In self-promoting The Tech Drama I’ve noticed book sellers provide samples that can require setup and context. Under the Bus is a mid-story chapter that I think is relatable and stands on its own. I hope you enjoy.
One night that spring I sat on the floor outside the door to Jesse’s room. He was six years old. He was standing just inside the threshold of the doorway. He had his turtle sweater on; a green/brown turtle on a navy background. He was standing with his torso angled away from me at 45 degrees. He looked back, over his shoulder at me.
The light of the overhead fixture lit the room brightly, but my eyes were drawn to his fine, gold hair, which collected the light and seemed to amplify it, like a halo.
A feeling.
A weird feeling.
Positive.
Hopeful.
There were no words in my head, but if there had been:
I want to be here.
I thought about it for a moment and then a question formed,
What was that? That… feeling?
Oh, it was— joy.
A moment passed.
I haven’t felt that in… a long time.
Another moment passed.
When we got to Polymodal, Daniel and I were part of the engineering group. Erik asked us to choose which one of us would report directly to him. I was interested in process, tools, and collaboration with other groups. I was excited to be in a bigger organization. I actually wanted to report to Erik. Daniel liked to be heads down in his code. Other groups seemed to frustrate him. Between Daniel and me, it seemed pretty clear, I should be the one to report to Erik.
Erik pulled me into his monthly engineering leads meeting. At the time I had 6 engineers on my team and Ilya had 4. Marissa and Patrick built some of the foundational tools and had teams of about 15, each. Jack Van Damme had been VP of Engineering at Questar and and Marco Henry had been VP of Engineering at Polymodal before the two companies merged. They ran teams of 130 and 75 respectively. Instead of rolling Ilya and radiology under Marco, Erik insisted on us reporting to him. Then, he encouraged us to speak up.1
So, we talked about KPI’s, A3 plans, and engineering fungibility. We practiced healthy disagreement. There was a particular difference between people who had worked at Questar and people who had worked at Polymodal. The Polymodal’ers represented building, growing, and innovation. The Questar folks were responsible for a mature market, 35% of all healthcare dictation in the United States went through Jack Van Damme’s team’s systems. They valued stability over growth. I aligned more with the Polymodal’ers. Our team was small and we were non-existent in a market dominated by a single player so vision and innovation were our chances to grow. Our discussions were respectful, though there was competition for influence, resources, and approval. Erik was a great moderator, being convinced of the value of all the work we were doing, and he had everyone’s respect.
Catherine had been given the choice to work with Alex, as part of a vision group, to communicate what Polymodal did, but responded, “Alex is a creep.” So, she went to work with the product management team.
Catherine would come back from the meetings with the product management team and talk about the drama. “Max threw Elise under the bus.” “Noah got thrown under the bus.” After the second or third time I heard someone talk about being thrown under the bus I thought,
That can’t be the sign of a healthy culture.
Catherine spoke up about her 90 slide NanoDeck assignment. It should have been an exercise to understand customers. She never showed me the deck, but it didn’t matter so much as we had our milestones already set in contractual stone for the first year. Catherine also didn’t seem to buy-in fully either. She presented it as, ‘Look what my boss asked me to do. See, we shouldn’t have sold to this company.’
Her boss’ name was Don Layzer, and he was as dynamic and credible as his name suggests. He had been hired by Hank, the Polymodal CEO, in what was described as a coup. Hank stole Don and his team from NanoSoft Health. At NanoSoft they had been poised to fix everything with healthcare and the only reason they failed was because the world wasn’t ready. It was not because of the way they worked and talked,
“Max threw Elise under the bus,”
is just so much more efficient than,
‘Max challenged Elise because he
thinks her ideas are so promising
and she’s a few steps away from
something really special.’I didn’t know Hank, but my impression was the attitude came from the top. I never saw Hank, our CEO, fly off the handle. I just heard about it. Every month the executives would have a two day intensive meeting. Of course it was referred to by a critical acronym, the S.E.T: senior executive team.
According to Erik, Hank’s leadership was to yell at the team, then leave the room. Then he would pull people out one by one. “Mandy, get over here!” “Yes, boss! Right away, boss!” Erik’s Austrian-German accented impression of a big Texan was its own comedy.
Hank was 60 years old, but still an imposing 6’5”, with dark grey hair, transformed by product into an armored helm. You know the type.2
There was a culture shock when Polymodal and Questar came together. When people come together there is always a culture shock. Maybe friction is a better metaphor; heat, wasted energy.
And hurt feelings.
I didn’t know about those at the time. My business partner called me fucking ugly to a room of employees and I thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it some more.
Not feeling, ignoring it for the most part was coping.
It was also a superpower. When early customers struggled with speech recognition issues, Catherine’s first response was, “What are those fucking clowns in speech doing? They need to stop fucking up,” but for years it would end there. Just complaints.
When I talked to Erik about the same issues, he encouraged me to talk more with the speech team. Our relationship with the speech team had always been through the computer, email and NanoTask tickets. Erik encouraged personalizing it.
Catherine and I wound up in our respective cultures, one was partly a spirited, collaborative discourse, the other, shoves into oncoming traffic. The culture of the greater organization biased towards oncoming traffic.
At PUH and later at Poetic Systems, there were a number of times when we would have angry customers. When they got angry enough, Catherine would visit. Sometimes she was the ‘customer whisperer.’ The reviews that came back from some customers: she is patient and empathetic. Her attitude in the office when she came back was anything but patient and empathetic.
