Condensed from Rolling Stone Return to Trilogy Case

Bryon Krug graduated last spring with a 4.0 GPA and a talent for hacking code - in other words, he was a first-round draft pick in the overheated world of software-company recruiters.  And they would do anything to win his love.  Finding a job won't be a problem for Bryon Krug.  He's a senior at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, majoring in electrical and computer engineering, with a 4.O GPA.  He's fluent in three programming languages and has academic awards coming out his ears.  Still, he's got his troubles.

He's getting close to graduation, and Trilogy Software, a fast-rising company in Austin, has been wooing Krug with gifts and spectacular attention since February - it has flown him to Austin twice, put him up in luxe hotels, taken him out for expensive dinners, shuttled him around to hip clubs downtown, bought him drinks, laughed at his jokes.  Trilogy recruiter Chris Ostroot has spent hours on the phone with him, listening to him weigh and reweigh his options.  She has sent him T-shirts and books and CDs of Austin bands - even a silver Tiffany pen with a note attached: "Signing your offer at Trilogy just got easier."

Nevertheless, Krug is the kind of guy who believes that if something looks too good to be true, it usually is.  Krug can't say exactly what's bugging him - maybe its the stories about Joe Liemandt, Trilogy's charismatic twenty-nine-year-old co-founder and CEO, who drinks with the gang on Friday evenings and has been known to gather up those left at the bar at midnight an fly them out to Vegas for a weekend of blackjack.  Maybe it's the fact that half the people who work at Trilogy look as though they just wandered in from the H.O.R.D.E. tour.  Maybe Krug can't bend his mind around the fact the everything about Trilogy, from its company ski boat moored at a nearby marina to its 24-hour work ethic, shrieks a single message: Live fast or die.

For high-tech employers, recent grads offer an irresistible combination of energy, intellect and disposability that's perfectly suited to the demands of an industry that moves at warp speed.  "New hires who are fresh out of college work harder and arrive with less baggage - both personal and professional - than their middle-aged counterparts," says Patrick Coulson, manager of staffing programs at the Internet-switches company Cisco Systems.  "And if they don't work out, they're easier to get rid of."

For most high-tech companies, selling themselves to college seniors has become as vital as selling themselves to customers.  Some, like MicroStrategy, a database-support-services company near Washington, D.C., try to wow recruits by taking them on sightseeing rides above the capital in a helicopter.  Others, like Microsoft, stress the fact that new hires will work alongside the brightest minds in the business.  Companies with stodgier reputations, such as IBM, are desperate to get hip.  During spring break this year, for example, IBM sent four recruiters down to Sanibel Island, off Florida's southwest coast, where they staged stunts like molding a twenty-ton ThinkPad out of wet sand and hiring a plane to fly above sunbathers with a banner that read DON"T GET BURNED ... BLUE IS BETTER.  It was the equivalent of grandma trying to rap. 

In this highly competitive market, you'd think a little-known software company like Trilogy, which specializes in sales-automation software, wouldn't have a chance.  In the new world, what counts is not what kind of software you write - on one level, all code is equally arcane - but how much fun you have doing it ("fun" here is broadly defined to include money, intellectual stimulation and a good time).  That's why Trilogy's products may be dull but irs corporate culture is not.  Neither is its recruiting program.  The company markets itself to college students as though it were a garage band.  Trilogy recruiters are your friends.  They're your age.  They drink tequila shots with you.  They listen to the same music.  When Trilogy sponsors an event on a campus, it's likely to be something offbeat and quirky - like buying pizza for the participants and spectators at a twenty-four-hour bicycle race at Rice University, in Houston, or passing out free disposable cameras with TRILOGY emblazoned on them during Carnival at Carnegie Mellon.  Trilogy recruiters themselves are often former sorority girls who are smart and friendly; one recently showed up at a beach party for recruits in a teeny-weeny bikini.  They may note be up on all the latest technology, but they know how to make a geek feel wanted.

"Microsoft is the most aggressive recruiter we have on campus," says Mark Stehlik, an assistant dean for undergraduate education in the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, "but Trilogy is the savviest."

[For Bryon Krug] Trilogy was just a lark.  In fact, the only reason Krug interviewed with Trilogy at all was because his friend Mahender Nathan, who had been a year ahead of him at Carnegie Mellon, Took a job there and then raved about it.  Krug breezed through several on-campus interviews, then visited the company in early February during one of Trilogy's regular recruiting weekends.  More or less every weekend from September through May, Trilogy flies in twenty or so potential recruits from various schools around the country.  It puts them up in a posh hotel, wows them with nice dinners, whispers sweet nothings in their ears.  If it's a nice day, they might go for a spin around Lake Travis in the company's new $25,000 ski boat, followed by a barbecue at the beach. 

