Leaving The Spaceship

Sometimes you have to leave your paradise to find your destiny.

This article originally published on LinkedIn July 22, 2022

People who know the history of ServiceNow have undoubtedly heard of a place called The Wooden Spaceship. Located in Solana Beach, California, the Spaceship was one of our earliest offices. It's become a place of legend in the lore of the company. The building was a World War II-era Quonset hut -- common enough -- but it had this big, crazy, wooden disc-shape thing sticking out of it. I think sometime in the '70s an inspired (read: hippie) architect tried to redesign the place to maximize office space, so they stuck a nautilus shape right in the middle of the building. Far out, man. The concept was dubious, but the vibe was amazing. The minute I drove up for my interview I knew that, regardless of whatever this company called "service-now.com" did, I wanted to work in this building.

It didn't take long to see how great the place really was. The beach was 300 yards away, the bar was thirty feet across the alley, and the nearest taco stand was a pleasant three-block ramble. Sure, usable office space was limited; people worked at tables, in conference rooms, and cubes in the hallways. But there was a band room downstairs, man! And, while we only had basically one and a half functioning bathrooms, there were these cool beams in the middle of the nautilus that you could walk out on -- awesome! Sure, we had to put buckets out to catch the leaks when it rained. And, come to think of it, the downstairs was pretty dang moldy. OK, it had rats, too. But just forget all that and feel the vibe, ok?

Let me interject here that for all the cool factor a hell of a lot got done at the Spaceship. Gigantic amounts of innovation, the product of insane amounts of heads-down work. You could feel the place hum. There was a rhythm where people would interact, conversations and meetings would take place, followed by dead quiet as intense focus was applied to ridiculous problems. The building was crazy, but these people weren't fooling around.

The first time I heard it called The Wooden Spaceship, I was stopped in my tracks. Just the poetry of it. Imagine a spaceship made of wood flying into outer space; such a beautiful absurdity. It was also a stunningly perfect metaphor for ServiceNow itself: the plucky start-up, built on a dream, full of hope, making a voyage into the future, flying a ship that should not sail, etc etc. It also matched a phrase founder Fred Luddy liked to say. After giving a rousing, sometimes tearful, speech Fred would quote Buzz Lightyear from the movie Toy Story, saying, "To Infinity and Beyond!" It was all so perfect.

But one day, the vectors of time, space, and progress came together to ruin everything.

I was eating lunch with my boss and a coworker at one of our two and half functioning tables. Out of the blue, my boss said, "So, we are going to be moving in a few months." He must've seen the look on our faces because he followed quickly by saying, "Is that bad?"

Bad? It's the end of the flipping world! We can't leave the spaceship! This is our home, our origin. Our conveyance to the outer stratosphere, for crying out loud. It's who we are. We can't just leave who we are! The band room!

I didn't say all this out loud. But as the word spread through the office it was clear a lot of people felt the same way. Some people were bummed, some were angry. Some thought it was a sellout and that we were leaving our startup integrity in the dust.

Later that afternoon, I was sitting next to Eric Schroeder, one of ServiceNow's first Solution Consultants. I was still distraught. I turned him and said, "Isn't this terrible?"

Schroeder looked me right in the eye and said, "No, this is great."

I asked him what the hell he was talking about. He said, "It means we're growing. If we weren't growing we'd be in trouble. I want to see us in a ten-story building." 

Without saying anything else, he closed his laptop, put on his sunglasses, and left. Probably to go surfing. I still had docs to write.

Schroeder was right. If we were going to do what we set out to do, we had to grow. Which meant we had to go. We needed more people -- lots more people. And we didn't even have enough room for who we had now. And if we were going to go for bigger customers, we needed an office where we didn't have to take our laptops home when it rained. Clearly, we needed to grow up a little bit.

So did I.

I needed to see past the coolness of the Spaceship, the band room, and the startup vibe to see the dynamics of what was happening. Landing at ServiceNow at the outset of the journey was a gigantic opportunity for me. As I came to realize this, I began to take my work much more seriously. I began to feel a deep emotional connection with the mission of the company. I made it my sworn duty to always work towards the fulfillment of our mission and to insure that anyone I hired would also be fully invested. I needed to learn as much as I could about our work, our industry, and our customers. I needed to create process, programs, and products that would support our progress and I needed to devise techniques for creating the strong teams to do it. I needed to grow, dig in, leave my own, personal Spaceship and venture forth.

So on another sunny afternoon in Solana Beach the boxes came out, the posters came down, and the moving truck pulled up. People gathered in the parking lot, sitting on couches that were still waiting to be moved, telling old stories about great times, cracking a beer and saying goodbye to the place. It was bittersweet, but there was also an air of excitement: this thing is really happening. We were still a ways off from an IPO and we had a lot of work ahead of us, but "To Infinity And Beyond," right?

As the sun went down over the ocean, we got in our cars and left behind our Wooden Spaceship. It almost felt like as soon as we all left, the nails and screws would pop out of the wood and the windows would fall off and the old place would crumble into a heap.

The new office in Del Mar was certainly a step up. It had a decent design, a nice kitchen, lots of space, and actual reliable utilities. Yes, it felt pretty corporate but not terribly so. Try as we might, I think the biggest complaint we could come up with was the parking spaces were kinda narrow. But, we had probably triple the floor space we used to. We were still small enough to have an open floor plan and you could easily see pretty much everybody in the company everyday. But before we knew it we'd triple in size, get a new CEO, and become a publicly traded company. Things move fast in hypergrowth.

When we did have that IPO, guess where we went to celebrate? It wasn't at that Del Mar office, or the fancy hotel across the street. Everybody trucked back to Solana Beach to the bar across from the old Spaceship. It was a riot of a party, especially when Fred Luddy walked into the bar and got a five-minute standing ovation. All the bottles of tequila on the top shelf were purchased and the party spilled out onto the street. There really was no other place to be. 

I moved to San Diego from Minnesota about 20 years ago. I had actually made the decision to move my family out a couple years before we were able to do it. The funniest thing is that all that time I was working on getting out to California I had the Solana Beach sign for a screensaver. Who could have predicted that only a few years later I would be working in a building a block away from that sign? And not just a building, but the best building. And not just another company either, but ServiceNow. I had left for something new and better. The company left the our beloved office for something new and better. Both a leap, both worth it.

Because sometimes you gotta leave the spaceship if you wanna see the planet.

P.S. The Wooden Spaceship is still there in Solana Beach. It's gone through maybe three tenants since ServiceNow. The current owner did a loving and tasteful restoration to the old place. If you're in town I recommend getting your picture taken in front of the building, watching the sunset at the beach, grabbing a beer at the Saddle, and walking down to Roberto's for a Carne Asada. Maybe while you're there you'll get an idea for a new company...