“I just got back from WestMed. All I have to say is, our product is shit.”
I asked, “Can we go over the issues in the conference room?”
“I don’t care who hears. They should hear it.”
Was I afraid of ruffling feathers? Probably. But how was that constructive?
Of course, this was after she had spent months working on a 90 slide NanoSheet deck that had ballooned to 120 slides. For the first year we were at Polymodal, I don’t think she could even run the software.
I never barred her from coming to our engineering meetings, but I also didn’t invite her. I’m sure I had my ways of passively discouraging her, particularly at the beginning. Her negativity pervaded everything. It hadn’t registered before when we had all worked at Pittstown University Hospitals, but I had never been in the crosshairs, and didn’t know what to look for.
After she was fired, and I had to pretend I didn’t know why, I worried about how it looked, not having had her at our engineering meetings. I wanted—needed—a product manager at our meetings, someone plugged into customers, who could speak on their behalf. But, it never would have worked with her. I feared she would have called one of the engineers ugly or stupid. I tolerated her abuse,
Do I dare call it that?
It’s what it was.I’m not sure what I would have done if it were directed at a team member. When she said it about customers, I would sometimes redirect. When she said it about me, I could ignore it.
The engineers needed a triaged list of problems with relevant details. When details required investigation, they needed a committed partner, not a tirade about how it all sucked.
When she did go on site, I tried to listen to what was underneath the anger. I listened and tried to synthesize what she said with other information coming in from support and implementation.
—But let’s be clear, it was a distracting, complex, chaotic environment. Survival of radiology was never a given. I was actually told by Catherine and Barbara and others that people were questioning, “why do we even need a radiology group?”
We had moved from one culture dominated by the relationship of three founding partners to the “under the bus” culture, and the jury was out on its effectiveness.
Years before, at PUH, Dr. Patel ran staff meetings at 9:00 AM on Monday morning. Most of the time he would come in, sit down in a slouch at the head of the table, and ask “what’s going on, guys?” He had this manner where he would nod, rapid, short, and sharp when listening, almost like a tic. At the same time he would often blink rapidly. His slouch would often spill to one side over the armrest of his chair. He would swivel, so his body would be turned away from the speaker and he would then turn his head to be able to look at the speaker, fist on the table or armrest, propping his head by his jaw.
I was so young then, I just watched and listened. Dr. Patel would ask about operations. “Anything happen over the weekend, guys?” Then he would ask about development. “When is the workflow change going to be ready?” Then he would paint a vision and talk about what was coming next.
If there was a problem, he would start there, initially calm. “Guys I got a call last night from Dr. Reynolds. He said the images were not coming across starting at 10 PM.”
Charles would open his laptop, “Dr. Patel, I’m looking right now and the images are there.” Charles was just trying to be helpful.
“Are you kidding me!? Are you telling me what’s going on right now?! I am talking about last night! There was a film they needed last night and it wasn’t there.”
“Dr. Patel, I wasn’t saying...”
Everyone would stare daggers at Charles. Shhhhh.
“WHAT THE HELL, GUYS!? I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS ATTITUDE! WHAT IF IT WAS YOUR MOTHER ON THE TABLE?!3 YOU… NONE OF YOU ARE TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY!”
We all took it seriously. Patel was often on edge.
After the second time, I was aware there was a hidden tripwire. It was something I was familiar with from my childhood.
My father used to yell. Sometimes it would go on for 30 minutes. 30 minutes of, “what the hell were you thinking?” but no answer you could give would be adequate. At the time I thought the root of the problem was forgetting to mow the lawn, take out the trash, or empty the dishwasher.
It could have been worse. My grandfather used to beat my father with a belt. My grandfather became addicted to uppers, which he tempered with his chosen downer, alcohol. It was back when they still thought of pills as magic cures, before we appreciated the side effects.
My father, for his part, has been sober as long as I have known him. He also didn’t physically hurt me. Though he did yell. It was ten times better. It taught me real world skills when dealing with someone enraged,
1. Don’t speak unless spoken to.
2. When ordered say, “Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”
3. If you don’t know the answer to a direct question, “I’ll find out right away, sir.”
These translated perfectly to Dr. Patel. Dr. Patel’s outbursts were common. The emotion shown by Dr. Patel did one thing, it got everyone’s attention. However, like my father, Dr. Patel was unable to calm down. Any deviation from the rules above further enraged him and prolonged the meeting. Our collective goal: get done quickly, get to your terminal, figure out what actually went wrong, fix it.
In January 2006, Dr. Patel came in to a Monday morning staff meeting and told us, “Guys, I’m sorry to say this, but I’m leaving. It’s been great working with you. My last day is four weeks from now.” It caught everyone off guard. For the past year we had been talking about starting a company, a sequel to Omniscient. Omniscient had been commercialized out of the lab and sold for a billion dollars. Patel’s vision for the new company had been, “we are going to elevate healthcare by orchestrating workflow, but we won’t stop, and eventually we’ll have jazz.”
Later people would speculate on whether Patel was leaving or he was actually fired.
“You know it was Catherine, right? She was the person who filed the final HR report.”
“No…” I began to think about it. “No… way…”. Then, it started to make sense. “Really?”
Catherine had a history with HR. She had a falling out with Frank, one of her best friends and officemate. At the end of their friendship, both Catherine and Frank had complaints filed in HR.
