Voyage to the New Economy

By 10:25 AM on Monday, January 3, McCue knew that he was not at Coca-Cola anymore.

He had just stepped off of a plane and caught a cab to Blue Martini's San Mateo headquarters. His boss, VP of marketing Bill Evans, gave him a hurried hello and then hit him with stunning news: "We've scheduled you to do a presentation at 2 PM to about a dozen key managers. You're going to explain what sorts of alliances you want to negotiate. I'd give you a laptop so you could work up some slides, but we don't have one ready for you. You're on your own."

Fortunately, McCue had brought his own laptop. When show time arrived, his presentation was ready to roll. Partway through his slide show, he began making sense of his audience: Here were the sales specialists who could be his allies. There was the finance specialist who would need more detail on the numbers. When the talk was over, Evans took McCue aside and told him that he had done just fine. "I knew right at that moment that I had made the right choice to come here," McCue says.

Like swarms of other consultants, McCue has made the leap to a Web career partly out of hope -- and partly out of frustration. "I wanted to be part of a get-things-done culture," he says. Blue Martini is young enough that each new business success -- even just a small contract award -- is celebrated with a companywide email lauding the managers and salespeople who made it happen. "You'd never see anything like that at Coke," he says. "A companywide email would crash the server."

When he joined Blue Martini, McCue took a modest pay cut but received a hefty stock-options package, which could be valuable if the closely held company completes an IPO. That's a big contrast with Coke, where he participated in a much tamer employee stock plan, or with PricewaterhouseCoopers, where, as a nonpartner employee, he didn't have any direct stake in the firm's fortunes. At Blue Martini, "I get excited about what the stock could be worth sometimes," he confides. "But I try not to do any calculations. I call it 'spreadsheet masturbation.'"

Parts of McCue's new career have been tougher than he expected. He thought that being at a smaller company might give him more time to see his three small children and maybe even to refine his golf game. Not so. "When I'm in California, I work at least 14 hours a day," he says. "And back home, I start at 6 AM, take a dinner break at 5:30 PM, and then go back to work at 8:30 PM and work for a few more hours. This isn't as easy as people think."

At first, McCue says, he thought that he would miss the cachet of working at one of the world's largest companies. "Five years ago, you would have had to explain what you were doing," he says. "If you were with something small and new, people wouldn't respect your organization right away. That definitely would have been a frustration. In Atlanta, people would always say, 'Wow, you're at Coke.' But now, the whole culture has changed. Today, when you say you're with a startup, people's ears perk up. They've heard the buzz. It's much cooler to work for Blue Martini than it is to work for a big-five consulting firm.''

Is It Really So Hard to Stay Behind?

Young guns Michael Laub and Nick Stowe had expected a hero's welcome. Ten hours earlier, they had set foot on Stanford's business-school campus during a recruiting trip, convinced that swarms of first-year MBA students would plead for the chance to be a summer associate at Bain & Co. After all, when Laub, 31, and Stowe, 30, joined Bain just a few years earlier, they had needed to outshine hundreds of other promising candidates.

But this time, something was wrong. Some of the best students didn't even show up. Those who did come for interviews spoke of Bain as, perhaps, a backup choice. What these students really wanted, they confided, was a chance to work at an Internet startup. As Laub and Stowe drove back to Bain's San Francisco offices in March 1999, they decided that it was time for drastic action. Like many consulting firms -- and, for that matter, like many investment banks, law firms, and other service firms -- Bain had somehow lost allure with talented twentysomethings. If Bain didn't react, it would have trouble attracting and keeping the best talent. And, as Laub and Stowe came to realize that spring, it wasn't just the Stanford students. A young analyst had left Bain in early 1998 to join eBay, just before the online auction company went public. Now her eBay stock was worth maybe $3 million -- far more than she ever could have earned at Bain. And in April 1999, one of Bain's brightest young consultants, Mark Vadon, left to form an online gem-retailing company that later became known as BlueNile.com. He took a couple of Bain colleagues with him, and, when asked why he was going, he said something that unnerved Bain veterans: "I'll know in a year whether this will work or not. And whatever happens, I think I'll learn more by doing this than I would by staying."