On the whole, recruiters say, lower-level employees from a failed dotcom can rebound nicely -- if it's clear that they picked up vital job skills from their last employer, regardless of the company's overall fate. It also helps to be realistic about prospects for titles and stock ownership. When bigger employers woo startup castoffs, they generally offer competitive salaries, but they seldom make a 26-year-old a "senior executive Web designer" or award her 50,000 options.
For top-level executives from a doomed dotcom, it's important to have a reasonably candid explanation of the company's missteps -- and an ability to point out a few lessons that they drew from the experience. "I always want to know whether candidates understand what went wrong,'' says David Pritchard, 38, director of business-group recruiting at Microsoft.
Lately, UrbanEarth's top executives have learned the importance of introspection. Venkat Balasubramani, 29, a cofounder of the company, says that when he began looking for a new job, he expected employers to be impressed by the "risk tolerance, initiative, and self-confidence" that he showed in forming his company, even though it eventually failed. To his chagrin, he found that they were pretty skeptical of UrbanEarth's basic business plan and that they wanted to know what he had learned from the company's demise.
Gradually, Balasubramani came to terms with his company's shortcomings. UrbanEarth was a content and commerce site aimed at a young, racially diverse, nonaffluent audience -- a brave idea, but not necessarily a quick moneymaker. It was also funded on a mere $350,000 -- not nearly enough to sustain a company through tough times.
During the spring, Balasubramani put out 40 feelers, and soon he landed work as the in-house lawyer for WildTangent, a Seattle company that specializes in tools for 3-D animation on the Internet. He's not as high on the organization chart as he was at UrbanEarth, and he doesn't own nearly as much of the business. He says that occasionally the change makes him a little wistful but that it also comes as a relief. The new company has $15 million in venture funding, "and I only have to worry about a small piece of the overall business,'' he says. "I don't feel as though the success or failure of the company is riding on my shoulders.''
Similarly, Nathan Webb, 28, the former CEO of UrbanEarth, has resurfaced as a vice president at WhitePages.com Inc., a Seattle company that provides Internet phone directories. "I wouldn't jump to a dotcom now without seeing the books or without believing that there is a path to profitability," Webb says.
As for Eric Smith, UrbanEarth's one-time art director, he is adjusting his work habits to the more measured pace of Microsoft. His first assignment has been to work on a layout for bCentral, a small-business Web site whose design sensibility is the buttoned-down antithesis of UrbanEarth's gritty look. No matter, he says, he's flexible.
On a recent morning, Smith proudly shows a visitor the elements that make up bCentral's home page. While he didn't create all of those elements himself, he did refine some of them and help lay them out. And he spent several hours doing so -- far more time than he would have taken for an UrbanEarth project.
Such work is fine for now, Smith says, but his real passion is computer animation. And his roller-coaster ride has convinced him that if there's a path to an animation career, he'll have to find it himself. Eventually, he says, he would like to transfer to Microsoft's computer-animation team. "But it's up to me to make that happen," he remarks. "That's not something that my bosses are going to do for me."
George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com), a Fast Company senior editor, is based in Silicon Valley.
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