Or was that a rumor?
I don’t remember what was rumor.
Oh god, is this how rumors perpetuate?
I do remember Catherine saying someone had reported her for having a whip in her desk. I do remember seeing the whip, left side, second drawer down, a Cat-O-Nine-Tails.
I do remember seeing a group of IT folks standing around a computer in the server room. I remember talking to someone about it.
Who did I talk to?
Was it Charles? It had to be.He said, “It’s Frank’s computer. It was reported for having things on it it shouldn’t have.”
“Porn?”
He shrugged and grinned. At least I picture Charles, shrugging and grinning. That memory is a little hazy.
I discounted it at the time. I didn’t connect her black book. Her talk about vengeance, I never got it. The offer of the watch, it had to be a joke.
Years later, when Daniel said, “It’s funny how all the bad things that happen in this company relationship wise always center around her,” the pattern was already clear, bright, shining, undeniable. I stared at it, could feel something was off, but couldn’t see it.
Charles was going to start the company with us. He was annoying but simultaneously salt of the fucking earth. He would do anything for anyone. He had also been Catherine’s good friend. After Dr. Patel left, Catherine began to rip Charles apart daily. I think it started with Charles being slow to get work done, but it devolved into, “he’s an idiot.”
At first Charles laughed when Daniel and Catherine made fun of him. So, it must have been ok, right?
That’s around the time I overheard Charles telling Daniel, “You enable her.” I didn’t think about how I enabled her at the time. I just wanted to stay out of the line of fire, though I didn’t think about it that way. I didn’t think about how Charles had always helped me, and I was terrified of being vilified. I just thought,
Keep your head down.
A few years later Ray Steiner, one of the execs Catherine had befriended came around the Poetic Systems offices for lunch. We joked about the old days including Dr. Patel’s tendency to yell and scream and be dramatic.
“I mean, that’s what eventually got him,” Ray spoke and then looked around. I had always wondered. There had always been rumors. As counsel at PUH, Ray would have been in on the decision.
A few months before the announcement that Dr. Patel was leaving, I heard him on a tirade in Catherine’s office.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU! YOU ARE JUST GREEDY!” I was walking by in the hallway, curious, but not so curious as to walk in. I saw Dr. Patel storm out and turn the other way down the hall towards the lab’s exit.
Charles and Catherine emerged from Catherine’s office. Catherine was shaken, hives on her neck. Charles turned and walked toward me, it was the shortest route to his office. He grinned. The same one he had in the meetings when Dr. Patel flew off the handle.
“What uhhh, what happened?” I asked in a hushed tone.
“We were talking about the new company and, well you know him.”
Two weeks later, Catherine had mentioned that Dr. Patel’s wife, Renee, had called her to apologize for Dr. Patel’s outburst. I assumed the two things were linked.
I don’t know if Dr. Patel’s fate at PUH was sealed by the incident with Charles and Catherine. As I grew into a leader, I saw Dr. Patel’s behavior was unnecessary and worse, it was detrimental. Still there would be some sick symmetry if Catherine had filed the final complaint.
Catherine’s attitude to problems was like Dr. Patel’s. Make noise, then walk away and wait for others to solve it.
—But we needed her. There were times when she stepped up; when she reported actionable issues in NanoTask. When it was there, the substance and detail was surprising and welcome. Though, most of the time she would just say, “This software is shit.”
After a blow-up, Patel would come back days later or the following week and ask for updates. He would be calm as long as you were working on it.
“Yes, sir. We’re on it, sir.”
I think Catherine always wanted that response. Some people call it respect, but it’s really control through fear, not competence and merit.
I don’t think it was all Catherine’s fault. Half of it was the Polymodal Product Management culture. The one Hank brought. The one that loved to say, “he/she threw me under the bus.” The 120 slide NanoDeck required by Don Layzer flew against the idea of the essential priority.
Essential.
The deck looked great for marketing. ‘Look at all the things we are thinking of.’ ‘Look at all the plans we have.’ ‘Look at how smart we are.’
When it comes to building something good, it’s debilitating.
The Layzer Team, the product managers he brought from NanoSoft Health, all lived near Hank, outside Kerry, Eastern Carolinia. They had all relocated to be near the nerve center, even though the cores of our engineering and operational teams were in Atalantis, Edenborg, and of course, Pittstown.
The Layzer Team was uber-talented. Ivy league degrees coming out of their ears, but as Polymodal was sold and then entered and emerged from bankruptcy, they were all gone. None had created a single successful product. None had gone deep enough to know enough about their customers and the business, like Rich or Noah, to be made a general manager of one of the business units. At first I wanted to write, “they were gone because they accomplished nothing,” but that’s wrong. There’s another story, underneath.
The Layzer Team had done their job and done it well. They were presented as an extraordinary product team with tremendous vision. The Layzer Team could have been an amazing product team. The ones I spoke to were insightful, but they would have been better served to live in Pittstown, Atalantis, and Edenborg, near engineering and operations.
Hank wasn’t a builder. He was a seller. He sold the story of a product team, which was actually a marketing and sales team. Their job had been complete the moment JD Morgenstern wired the money.
Walter Cramblin was our Chief Medical Information Officer. Everyone knew him as Suspenders, because he wore a pair of bright red suspenders, the color chosen because of our bright red logo. Suspenders came to me one day, “Phil Anderson told me you said your system can’t be put outside the firewall on the Internet.”
