On a recent Friday afternoon, the last half hour of the work week can’t bleed by fast enough for most.
But on the fourth floor of a building on 16th Street near Mission, about a dozen people sink into plush couches and give their attention to one guy talking in front of a computer screen. It’s show and tell, engineer style.
“So I’ve written Ruby that writes Ruby,” says one of the engineers, describing a programming language he coded during the week. He scrolls through the code for a quick demonstration.
“Make sure it doesn’t become sentient,” another employee says with a smirk.
“Yeah, don’t call it Skynet!” says another, a reference that anyone familiar with a certain Arnold Schwarzenegger film franchise would get.
Welcome to Posterous, one of the newer tech startups in the Mission District. The company moved here last April; it launched in July 2008 with current CEO Sachin Agarwal working in New York City and co-founder Garry Tan in the Bay Area. Its product: a very simple blogging platform that lets users post through email. The competition: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr.
The Workday
With only 13 full-time employees — 11 men and two women — the Posterous office feels a little sparse in the morning.
About nine of the contingent sit in one very large room, with two conference rooms along the edges of two of the walls. Three couches surround a coffee table, and a very large television sits on one side of the cavernous room. On the opposite end, a few islands of large desks float in the middle of the room.
At 11 a.m., a missing employee arrives in time for a company status meeting. Ten people, ranging from their early 20s to early 40s, gather around the conference table as Vincent Chu, the company’s 28-year-old director of engineering, scrolls through a digital to-do list on a large iMac.
There aren’t enough chairs for each employee, but no matter. They all remain standing.
“When you’re sitting down, meetings tend to run longer,” says Rich Pearson, the vice president of marketing.
The group moves rapid-fire through the list, reviewing bugs, marketing updates, mobile projects and hiring — the company is still growing.
The meeting wraps up in just under half an hour, as the ceiling starts to shake and rattle from the trampling and thumps of Yoga to the People on the floor above.
By the end of the meeting, Agarwal, 30 years old, finally appears at his desk.
Very Mission
Posterous’ original office was in North Beach. Most of San Francisco’s startups are in the SoMa district, where rent is climbing and, according to a nodding consensus in the group, good food is rare.
“It’s really sterile,” Agarwal says. “It’s built around the tech industry.”
So Posterous opted for the Mission District — the heart of the urban Mission, at 16th and Mission. Four stories up, the BART station is inaudible, but tapping away on their computers, they’re very much aware of where they are.
“It’s awesome,” Chu says. “It’s more like real life here.”
Sometimes too real.
Chu, who bikes in from the Lower Haight, was on his way to work one day. He doesn’t remember much else.
He woke up in San Francisco General Hospital with a note pinned to his shirt, telling him he had been in a bike accident at 14th and Mission.
Jackson Wilkinson, the user experience lead (which basically means he designs a clean site that’s easy to use), says he’s not so enthusiastic about the neighborhood and much prefers work-at-home Wednesdays, when he stays in Noe Valley.
His worst experience involved walking between drawn guns. He says it took him a few moments to realize that he was standing between two men arguing from opposite ends of the block, and then he noticed the guns.
A few months ago, Wilkinson slipped on a bullet casing near 16th and Mission, at the site of a drive-by shooting.
“You slipped on evidence!” co-worker Chris Burnett says.
Agarwal tends toward the more glowing outlook.
“It’s the real San Francisco,” he says. “It’s where we live and eat. It’s a real community.”
The Virtual Community
Community — albeit safer and more private than the Mission — is what Posterous is trying to grow. Pearson says the platform is so easy to use that it attracts a lot of parents who post photos of their kids to share with grandparents.
Pearson uses the site for updating and sharing photos and information for a youth baseball team he coaches. There’s no need to log on to the Posterous website once an account is set up, since users can post by sending an email and attaching photos or other media that Posterous automatically posts to the web.
“We started it as simple as sending an email,” says Pearson, “but we’ve added more complexity.”
On most social media sites, the circles of friends, family and co-workers combine whether we wish it or not. Posterous has settings that redraw those social boundaries.
The trick is to get users on the site; it’s a numbers game.
Tsunami Visits
Businesses grow for different reasons. You could say that Posterous got lucky when a natural disaster struck Japan.
“We’ve been discovered by a country,” Pearson says.
After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, site visits from Japan multiplied tenfold, peaking at 157,000 users in just one day.
“Japan wasn’t even on this list a month before,” Pearson says, referring to a top traffic source list on Quantcast, a web audience statistics site.
The simplicity of posting to Posterous allowed users who only had their phones, equipped with email and a simple camera, to post immediately to a Posterous blog.
Still, the company is in startup mode, trying to grow and develop at the same time.
Sangria Friday
“I don’t expect the guys to work to 3 a.m.,” says Agarwal, well aware of the typical demands of a startup lifestyle.
Agarwal dreamed up Posterous in 2006 when he was living in New York, working for Apple. On his own time, he took photographs and blogged, but got frustrated with the tools at hand.
When the iPhone came out in 2007 — pre-App Store — Agarwal saw that while it was equipped with both a camera and Internet connection, there was no easy way to publish photos immediately to the web. Enter Posterous.
Agarwal left Apple in 2008 and moved back to San Francisco. Initial funding came from Y Combinator, a funding firm that provides early cash to startups.
But in spite of all the moving and company growth, Agarwal says personal time is still a priority.
“I always go home between 7 and 8 to have dinner with my wife,” he says.
His philosophy: “Work hard and have your life.”
Although the Posterous office has the feel of a living room, Agarwal encourages his employees to have fun elsewhere, with spouses, fiancées and friends outside of the workplace.
While large tech companies like Facebook and Google design their workplaces to keep their employees on campus — offering free meals, on-site doctors and gyms — Agarwal says it’s not his style. He doesn’t want his employees to feel forced to spend time together — though, he notes, most have become close friends.
“It’s organic,” he says.
On Friday’s lunch break, five of the guys head down the street to Picaro, at 16th and Valencia, to enjoy a few carafes of dark red sangria and $6 sandwiches. They’re regulars here.
The group spends most of lunch talking about past jobs: mobile developer Andrew Smith worked with motion capture on the film “Mars Needs Moms” and Suyash Sonwalkar, who does support, used to be on Posterous’ user side. Sonwalker says he was swimming in paperwork at his former job in Texas as a medical document consultant. As a relief from his work, he started email exchanges about Posterous’ early bugs. Eventually he asked if Posterous was hiring, and joined the staff last year.
Show and Tell
After lunch, the office fills up again with the sound of clicking keyboards, the occasional musical whine from headphones and that familiar yoga stomp overhead.
But around 4 p.m., the employees break out of their solitary work and convene at the couches for a meeting and the Friday engineer demo.
They gather, snacking on finger fruit, chocolate, microbrews and wine.
Each engineer takes a turn, hooking their laptop up to a large monitor screen to show of snippets of code or demos of the Posterous iPhone app.
“This is a pants-changer, Sachin,” one of the employees quips about a project.
During another presentation an engineer brings up tron, a coding method that Yelp uses.
“MCP,” says Debby Meredith, the company’s interim vice president — Master Control Program, a reference to the film “Tron.”
“Nice! You know your ‘Tron,’” says another employee, deeply impressed.
Meredith is well-respected. She’s been working in the tech industry since 1982, when she graduated from Stanford with a masters in computer science — years before the Internet became a household word.
She fits in well with the group, nestled in a row of four on one couch. Everyone has their laptops out while viewing the demos, champion multitaskers.
The end of the demo meeting signals the end of the day, and the employees mill around, stretching and making weekend plans. There’s no mad rush for the exit.
“It’s time to drink!”
