the company is trying to do.
Nearly all of the employees who joined before the company was funded sacrificed something because they believed in Martin and they believed in the companies mission. I had a number of friends tell me FON would never work, never get funded and never get off the ground. I ignored them and pushed forward and FON did get funded, it did get off the ground and I went on to build the largest division of FON (FON USA has the largest concentration of registered users in the world).
When everyone around you tells you that you are bound to fail the only thing you have left is your passion for the idea. They say entrepreneurs and successful business people can be very arrogant and difficult to deal with, but if you lived your life constantly proving people wrong, can you blame them?
The FON concept is not new. The only thing that made it successful was the employees who sacrificed, and believed in the concept and Martin’s ability to pursue his vision. Those who decided that proving everyone else wrong is a pretty damn cool.
So why did I leave FON? Passion doesn’t last forever and when it whines down and you have a better view of the landscape, tough decisions have to be made. I’ll finish this piece later in the week but please don’t expect me to drop some bomb about an imploding FON. That wasn’t my reason.
June 26th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Ejovi,
Don’t drop a bomb, but do tell us what really happened. I know that shouting about a former employer is not a good thing, but I also believe that your motives can be honest and clear.
I sincerely believe you had a lot of pressure, but little backing from Martin. It was clear from the boards’ posts that there was a terrible lack of resources in costumer service and logistics, with many people miffed at not getting their routers, receiving broken ones, or having configuration and operating issues.
As for the current model Fon is following, I am not sure - I wrote an article in my blog, in which some quick maths showed that 1 million routers, at $5 each, will prove hard on the ROI in the midterm. Can they survive with the $21.7 million they got? Sure, for some time. But investors don’t invest for fun or pleasure…
Best of luck,
Mike
June 27th, 2006 at 3:41 am
Mike,
at the end of the day, their plan is selling those routers, so 5M will come back. And for those who won’t connect their routers, FON will get even more. Martin is so wise and skilled that I can’t believe, even for one second, that he’s taking fool steps
Ejovi,
you’re right. Startups are made with passion, and you need to be ready to sacrifice something. But it’s also true that if you’re a 10/15 years professional, with a strong experience, and you have reached a certain life style, you need to balance these factors (passion AND economical reward). And a company willing to attract the best talents needs to understand this. I am not necessarily saying they must be ready to pay a fortune in salaries, but “quality” is not cheap. Just my 2 cents.
June 27th, 2006 at 10:03 am
I am interested to hear your side and the truth of it, having been reading your posts about it i am keen to hear what brought on the change of “passion”
June 27th, 2006 at 10:35 am
I thought you were right to follow your passion and I am thinking you will be right to follow your course now. There was nothing new in Fon apart from the passion and I also am thinking it is diminished.
Along with raw initial talent disappearing I fear that is never achieving the momentum it needs of those with real knowledge of services. You cannot do a million of anything without vision and action behind it.
I myself did make a nuisance asking some of the European people “what if?â€, “how will you?â€, “when will†questions. The lack of answers was not the disappointment; the lack of understanding what is behind the questions is the real troubling part.
Go forward with best wishes
June 28th, 2006 at 11:17 am
Ejovi,
My experience working for a startup has confirmed the issues you bring out. Much of the time is about passion, sacrifice, and the desire to succeed and silence the critics. Having worked at the cutting edge of Voice-over-IP (VoIP)during the early stages (1998), our startup company encountered many critics and skeptics at trade shows that told us that VoIP wouldn’t work because latency, jitter, and packet loss would render voice quality too poor. Well if we had listened to the critics, the company would have never gone IPO, built a global VoIP network expanding over 100 contries, and carried over 7 Billion minutes of international VoIP traffic annually. Keep up the good work and I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of the story.
June 30th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
I found that fon was so eager to launch that they did not have the logistics in place when they did launch. Even now the logistics are a mess. I even got a doa router and been waiting 4 days for an answer from fon.
Ejovi, wont say it but the bottom line was after the passon wound down, he saw the major flaws in this and saw how fon is going to go down like the titantic.