"Everyone I met that weekend seemed incredibly happy with their jobs," Krug recalls.  "They all seemed like they were working hard and having a great time."  Krug met twenty-two-year-olds whose job it was to discuss software strategy with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.  "That impressed me," Krug says.  He also met several Carnegie Mellon alums who told him that life at Trilogy was a lot like life at Carnegie Mellon: bust your ass eighteen hours a day and work on challenging projects with really smart people.  Except at Trilogy, you get paid for it.

Krug did not know this at the time, but Chris Ostroot, the woman in charge of reeling him in to the company, is one of Trilogy's top recruiters.  And it's easy to see why - she's twenty-six, a tall, attractive blond Texas native who tends to build a warm, big-sisterly relationship with recruits.  She is, in short, exactly the kind of woman whom most of the guys - and they are mostly guys - she lures to Trilogy would never get to go out with in a million years.

That is not to suggest that there's anything flirty in Ostroot's manner - there's not.  But everyone knows that recruiting is a game of seduction, and it is not accident that fourteen of Trilogy's seventeen college recruiters this year are women.  In the recruiting game, Trilogy needs to press every advantage it can get.  Ostroot's basic approach with Krug, as with all recruits, was low-key, friendly and highly personal.  When Ostroot learned that Krug was interested in starting his own company someday, she sent him books on entrepreneurship.  When he mentioned his interest in rock climbing, she sent him a book that described the great climbing areas around Austin.

Nevertheless, Krug was not ready to give up his game plan.  In February he learned that he had been accepted into both t he Ph.D. program in computer science at UC Berkeley and the economics program at the University of Chicago.  In March he flew out to Berkeley for a campus tour.  While he was there, he happened to hear about a startup in Mountain View, California, called Epiphany.  The company had staked out potentially lucrative turf in creating software that helps companies maximize their customer relationships: it was headed by Silicon Valley veterans with proven track records.  At this time, Epiphany was a small company, maybe thirty people squeezed into cramped offices.  Krug liked many of the employees and, in fact, almost decided to throw his whole game plan out the window - why go to grad school?  Why not jump in now?

Trilogy recruiters call it the sell weekend.  That means that the recruit has been through all the interviews and has passed all the tests; a final offer has been made; and now it's time for the company to get him or her to sign on the dotted line.  Krug's sell weekend began when he arrived in Austin at about 9:30 A.M. on a Friday morning.  By noon, he had picked up his rental car, checked into the ritzy Omni Hotel and driven the ten miles or so the the shaggy green bluffs outside downtown Austin, where Trilogy's offices sit atop a hill like a tinted-glass fortress.

Then it was just interview, interview, interview.  Ostroot guided him from one vice president to the next until about 5 P.M., when Krug had a sit-down with CEO Joe Liemandt.  Liemandt was the grand finale, the one who sends recruits reeling out of his office with a high that is roughly equivalent to chugging three beers.

"I told Bryon the same thing I tell all our recruits," Liemandt recalls later, his Nikes kicked up on a conference table.  He has a boyish, teddy-bear face - small, dark eyes, meaty cheeks.  Like most successful entrepreneurs, he has charisma to spare and talks in a way that suggests time is short and there are still new worlds to conquer.  "I tell them that the future of Trilogy is how well you guys do: 'If you come up with blockbuster products, then in three years we'll be on the cover of Forbes again.  You guys will be on the cover of Forbes,  If you don't and you guys all suck, then we're dead.  This isn't an opportunity, it's a requirement.  Trilogy will be great if you guys are great.'" 

Still, Liemandt knows that Trilogy, to a top recruit, is not an easy sell.  To get around the perception that Trilogy is already middle-aged, he encourages prospects to think of the company as an entrepreneurial boot camp.  The boot-camp pitch is a brilliant recruiting strategy for many reasons, not the least of which is that it transforms Trilogy's marathon workweeks and the ruthless, Darwinian competitiveness within the company into a series of character tests.  Are you tough enough to succeeded?  Are you smart enough?  In this world, burnout is not a job hazard, it's a badge of honor. 