I responded, “That’s correct. We’ve been designing the system assuming a VPN.”
“Well, we’re trying to sell a deal in Nashtowne and they need it on the web.”
“I’m all for a managed service, cloud hosting. Then, we can secure one set of endpoints, but that’s not what we sell right now. The customers are responsible for hosting and we simply can’t manage or test all the different ways they might set it up.”
“I don’t care, you have to do it,” he insisted.
“What would we give up to take the time to make it work?” I asked.
“That’s not my problem.”
“Why don’t you take it up with Catherine? Get it properly prioritized?”
“You take it up with her. You need to do this.”
I wondered,
Do I?
Catherine had never made it a priority. If she had I would have worked out what needed to be done.
I thought about it some more.
It was an acceptable strategy to have 100 small fortresses instead of one big one—if you can lose a few: a war of attrition. —But this was not war. Can you imagine treating customers that way? If one of our customers was hacked, I imagined,
A courtroom…
I went to Erik and explained the situation. His response, “You need to figure out how to do it.”
It was one of the only times I didn’t feel supported.
I couldn’t see it, but the company was trying to increase revenues to push up the stock price. Suspenders had been brought into a sales deal, a medical information expert, demanding changes to IT security. His goal was to push revenue, deal by deal, to push a story.
Polymodal went public in 2012 and a year later, the company was sold to Alpha Equity backed by the legendary investment bank JD Morgenstern.
Going public had put Polymodal on the map, but it had been part of making people do stupid things.
Suspenders never came back to confirm I had followed orders. I hadn’t. I had gotten distracted by the 20 other higher priorities. I mentioned it to Catherine, “can you prioritize it?” but it never got prioritized. I would find out three years later, in 2016, that operations had given customers clearance to put their servers on the Internet without a virtual private network (VPN). I don’t know if Suspenders had been in on it, but I had explicitly said, “no.” Someone above me must have told them it was “ok.” Of course, Suspenders was long gone by then and Catherine too. It’s easy to justify bad decisions when you aren’t committed to being responsible for the consequences.
I’m going to repeat that.
It’s easy to justify bad decisions when you aren’t committed to being responsible for the consequences.
Erik broke the news of the sale in our monthly Development leads meeting. We had gone public the year before and JD Morgenstern was taking us private. Erik said it was a good thing. “We will have owners who are committed to investing in us, but we need to show hockey stick growth4 by expanding our product sales.” We thought we had the tools and talent.
I walked by the main conference room a few days later. Something was going on. Among the Polymodal nerds, Greek gods had come down from Mount Olympus, four or five of them. the shortest was 6’4,” the tallest 6’6”, perfect heights as any taller would just be awkward. Broad shoulders. Chiseled. Stone, cold competence… or something.
At my next 1:1 meeting with Erik, I asked him, “What’s going on with those guys in the conference room?”
“Those are the Alpha Equity guys.”
“Do they all look like that?”
He smirked, “They told us they all met at rowing competitions in college. They are all ivy league rowers. One of them said you have to be, to understand the mentality needed to compete and thrive.” Erik was confident and brilliant. I read his smirk as skeptical. He continued, “There is one exception, but he was a division 1 basketball player, so…” he shrugged.
Hank left as part of the buyout. The rumor was he collected a $10 million bonus. The Layzer Team began to show up in Pittstown. Without Hank anchoring them in Eastern Carolinia they suddenly had to find where the real decisions were being made, the real work being done. A small round of layoffs came. Erik protected engineering, so we didn’t see them. Then, a change in the health plan, raised the deductible, reduced service, caused deep unrest. Travel was frozen. Alpha Equity was…
We were called to an all hands meeting for the Pittstown staff about 6 months after the take over.
I had never had a corporate boss before Erik. He defied the stereotypes I had seen in movies. He was forthright. His attitude seemed to be, ‘the truth is going to come out in the end anyway, so you might as well speak it.’
Erik stood up, “We have some news, but we want you all to hear it and make sure you understand how important you all are to the future of Polymodal.” He swallowed and continued, “As you know we were purchased by Alpha Equity six months ago. Now, it has become clear, the financing done by Alpha Equity took on too much debt.”
Erik would go on to say the word “debt,” 30 times.
He concluded, “Again, Polymodal is fundamentally sound. The only thing that is a problem is the debt financing.”
“Will there be layoffs?” came from the audience.
“We don’t know, but you are all important to the future of Polymodal.”
“Will there be further cuts in healthcare?”
“We don’t know, but you are all important to the future of Polymodal.”
“What about the owners?”
“They lost everything.”
People were afraid.
I sat with Erik shortly after the announcement of the bankruptcy and asked, “What happened?”
He pursed his lips, looking away for a moment in consideration, “They paid twice as much as the company was worth. They needed revenue to be a hockey stick to pay the interest on the debt. Only our best projections made it all work.”
“You mention we have too much debt. What do you mean by ‘we?’ They bought the company.”
“Yes, but the way the Private Equity structures it, Polymodal owns the debt they took out to buy it.”
“Oh. Shit.”
It’s absolute magic.
The way it works for me and you, if you don’t pay the loan on your house, the bank will take it. If you don’t have homeowners insurance and the house burns down, you still have to pay off the loan. I just don’t get it: if your whole strategy involves walking away from businesses that don’t work, why would anyone loan you the money?
