Beginner's Luck

For Zornosa, things came to a head at a 1997 conference on push technology. "The first speaker asked how many people in the audience had already taken PointCast off of their computers, the second speaker recommended that anyone who hadn't already done so should, and the third speaker showed them how to do it," recalls Zornosa, who was next in line to speak. "I was mortified. Here I was in charge of revenue for my company, and I was selling a product that everyone was suddenly bashing."

The boundless optimism that Zornosa had displayed in previous months began to give way to serious doubts. But she refused to let go of the dream that she had so fervently held -- or to abandon the team that she had helped convince to pursue it. "I felt so torn," she says of the months that she spent fretting over whether to respond to the flood of headhunter calls that she had begun to receive. "My intellect was telling me that the company wasn't going to make it. But my heart was saying, 'That can't be true!' I felt that if I left, then everyone else would think that I no longer believed in the company. And then we'd all give up."

In the end, she says that it took an "act of God to get me to leave." Divine intervention came in the form of a startup founder who had interviewed for the PointCast CEO job and turned it down. Bill Lohse, a charismatic former computer-conference organizer, didn't think that Zornosa should be at the company either, and his inside knowledge of its problems -- combined with a relentless flogging of his own brainchild for Internet success -- finally persuaded Zornosa to quit.

Lohse's company, a banner-exchange service that would allow small Web sites to promote themselves inexpensively, didn't have the emotional appeal that PointCast's product had for Zornosa. But this time, she decided to follow her head instead of her heart. "This had the germ of a great business idea," says Zornosa, who envisioned expanding Lohse's banner-exchange program into a whole suite of services for small Web-based companies.

Friends in the business warned her that Lohse, a onetime EST trainer, had a penchant for micromanagement, but Zornosa was intrigued by his willingness to make her chief operating officer of the fledgling company -- as well as by the sizable stake in the company that he offered her. "He made it clear that he was open to my ideas," says Zornosa, who joined up as employee number eight and soon convinced Lohse to change the company's name from NetWeb to one that she had coined: SmartAge.

But while Lohse promoted Zornosa to president after only three months, his penchant for aggressive managing began to emerge. Setting her sights on hitting the membership and revenue milestones needed to get the company rolling, Zornosa had feverishly begun hiring workers, revamping the Web site, and using her contacts to woo distribution partners. But her extemporaneous management style clashed with Lohse's methodical, process-driven approach, which required all managers to solicit weekly lists of goals from their direct reports and then to respond in detail. "I had a dozen direct reports, and I didn't have time to read and respond to goals that were changing faster than I could respond to them," says Zornosa unapologetically. "Bill saw that as bad manager etiquette."

She could feel a power struggle developing, and she wanted no part of it. At PointCast, she had felt the impact of similar conflicts: Repeated clashes between the board of directors and the founder had helped undo the company's early success. "I wanted out before it got to that point," Zornosa says. She decided to quit SmartAge after just six months on the job. "I told myself, 'If we break up now it's an annulment, not a divorce.' "

The breakup certainly stung less than her painful departure from PointCast. But for a woman whose pre-Internet career was defined by success after success, Zornosa now felt an intense pressure not to end up a three-time Internet loser. "I really felt like I needed a win this time," she says.

Despite her two bailouts, Zornosa was hardly damaged goods -- not in this economy. Given the high demand for managers with Internet experience, even a failure is widely viewed as a resume builder. And, among the high-tech elite, job-hopping only demonstrates that you know how to play the game and that you take your own career and potential worth seriously -- which, in turn, means that you are worthy of being taken seriously. But four years of dashed hopes had changed Zornosa's outlook. As a mother of two young children, her career ups and downs had taken a toll on her family life. And while she remained determined to ride the Internet wave, she began wondering if there weren't a less jolting way to go about it. "I've chosen to ride the rapids, but I don't have to sit right on the edge of the raft," Zornosa says. She pulls out a piece of paper and draws an X-Y graph, the horizontal and vertical axes corresponding to varying levels of "fun" and "risk," respectively. She points to a spot near the center signifying a blend of lower risk and more fun. "That's me," she says. "I've had many opportunities, but this is where I feel most comfortable now."