Jeff Daniel huddles with Krug.  Daniel is twenty-seven, a tall, friendly, fast-talking guy who wears a cuff on his left ear and a black polo shirt.  At Trilogy, he's the closer.  It's his job to get recruits like Krug to commit.  Daniel knows that Krug is taking off the next morning on a 6:30 A.M. flight - this is probably the last chance he'll have to talk to him in person. 

Tonight Daniel wants to talk to Krug about one thing: Epiphany.  When trying to seduce a recruit, Daniel never directly slams another company, but he does ask leading questions.  At one point, for example, Daniel turns to Krug and says, "Are the people at Epiphany in it to get rich?  Or are they in it for good reasons?"  "A little of both," Krug says.  "OK, let me put it to you another way," Daniel says.  "Yes or no - are they the next great software company?'  Krug says, "I can't answer yes or no to that."  "Yes you can."  Krug struggles for a moment. "No," he says. 

Trilogy's top recruit in 1998 is probably Erik Flister, a scary-smart Stanford grad (a BA in symbolic systems, an MA in philosophy) who reeks of entrepreneurial zing, that rare, hard-to-define combination of technical smarts and business savvy that recruiters and venture capitalists swoon over.  Flister interned at Microsoft last summer and impressed the Softies enough that during the final weeks of his job search, a Microsoft exec offered to fly down from Redmond, Washington, to the Bay Area just to have dinner with Flister and discuss his reservations about coming to work for Microsoft.  In the end, Flister turned down Microsoft - and, coincidentally, Epiphany - and accepted a job with Trilogy.  "I was deeply impressed with the brains of the people I met who worked there and their willingness to let me know my own thing," Flister says. 

Krug, though, is not a Flister.  Not in Joe Liemandt's mind, anyway.  He's smart, yes; but unlike Flister, whose laserlike focus on software development was never in question, Krug's conflicted heart was apparent to Liemandt and other interviewers.  This is not uncommon, nor does it mean that Krug won't be successful at whatever job he ends up taking.  It just means that Trilogy is unwilling to pay top dollar to get him. 

Liemandt:  Taylor wasn't crazy about him.  He said he'd work with him, he's smart, blah, blah, blah.

    Daniel:  Of course, he's just talking about personality.
Liemandt:  After dealing with him, I agree he's not Mister Dynamic.
    Daniel:  Oh, sure.  He doesn't set the world on fire with his personality.  But what role are we looking for him to play?
Liemandt:  Right, right.  [Reading]  Everybody just says ...
    Daniel:  Solid.
Liemandt:  Yeah.
    Daniel:  I think, ultimately, he wants to do politics - that's his real interest.
Liemandt:  Everybody says he's smart.  They're saying, "Can we train him?  They're worried if he's really driven.  But we can train the shit out of him". 

Epiphany's vice president of marketing calls Krug with his final offer.  The salary is in the $60,000 range, plus a signing bonus and stock options.  Not a fantastic deal but nothing to complain about.  Krug has seventy-two hours to take it or leave it. 

Krug immediately calls Daniel who provides a counteroffer.  It's a typical Trilogy package of salary, signing bonus and performance bonuses.  The base salary is about the same as Epiphany's.  Krug is still debating whether he should haggle for a few more bucks and which company he likes more when Daniel says, "Bryon, let me ask you this: If you had $10,000, which company would you invest it in?"  Daniel frequently uses this link with responsible-minded people like Krug. 

"Trilogy," says Krug.
"Why?" asks Daniel.
Krug's reply: "Because it keeps defying peoples' expectations." 

Daniel asks, "Are you going to accept?"
"Let me think about it a little bit" Krug stammers.
"I can give you a couple of hours," replies Daniel. 

The words jump out of Krug's mouth.  Even before he says it, he fells a little lift of joy: "No, you're right.  I'd be crazy to turn this offer down.  OK, I accept." 

"Congratulations," Daniel says, relieved that it's finally over.  "And welcome aboard." 

Because Krug is still in the middle of finals, he doesn't allow himself to celebrate that night.  But a few days later, Trilogy's new Carnegie Mellon recruiter and a couple of other staffers come to town and invite Krug and the other new Trilogy employees to a get-together at the Pittsburgh Deli Company, a bar near campus.  The recruiter suggested that Krug bring along three or four Carnegie Mellon juniors, the smarter the better. 

Goodell, Jeff.   "Wooing the Geeks", Rolling Stone, October 15, 1998, P. 66 - 71.
 

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