So, the thing about stone, cold competence—it wasn’t in the operation and growth of a high tech healthcare firm. The competence was in hedging against your own incompetence in the operation and growth of a high tech healthcare firm.
Don’t feel sorry for the rowers. It wasn’t their money.
“How come they didn’t see it?” I asked.
“They should have. It’s obvious that Desktop Dialect and Radiology could never sell the amount they needed to cover the debt. Neither could Catalogic. We needed to double revenue from 100 million to 200. I think that happens in 3 to 5 years, but not 1.”
It put the rumor of Hank’s $10 Million payout in a different perspective.
All the executives, including Erik, Alex, and Roger made money off the sale. I wondered how obvious it actually was. If it had been obvious, then people had ignored it.
In bankruptcy, the banks who had loaned Alpha Equity the money became our new owners. I never met them, but I heard they were unhappy losing half their investment.
The Layzer Team, Hank’s ace product team who had built nothing of note in 3 years, made themselves scarce. As a transition team took over, the Layzer Team could see they were not part of the group Erik had talked about when he said, “you are important to the future of Polymodal.” They left, one by one.
The rest of us, we suffered; responsibility for the consequences.
Catherine was on the front lines of the bankruptcy. She had to call customers, something she was very good at, and explain what the bankruptcy meant. She had to try to convince the customers to stick with us. A shitty job.
I give her hypothetical credit here, but realize now, I need to take it away. There are those people who bring positive or at least “can-do” attitudes to shitty jobs: Phil, Daniel, Finn, Cal; not Catherine Jay. The bankruptcy is where she and Dr. Patel and whoever else hatched and executed her exit.
She was indeed playing chess, when the rest of us were committing to getting things right over the next 3 years.
What I can see looking back now, the air was toxic.
Daniel, Catherine, and I were all owed about 1/4 of the total Poetic Systems money before the bankruptcy. The bankruptcy took all of it and wiped it out.
Many employees had incentive money on the table, all of it lost.
Again, it put Hank’s payout in a new light.
And it made things even more toxic.
Catherine, Daniel, and I retained a bankruptcy attorney from New York City to help negotiate with the Polymodal bankruptcy attorney. We would have gotten nothing, except for Alex and Erik.
Alex and Erik, knowing that the future of the company depended on the employees staying around and being happy and productive fought for us. They made the case, ‘if you don’t make everyone whole, you risk the half billion dollars you still have.’ The case was there. The company could double in value. It was just going to take a few years.
The Polymodal bankruptcy attorney came back with an offer to make us whole, to get all the money that was left to be paid out, a half million, each. The biggest change was that instead of getting our final payment in December, we would be paid out quarterly over the next three years. It sucked, but I don’t see how to be negative about it. Everyone was suffering. Most of the others didn’t have such a big reason to stick around.
Another detail, we would also get paid out if we were laid off, but not if we quit or were fired for cause.
I followed Erik’s lead. I could see there was still value for the employees. I made a case. I was positive.
For years, I had become well practiced at it. I had been Catherine’s foil.
When she complained, “The customer is an idiot.”
I would soften it by saying, “That part of the interface is confusing, even for me.”
Or, when she said, “That guy is a fucking asshole.”
I would fill in some context, “He’s direct because he’s just got a lot on his plate right now.”
I did it for her too. Charles was right. At some point it had become enablement.
In the bankruptcy, she said things like, “This is a shitshow.”
It was. When Eli asked me what I thought I responded, “The problem isn’t that there’s not a bright future. We have great people, tech, and vision. The problem is debt, which the bankruptcy will fix. The company knows how important we are to its future. Hank and JD Morgenstern really made things tough on us, but the new owners have taken care of everyone and seem to have the right idea in mind.”
I can see how it might be annoying, but we were there, still collecting paychecks. We still had customers who were relying on us. Exposure to Catherine’s venom made me quiet. I was afraid of the effect on the rest of the team. I didn’t want the rest of the team to fear her or to fear I wouldn’t stand up for them if it came to that.
The mood outside the radiology engineering team’s area was melancholy and defeated.
The attitude wasn’t what you’d expect from being thrown under a bus. We had been thrown under a train. —But all metaphors break down. We were alive. Mostly unscathed, except for the shame of being labeled “bankrupt.”
Our competitors used it against us and that further soured the mood. When we lost a competitive sale because of the bankruptcy, the news rippled back. From sales to product. From product to operations and engineering.
Our sales lead Mick held on, hoping he could wait out the bankruptcy.
Noah couldn’t sell anything.
Barbara had to talk customers out of leaving us.
Engineering and Operations began losing people. Catherine had called it, “rats leaving a sinking ship.”5
The year was a lost year.
A little aside:
I wondered where did the rest of the money go, the other half billion, minus Hank’s 2%?
As it was explained to me…
Before the Polymodal that I was a part of, Polymodal had been many separate companies. I’ve looked back to understand what these were.
I searched: “Questar 2004,” and asked NanoLLM, “Tell me about Questar ownership from 2004-2020. Please provide references.”
I found articles about Questar being delisted from the stock exchange for not filing proper financial paperwork. Customers began a class action lawsuit for fraudulent billing. —The company we were part of had been part of a giant fraud ten years before. I knew some of the people who had been at Questar during those times. They were good people. They were the ones who hadn’t left in the aftermath, the ones who had been shocked at the fraud. Questar’s major investor sold their stake in the company a few years later to Flushing Capital.
