The Only Thing That Matters

It's not the first time. After graduating from The Ohio State University in 1992, New York City-native Bar-Zeev took only three months to find his first VR-programming job. Over the Internet, through the sci.virtual-worlds usenet group, he met Bob Jacobson, founder of Worldesign, a Seattle company that built CAVE-like virtual environments. Bar-Zeev, a computer science graduate interested primarily in computer graphics and virtual worlds, moved west and put in two years at Worldesign, building virtual-reality operating systems and authoring tools. Then the company went into an inexorable death spiral -- the fate of nine out of ten startups -- as the initial investors gave up on Worldesign before new investors or customers could be found.

"My last six months there," Bar-Zeev recalls, "were kind of a waste. There was no money and no projects. I was actually living in the office. It was really just subsistence at that point. I finally left because I didn't have a choice."

Bar-Zeev took off in 1994 for Walt Disney Imagineering -- a wrenching cultural shift from an archetypal 90s startup to an archetypal 50s corporation. "I didn't want to work for a corporation," he says. "I didn't think about joining SGI or any other computer company. But I thought Disney might be cool because it's an art company, a company that gets the whole picture, not just the technology."

At first Bar-Zeev thought he'd found a visionary's paradise. Disney had virtually infinite resources to put at its virtual-reality dreamers' disposal. Bar-Zeev went to work on the "Aladdin" show, in which users don a helmet, sit at controls that look something like motorcycle handle-grips, and "fly" through the world of the movie "Aladdin," encountering three-dimensional characters along the way. (The user also flies past a "bar" at one point, its sign alternately flashing the words "Bar" and "Zeev.")

When "Aladdin" was released, first in 1994 and then in an expanded version in early 1996, it was the best virtual-world experience ever built -- testament to both Bar-Zeev's abilities and the resources Disney put at his disposal. The more work he did, the better Disney liked what it saw. After his first year, the company offered him his own lab with his own staff. "It was the opposite of Worldesign," Bar-Zeev says, "where there was like, no hope, ever."

Unfortunately, at Disney there was like, no excitement, ever. In part this was a reflection of Bar-Zeev's personality -- he genuinely missed the fight for survival at a startup that infuses every day with meaning. But there was also nothing genuinely thrilling to work on. And Bar-Zeev wanted to keep pushing the edge.

"There are a lot of people at Disney, like at a lot of big companies, whose sole function is to slow things down," Bar-Zeev says. "They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars, they want to make sure you're doing the right thing. They have evaluations all the time, they're very careful about everything. The buy-off process there is amazing."

To Bar-Zeev, the future that loomed before him at Disney was all about politics. "To stay there and do what I wanted to do, I'd have to move up the management chain, get allies, get resources, hire people, and sell ideas," he says. "That's not what I'm good at. I hate the politics. The place for me to succeed is where it's just smarts. And in a startup, to a great extent, smart wins."

It's one of the big differences between the world of the corporation and the startup -- the sense of freedom and adventure, the feeling of risk and self-reliance that infuses the built-from-scratch venture. And it's why a skilled techie like Bar-Zeev -- and others like him -- jump ship from the plush corporate world to the scrounge-and-scrimp startup scene. After all, There is something of the romantic to Bar-Zeev, as if he were looking for deep-seated psychological rather than corporate solutions to F5's startup dilemmas. One night, after a painful meeting in which Jeff Hussey had delivered a blistering critique of their development team, Bar-Zeev and his fellow developers went back into their lair and slammed the door. They worked far into the night, long after Hussey had left, then took a break.

"Let's get psyched! Totally psyched!" someone shouted. Suddenly the five of them were tearing up boxes, ripping off long strips of duct tape, covering up windows, transoms, and doors with cardboard and paper. Then they scrawled warnings all over the outside of their sealed-off room: "Development in Progress! Do Not Disturb!" "Leave Food at the Door!" "Do NOT Enter!" The final statement was a piece of paper: a photocopy of an adorable goat, seen in profile. The handwritten caption read, "So many goats. So little time."

The next morning, a bemused Hussey stood outside the door, afraid to enter. Looking at the picture of the goat, he shook his head. "I'm just glad it doesn't say, 'Sheep,'" he muttered.