Harrington

Monica Harrington: I’ve been chief marketing officer of two successful startups (Valve and Picnik) and I’m married to the developer who co-founded each of them. However hard you think launching a startup is, it can be way tougher than that – times 10.

It can also be exhilarating and rewarding beyond anything you might have thought possible. It’s been 10 years since Mike and I left Valve, but I think much of what we learned applies now. In the spirit of sharing, here are the 10 lessons I learned as Valve's chief marketing officer.

1. When you leave a big company to do a startup, many people – including former coworkers and family – will think you’re slightly unhinged.

Lots of people say they want to do a startup, but few people really do. You’re giving up security for a chance to lose a lot of money, your own or other people’s, and that can be humbling and scary.

I went from a situation where it felt like everyone in the technology industry took my calls (as a senior marketing manager at Microsoft, I controlled budgets worth millions of dollars) to a situation where no one wanted to take my calls and I was having to say: “Hi, I’m from Valve – V- A –L –V-E. I’m sure you’ve never heard of us, but…..”

At those times, when you’re trying to fight the feeling you might have made a big mistake, someone close to you is almost sure to say, “So, how’s it really going?” in a way that makes you realize they believe it’s not working and you’re in denial.

2. Hiring great people is critical and sometimes the people you most need to convince aren’t the ones you’re actually going to hire.

Part of my job was to convince the spouses and partners of whomever we were trying to hire that coming to Valve was worth the risk for them. Because we were hiring lots of developers, in many cases I was talking to wives and girlfriends who often had no technology background. Once, I had to help convince the brand new fiancé of a successful Atlanta attorney that her soon-to-be husband might have a great future in the game industry. What made it more difficult is that Valve wanted to hire him as a developer and until the weekend before, she didn’t even know he wrote code. Fortunately, they made the move, he played a key role in the company’s success, and they’ve become our good friends.

3. The most valuable hires can come from anywhere and sometimes have terrible resumes.

An advantage a startup has is that you don’t have an HR department, which too often screens out people without the “right” background. Since Mike and his partner Gabe Newell are college dropouts, they were sympathetic to people with unusual backgrounds. So they searched on the Internet for people who looked like they’d done interesting work and then reached out to them directly.

Two potential recruits were working as pizza deliverers in Florida at the time Gabe called them. They’d done some interesting game “mods” and posted them to the Internet – which in the mid 90s was a concept nobody outside the game development community seemed to understand. Because they didn’t believe anybody was seriously evaluating their work, they thought the phone call from Gabe was a hoax. It wasn’t until Gabe sent plane tickets that they knew it was real. They’re still part of the team.

4. You’ll need to be flexible in ways you can’t imagine.

Flickr photo via Victor Chapa

In the early days of Valve, Mike and Gabe spent time helping new hires find apartments, buy beds - basically they did everything necessary to help get the business off the ground. Mike and I even hosted a wedding for a developer whose work was needed to meet a critical deadline. Since he and his fiance had planned on going to Vegas, and we asked him to cancel the trip, we hosted and planned a Vegas-style wedding in our own home, complete with an Elvis impersonator. (They were going to celebrate later with family in their home country of Australia.) They and we had a great time, they’re still happily married, and he’s still at Valve.

5. You will veer between moments of triumph and moments of despair in a way that only the people who are on the ride with you will understand.

I can still feel my heart race when I think of the day, a couple of months before ship, when I asked Mike whether he could assure me that Half-Life would be better than Sin –a title to which Half-Life was often compared and which was expected to ship around the same time. Because Mike is a developer and doesn’t believe in spin, he said, “I don’t know.”

As a marketer, I know the limits of marketing. We could control what we did, but not what other people did – and at that point, after years of development, no one had actually played our game and probably hadn’t played theirs. It was still quite possible that the Sin team had created something incredible that when launched would surprise and amaze the gaming world. If they did, given the realities of the marketplace at that time, soon people might not even notice we shipped.

6. You’ll need to earn respect every step of the way and some of the toughest critics will be your own peers.

We knew that the only way Half-Life was going to be a hit game (and not lose money) was if it could win Game of the Year honors from at least one major publication. And in order to do that, we knew we needed to build a truly innovative game worthy of the respect of leaders in the game industry. We didn’t know if Half-Life would actually win any honors, but we knew that it wouldn’t even be considered if we didn’t share some of what we were doing that made it truly different.

So, during the time the team built the product, Gabe, Mike, and some of the engineers also went to conferences and did interviews about the work they were doing in artificial intelligence, physics, and integrating story into the player experience. When the playable demo appeared, it was the leaders and legends in the game industry who proclaimed Half-Life a breakthrough game. (Half-Life ended up winning more than 50 Game of the Year honors and was named the Best PC Game of All Time three times by PC Gamer magazine.)

7. Just when you think you’re on the rocket ride up, it can all come crashing down, and you’ve got to work hard and fast and think on your feet to force it back up again.

Less than a month after Half-Life shipped, the publisher scheduled a call with us to discuss overall marketing plans. During that call, they told us they were pulling marketing support from our game and moving on to the next Sierra title. They had more than made back their advance, were satisfied, and were looking forward to Valve’s next game.

We were stunned. Not only were they abandoning a game that was beginning to pile up awards, but WE hadn’t made back our money. After taking a breath, we told them that they not only were not going to pull their support from the game but they were going to re-release it in a Game of the Year box and it better be available at retail stores everywhere. The only leverage we had was the force of our will and the goodwill of the gaming community which we were willing to draw on. That Game of the Year box shot Half-Life into the #1 retail position all over the world. Without it, and in the days before games were distributed on the Internet, Half-Life might have sunk into oblivion fast. It was a startup near-death experience.

8. You’ll meet familiar faces in new and surprising roles.

It helps if you’ve been nice. Gabe and I believed strongly in the potential of the Internet as a way to connect with other players and as a distribution platform. So we wrote up our ideas and I booked an introductory, though high level meeting with Amazon. It was 1999. When I walked in, the person who greeted me said “I know you. You interviewed me at Microsoft.” I quickly realized that meant I must not have hired him – which didn’t bode well for the pitch. He then told me happily that I’d said years earlier, “You should consider checking out this company that’s just starting to heat up over in Seattle….” A couple of days later, he sent over a bottle of champagne as a precursor to Amazon’s offer to buy almost half the company. (We turned it down and decided to pursue independently, but Amazon’s offer reinforced our belief in the idea.)

9. The need to work hard and prove your ideas never stops because the race goes on.

I don’t know anybody in the startup world who gets to relax while they’re still in the race. In our case, Mike and I stepped out of the race, taking a few years off to relax and recharge. Gabe and the rest of the Half-Life team continued on to build and ship Half-Life 2, develop Steam into a full-fledged online game (and hugely successful) services and distribution system, and do all of the other things that you do to build a company’s success.

10. If you move on, you owe it to everyone you worked with to support the team and the company you built.

Though Mike and I no longer have a financial interest in Valve, our exit was structured in a way that vested us in the longer-term success of the team and the business. I’ve always believed that people who have helped build a startup should be committed over the long term - it’s part of the promise you make to the people you work so hard to recruit.

Monica Harrington was formerly chief marketing officer for Valve and Picnik. She now does strategy and communications consulting for business and nonprofits, and blogs at Social Innovation Perspectives. She also is a board member at Code for America. Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of their authors, and don't necessarily reflect the views of TechFlash or its staff.