Questar appears to have stayed afloat by constant acquisition of smaller companies, funded by their new parent Flushing Capital. By buying other companies, you could show constant revenue growth, which would allow you to keep borrowing more money to buy more companies. There would come a time when there was no one to buy. That was the writing on the wall in 2011. They needed to change strategy.
Polymodal itself had been a great, growing company in 2011. When I talked to people about pre-merger Polymodal, most were positive. But, when we met with Alex and Erik and Roger, the story was always, “if we don’t grow, we will not survive.”
So, the company that had run out of companies to buy merged with a company that was afraid it needed to grow. It just so happened that one company had the technology and vision to make all of the purchased companies more efficient.
It was in this narrative that Poetic Systems was purchased.
Behind the scenes, Flushing Capital was running the show. They took the company public, marketed a story, and sold it to 6’4” Adonis, Apollo, and David, the marbled and gilded gods, the brilliant JD Morgenstern bankers. Ivy League rowers who could understand the pressure that mortals couldn’t. They were betting, not managing, leading, or building. They lost their bet and it was the company that suffered. It was a game to them. A race. They’ll have another next week. They might win, they might lose, but it’s difficult for me to say they haven’t rigged it so they never lose.
When you lose money, make sure someone else shares or pays it all. When you win money, take it all, and tip the dealer if it makes you look good.
I don’t subscribe to this for a minute. There are a thousand stories like Polymodal’s and each one hurts the reputation of capitalism. “It’s just capitalism.” —But it isn’t.
Flushing Capital was indicted by the Justice Department the year after they sold us, on insider trading charges. They settled and paid a $2 Billion dollar fine and agreed to close shop. Their lead partner took $15 Billion into retirement.
That same lead partner was responsible for hiring Hank. That same lead partner could have encouraged building as much as storytelling. The two go hand in hand. Instead, Hank and Don Layzer and the Layzer Team, firmly established a culture where the people running the products needed to watch behind them when standing at a corner. Better to be the one shoving than be the one shoved.
When I see someone standing on a curb, unaware, my urge has always been to watch and observe to make sure they were aware of any buses; to intervene if there is danger always an urge to pull them back—otherwise to let life unfold.
I always thought a better world could be built and the bankruptcy didn’t change that. I wasn’t the only one.
There was one more wrinkle in the culture. It was hidden, disguised as a subplot.
There’s a tension in business. In our business, sales often wanted a feature for a new customer they were courting while Operations wanted an enhancement for an existing customer. Add R&D, product management, HR, finance, and legal and you get a web of tension.
This tension can be healthy. At Polymodal the power was balanced so heavily towards getting sales and booking revenue that customer facing staff suffered. It wasn’t just the sales team, though they pushed, rewarded by fat commissions. The product management team pushed to hit their projected numbers. The numbers were often arbitrary, backed into, so Hank could justify selling Polymodal at a premium price.
The bankruptcy year stressed the boundaries between groups more and more, until something had to give, like a fault line. The fault that concerns my story was between operations and engineering.
Part of the tension began the way Polymodal had been founded, rooted in engineering culture. Alex, Erik, and Roger were all engineers and valued engineering.
Erik secured retention bonuses for his engineers. It showed me he valued us. Don Layzer did nothing of the sort for Catherine.
When the bonuses became public, I didn’t hear anything explicit, but I saw, or imagined I saw, knowing looks and people whispering. This might all be in my head, but no—I clearly remember the tension. I don’t remember any one thing that was said. There were fifty characters, who all said something here or there, about bonuses, about healthcare, about the direction of the company.
I don’t see how you can reward one group of people responsible for the success of the company and not reward another without bad blood. On the other hand, I think Erik was good at representing us. The other leaders, Hank’s handpicked Tiger Team, their heads were not on their staff. Their heads were in revenue bookings.
I see it most through IT Pete’s frustration, Karyn’s frustration, Chandler’s frustration. I see it through Barbara’s about face and subsequent commentary. I see it in Svetlana’s change from venting in solidarity to passive aggression.
There’s more.
Erik also believed engineering should help drive the roadmap of the product. Engineers had driven Polymodal before the Questar merger. The whole story of the merger was technology as a key to the firm’s future.
Erik was in tension with Don Layzer too.
Daniel and I fit into this. When we were at Poetic Systems, Daniel and I were engineers, but had always engaged customers directly. We had always asked about the problems and been part of the translation of the solutions into the software.
Right after the sale, as the bankruptcy became a reality Polymodal’s COO, Head of HR, and CFO all left rather than be fired by the new owners. Alex and Erik were spared. They had not been part of Hank’s team. There was a vacuum of leadership. Even though the people most responsible for the culture were gone, the stress and uncertainty and momentum remained.
Barbara became ascendant in operations. Erik and Barbara are two of the best leaders I’ve met. They should have worked well together.
If the sickness itself doesn’t kill you, the complications and the stress the sickness puts on the body may finish the job.
The problem was the existing tension between the groups. There were those that received bonuses and those that didn’t.
There were other stories, like Svetlana’s who had been hired, then fired by engineering, and then rehired back into operations.
Then, there were our products, full of rushed features. In that vacuum of leadership and a year lost to bankruptcy, fingers pointed.
Abe was Noah’s engineering counterpart on the Catalogic system. I had known and worked with Abe for two years before he left the year of the bankruptcy.
I ran into Abe in the hallway, “I’m leaving. The product is stagnant. We haven’t found traction in 3 years.”
