Tech Talk: Lessons Learned

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Monday, May. 21, 2001 Regrets. I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention. Cranky Frank Sinatra got it right in his song "My Way" -- and not just for millions of teary karaoke aficionados.

Sinatra's song was about the choices one makes in life. You might make some wrong calls from time to time, but everything is a learning experience. Well that's how I see it.

About this time last year, I wrote here about leaving the world's biggest media company, AOL Time Warner, the one that publishes this website, to join probably the world's smallest, the regional news portal AsiaWise.com. I wrote, somewhat pompously, that the reason I switched jobs was not about money and instant wealth (the day I joined AsiaWise was the day NASDAQ died), but a higher calling that the Internet was an agent of change in media, and I wanted to know more about it. This would be a learning experience, I convinced myself.

I was right. But not in ways I anticipated. There were a great many things I didn't know: one of which was that less than six months later I would no longer be working at AsiaWise. (I did not flame out in a classic burnout way. I just couldn't tolerate management anymore.)

Still, the six months were an interesting personal experience: human resources manager one day, editor the next, staff psychiatrist the following day, and promotions director the day after that.

And it was revealing watching the clash of cultures. We, the skeptical journalists, alongside management who talked of billion-dollar IPOs as they walked us through a business plan that secured $3 million in venture capital, mostly from Japan's Softbank, predicated on an advertising bonanza driven by supposed weekly hits in the millions. AsiaWise wasn't a portal, we were told. It was going to take over Rupert Murdoch one day. But the hits never arrived, which of course was editorial's fault because we didn't write sufficiently exciting stories. But trying to get a readership, in English, in Asia, in six months, that is ten times that of TIME, is tough going. Needless to say, the CEO had no previous media experience apart from being occasionally quoted on CNN.

Day One was particularly revealing. The senior editorial people gathered in the living room of the CEO, who demanded that we ask our esteemed contacts if they'd like to join the board "of a major media company." I was asked to approach the former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating. "What do I offer him?" I asked the CEO. "Nothing," he replied. "He'll do it out of prestige." When I said that very few people do things for prestige alone -- and a yet-to-be-built website has very little in the way of prestige -- I suggested that Keating might at least want some share options. "Not enough to go around," he barked. "How about some of yours," I inquired of the boss. No comment.

I learned also not to be in thrall to pimply faced techies. In the first month, I sat through an excruciating week listening to funky Swedish Web designers supposedly handing us the key to Internet success. Their haircuts and jargon were great -- their body jewelry just so -- but their extraordinarily expensive website barely survived my time there. It took three months to deliver and I reckon I knocked together a better personal website in three days last month using Microsoft Front Page, for one thousandth of the cost.

I also got sick of the number of times friends and colleagues would ask how AsiaWise would make money. It was a good question and one that I would ask myself of management. The answer? There isn't one.

The greatest achievement during my time as a Net nerd? There were two: the first and most satisfying was helping recruit a great team of media professionals, who took a leap of faith to come on board as times were getting tough in the industry; the second great achievement was resigning.