a99kitten's Musings

~ begin rant

My husband and I started a company back when he was still in business school and I worked at a hedge fund. Our “office” was our tiny little guest room in the apartment we rented in Palo Alto between my office and his school. He and another co-founder came up with the idea(s) for the business and started implementing them and I handled all the administration to set it up. Was teeny – not too big of a big deal time-wise for me. Helped with customer service a bit too but then we hired someone (thank god!)

Now, at my “day job” I was the officially the ‘Executive Assistant to the Managing General Partner’. Now, what I actually did was all the typical exec assisitant stuff for him (ever see The Devil Wears Prada? Those were typical days and requests – really rich people are odd ducks) and then I handled his personal finances (rich people have really messed-up complicated finances), managed his house staff, managed his multiple homes, travel, travel and dealing with schools for his 4 kids, communication between he and his ex-wife (that was fun), finding new nannies, Investor Relations for all of the various funds, Portfolio Accounting for all of the various funds, IT for the office, HR crap for the office, dealing with a 2nd ex-wife, and general office manager type stuff. A 10-hour day was a short day. I only outline to show I was pretty busy already but also know how to do a range of jobs…

Anyway, when it came time to get some funding, I set up a meeting between my husband (actually fiancee at the time) and my boss. He was stressed since he had no business plan put together and I told him – he doesn’t care about paperwork. He wants you to go in there and explain how you are going to build a business and make money. Very simple. It took quite a while to convince him that he would be OK. To know him now, you wouldn’t actually think he would have been insecure about that. But he when in without a “on paper” business plan and it worked and he got seed money plus my boss introduced him to other people with seed money (some of those same investors invested in another company of ours more recently) who then got him in with the biggest angel investor in Silicon Valley. And that investor then got him in with Sequoia. So while I’m sure my husband could have done all of this on his own, he didn’t. I helped.

I worked not only full-time at my job (my hours were really more like 7am – 7pm) but I then came home (and then to our temporary office space that we got as we grew and grew) and did all the admin work for our new company. Plus all the bill paying, house keeping, personal errands for us both, blah blah. Then husband asked that I start full time which meant I would quit my old job. Whoa. That was hard since I really, really liked my job, my boss, my co-workers and the entire industry. And my boss preferred I stay. But he understood. Sometimes I wonder if that was the wisest choice I ever made…but I did leave.

Our company was growing fast and our COO (who came from a big company background and not a start-up culture) thought having the CEO’s wife (we were married by now) do HR might not be so great since employees want to feel comfortable with HR. We didn’t want to foster a kindergarten/baby-sitting type of HR culture and didn’t make any changes right away besides hire someone to work in HR with me but eventually the COO got his way and hired a Director of HR from another big company. Who then filled out his department of 5 (including him.) I still had tons to do without HR (did stuff in Finance, Legal, all of the stock option admin, investor and Board relations, took over and managed facilities and office manager type stuff) so I didn’t protest. And I got to have a 9-10 hour day instead of a 14-16 hour day. Kinda nice. Plus, I didn’t want some weird perception of me. I already knew there was as I heard some rumors of employees saying I only married my husband because he was the CEO (umm…when I met him and for several years after I made more money than he did you schmucks. And we started the company together well after he met me. Jealous and insecure much?) I thought these guys are more trained in HR and should know better anyway, right? Uh-huh.

Company still grew but then 2001 came and the economy tanked and business deals tanked and then 9/11 and we did 2 big rounds of layoffs between summer and fall. Then we had to bootstrap and did a final round in which I got laid off too as my husband felt showing me preferential treatment would be bad. So he kept one of the others from HR to manage that stuff. Ok…

I started a consulting business and had several good clients and kinda liked it – my own schedule, worked from home most of the time or at the client homes. Got to run my errands during off commute hours, take the huskies to the beach all the time. Pretty chill. I wasn’t working a gazillion hours and being stressed all the time. I highly recommend it if you can do it…

Then husband said that the HR rep just didn’t show up for a couple days. I won’t go into too many details about her deal but she basically stole a small amount of money plus was having trouble at home, blah blah. So he asked if I could take on the HR work as a part-time contractor since we were pretty small once again. Sure. I added my old company job (and still part MY company stock-wise) to my consulting jobs.

Boy…the mess I found created by the old HR department. 401k annual reports not filed correctly or at all for years, COBRA paperwork not done correctly, personnel files were a mess, insurance bills not audited and being over paid or not even right at all with coverage, and on and on. WTH did these 5 highly-compensated people do in there all day??? So I fixed it. Plus took over a project to wind down a segment of our business when our Controller needed the help.

Then when our Controller blew a mental gasket and just didn’t show up one day…or 5 days later, I took over our accounts payables/receivables, corporate insurance and payroll until we found a new one. And kept the jobs of payroll, corporate insurance and paying all of the admin/HR bills since I just fixed all of our relationships with the companies.

And then we grew and husband asked if I could come back on full-time. So I did. Phased out my other consulting jobs and came back full time. And have been doing it since then. Paid less than the other HR people had been when I started back. Did get a bump up more to market a couple years ago but husband always worried about the “optics” of him giving me raises or stock option grants. I’m not complaining, I’m not working for slave wages or anything by any means, but I note that I am still paid less than that Director of HR we “needed” who apparently couldn’t manage his department. Wonder what he is doing now? I sure hope he or his team are not in charge of anyone’s HR department…

I don’t want credit or accolades. I don’t ask to be recognized or care about titles or look or ask for raises, bonuses, etc etc. I have a job to do, I do it. I get things done. And correctly. But in the same vein, what I also don’t want is to hear (still? again?) is that people think the only reason I have this job at all is because the CEO was my husband. Really awesome to see people still believe that. *awesome* Who the F are you to say or assume that?

Or to think you can do or parse out my job “easily”. You want to add my job to yours – be my f***ing guest. I’m not saying other people can’t do my job – there are plenty of good HR/Administrative/office people out there. But it’s not so easy to find them – because they probably have great jobs already.

All I have to say you jackasses is a big F.O.

~end rant