I ran into Noah in the hallway a few days later, “I was really surprised to hear Abe is leaving.”
“Yeah, it really needed to happen.”
I puzzled over it for a moment. Catalogic had struggled, but everyone had. They were trying to establish a totally new market. I said, “It seemed like you guys worked really well together.”
“It seemed that way for awhile. But he was lying about things he was working on, being an obstruction.”
When I looked back on the conversation, almost a year later, I considered the interactions and the changes in tone over the course of the bankruptcy year. I saw the friction between Noah and Abe in a new light. It suddenly made sense.
Engineering vs Operations.
Erik vs Barbara.I could hear Noah telling Catherine about Abe. “He’s obstructionist.” I could hear Catherine replying,
That’s just like Jeremy. He tells me nothing can be done and then works on his own thing.
Except I had always worked on her things. I had spent the prior three years at Polymodal asking her for more detail, for priorities, and then space to focus. Space to focus was only ever provided in the context of a customer crisis. In that last year when the only crisis was the bankruptcy and still no details were provided for customer requests, I went directly to sales and to customers,
“What does multi-tenancy mean to you?”
“What do you think a downtime feature will solve for you?”
“What do you need from analytics?”I imagined her saying,
He’s trying to do my job for me.
I did. Sort of. I’m sure she left out context—essential context: the context necessary to make an informed judgment or a decision. I felt bad if I left something essential out. For her, it was a practice to tell 2/3 of the story, leaving out anything humanizing.
One of those stories would have been around our Guidance and Mashup features.
In September of 2012, I had my weekly one on one meeting with Erik. Part way through he asked me, “Do you have anything new to show at the CAR conference?”
“No.”
He looked at me, “Why not?”
I was caught off guard. “I guess because… we’ve just been so focused on getting the product going and hitting the milestones.”
“And you’re mostly done with those now, since we changed them?”
“We are.”
“So, do you see the problem?” He paused, then continued, “CAR is the one week of the year you have to set a vision for the next year. Last year, the story was becoming part of Polymodal. Do you think Thunderwrite is going to have something?”
I nodded. He was right. We had been putting so much energy into the milestones we hadn’t been thinking forward.
“Right, so what are you going to do for this year?”
I went back to my next meeting with Catherine and Daniel. I told them, “Erik says we need to show vision.”
Daniel was silent. Catherine asked, “Ok, how?”
I didn’t know.
I called one of the sales guys, Gus. “Is there anything you guys have been hearing from customers?”
“Well, pre-signature alerts are something that we show and customers get excited about…”
Pre-signature alerts were a demonstration. When doctors mixup left and right or the word ‘no’ is added or omitted,
There is cancer/There is no cancer
Bad things can happen.
We aimed to catch these with our natural language understanding.
I had seen a presentation by our Bespoke Solutions group acting to assist physicians. Larry, who had been working on it, gave my team a demo of the work Bespoke had done with the user experience team.
I told Catherine what we were doing and she didn’t say anything.
We built a demo in 6 weeks, just in time for CAR, which borrowed heavily from the visual language of the Bespoke team’s work. Customers loved the demo. Mick and Gus and Alex and Erik all loved the demo. It showed how Polymodal’s core technology and vision could be applied to radiology.
The following year, we built a demo called Mashup in the same way. It was engineering led. It went back to something Dr. Patel had always stressed, “There’s all this patient information out there, but doctors have such limited time. Under time pressure we have to punt and say, ‘correlate with prior history,’ even though the whole system would be better if we were the ones who looked at the history.”
Indeed, the context project, the one where Dr. Patel impotently stalked behind me saying the sky was falling instead of helping, was all about a system that could surface information related to a patient.
We called our project Mashup as the word described apps that pulled in and combined information from everywhere. I engaged the team with a concept and they attacked it. They had a lot of fun. It was inline with Polymodal’s vision.
All of this established us as a visionary company. Aidan had always said, “fake it til you make it.” With Guidance and Mashup, the underlying technology wasn’t ready. To make it ready we would have had to prioritize it and push other teams to prioritize it. Those teams weren’t ready.
When Catherine prioritized various workflows and reliability changes in Radiology Dialect, we back burnered the visionary features. It was the right choice, but it left the vision unfulfilled.
The more time went on, the more it looked like we couldn’t deliver. I took this on as my fault and felt some guilt for it. Two years went by for Guidance and a year for Mashup.
In that guilt I didn’t always think of the ways in which she contributed and benefited.
Yet, it was not wholly my fault, nor was it Catherine’s. The whole fucking thing was a mess. Incentives were misaligned to maximize the company’s sale price for a given moment, while hiding the real value. The company was healthy. It had grown from a quarter billion to half a billion. It wasn’t enough, fast enough. How do you sell a half billion dollar company for a billion, without putting in more effort?
Pressure to do new and sexy things that would sell more came from everywhere.
When we were confronted with real customer problems, we worked on them. Still, the pressure to sell vision came.
Sales were the first to sell something visionary. They are always happy to collect their commission checks. Catherine was happy to see her bookings rise to hit her numbers. Then, when the reality hit during the bankruptcy, fingers began to point.
“You didn’t deliver.”
“Well, you overpromised.”
During that time I just wanted to survive. There were often off hand discussions about products being cut. I heard rumors about our product being considered by four different people.
We survived. The bookings looked great. When Erik asked,
“So, do you see the problem?”
I heard,
“Be new or die.”
In the back of my mind,
Quality.
The word itched. I scratched it, and it went away for a moment. Then it woke me up at night. I struggled to name it or to define it.
The problem with Guidance and Mashup was the same as the problem with our King contracts. We booked the money long before delivery and we, as a team, Product Management, Sales, Engineering, we all were distracted by, pushed towards:
The New.
New customers. New features.
I accept my share of the blame, but in the end, I think Catherine and Daniel put it all on me. Then, I put it all on me.
But—there was a voice inside, a voice which wasn’t welcome in the office, a voice that defended me.
I said, “give the money back.” We sold King a million dollar contract on our Legacy Workflow product. Catherine found out it wouldn’t work and then she sold them something else that didn’t exist. We should have delivered the original contract as best we could or refunded them. I don’t know why she wouldn’t but it certainly would have hurt her numbers. I would have given my share of my milestone payout to refund them.
In 2013 and 2014, when we were working through major speech issues for customers, I was there, on the front line. I wasn’t coding. I was making sense of the hundreds of issues, generalizing, specifying, finding and communicating patterns, making sure people were on the same page. I thrived in those moments.
In those moments, I could ignore Catherine’s barking the way I had ignored Dr. Patel when he was raging or Tom when he was deflecting.
Ignore it.
Work the problem.I wish I had talked to Operations more. I definitely tried to steer Catherine away from my team, to protect them. I think she kept me isolated from Operations, but for different reasons. I think it allowed her to have control.
Maybe I controlled engineering. Maybe it was like Abe. That’s what she would say, but… She was a bully! I was never, ever that. I just wanted a partner.
We had a release party for Radiology Dialect after relaunching under the Polymodal brand six months after our purchase.
Neither Catherine nor Daniel showed up to the party which was at a bar across the street.
Erik and Roger showed up. Erik lived around the corner from my new house and afterward he drove me home.
As he pulled his car into its parking spot he asked me with a big grin, “Should we push Catherine out? It would be so easy.” I could hear relish as the word ‘easy’ trailed off.
I felt immediately uncomfortable. Everything inside me said,
Keep working at it.
She spent most of her time with sales and on her slide deck, away from me. She had left us to work on the product features.
“No, I don’t think so,” I told Erik. If she was to go, I never would have wanted to be the one responsible.
I told Daniel about it. I should never have told Daniel about it.
Daniel and Ashleigh had chemistry and yet, I heard Catherine poison that relationship. I heard Catherine selling Dolores to Daniel before Ashleigh had even moved out. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember the way the words sounded, the intention:
Dolores is so hot.
Don’t you think she is hot?
I think you guys would be so good together...
once you break up with man-hands.I don’t question Daniel’s affection for Dolores. He clearly loved her, but Catherine was match-maker. She was also match-breaker. Rather than letting the relationship with Ashleigh run its course, she ran a campaign to poison it and he let her. If Catherine couldn’t have Daniel, someone Catherine chose would have him.
I believe telling Daniel about Erik’s offer made its way back to Catherine, maybe via Dolores, maybe Daniel told her himself.
If it had been a game of chess—no! It was never a game of chess. Chess fails as a metaphor for life. It assumes one side will subject the other to its power. It’s a metaphor of war. War is a tearing, a shredding of humanity, crunching bones, draining life: dehumanization, normalization of the inhumane.
Catherine sometimes talked about The Art of War. I thought,
She’s someone you want on your side in a war, but I’m not sure she understands peace
…or team.In August 2014, Polymodal emerged from bankruptcy. That same summer Daniel, Catherine, and I talked over our new employment contracts. Sitting with Daniel and Catherine in a conference room, I said, “This feels like the end of Poetic Systems.”
I didn’t mean it as, ‘I’m going to destroy you now.’ I wanted to be on my own, free of her. I harbored no ill will. I had been magnanimous, turned the other cheek, lost the battles to win the war. The bankruptcy was over and we were being made whole.
We had all won the war.
I don’t think she took it that way. She was self-described, “hyper-judgmental”. She was black & white, always at war with something or someone.
In one of our meetings, Catherine had talked about trying to sell Radiology Dialect to Chykawga College of Medicine during the bankruptcy year. She spoke with Dr. Patel and Dr. Plodkin about the product. “I told them it’s a shitshow. I can’t believe I’m stuck here.”
I imagine what the ideal partner would have said to Dr. Patel instead of the ‘shitshow,’
Bankruptcy has been really tough.
But, you know Daniel, Jeremy, and me.
You know we’re going to get this right.
We’re committing to the next three years.That fall, I stood, next to the bus stop, two feet from the curb, ready to go on a new journey.
I think Erik kept me under him because the only other logical place to have put me was under Marco. This would have given Marco the responsibility to understand and manage the milestones for the Poetic Systems buyout. This would have been unfair to both Marco and us.
Well, snowflake, if you’re cringing, stay awhile. Learn something. Hank had a bigger plan than worrying about keeping you from melting into a little puddle.
Sometimes the yelling took away from the meaning. I found the more thoughtful times Patel would ask, “What if it was your mother on the table?,” to be the most compelling. It was a reminder that the work being done in the reading rooms directly affected the patients. One day, that could be our mother or our children. I’m truly grateful for the gift of that perspective.
Flat growth to exponential… because that’s easy to do—without shenanigans.
A great fucking thing for a leader to say. I can see why people were surprised by her being fired.