Well, all things come to an end. Some sooner than others, and sometimes sooner than you wanted them to. Such is the case for the company known as FlashTalk Communications, LLC. After over 4 years with the company, my job will cease to exist when the company does, possibly sooner if the company officially exists much into December.
FlashTalk has been through many changes since I started with them back in late 2003. When I first joined the company to help ease the support load from the shoulders of the CEO, FlashTalk was primarily a P2P VOIP service, a lot like Skype or other voice chat programs. There were deals with companies to offer the service under different names, deals to offer the service for free to other companies user bases (the other company would pay us lump or per-user amounts) and stuff. We had a kind of “match” system where someone could choose to connect with a member of the opposite sex, which would connect them to a person seeking the appropriate match, and the ability for people to block unwanted calls. It didn’t take long for that to mature into a kind of “chat room” type function, that allowed a small group of people with similar interests to all talk to each other. This idea then morphed into the conference call function that allowed hundreds of people to connect to the same call and speak/listen with others on the call. It wasn’t long before some MLM/Direct Selling types discovered the usefulness of that feature, and then things REALLY started to change. The conference feature got more robust and had lots of new features, such as the ability to show PowerPoint presentations, web sites, and eventually a whiteboard function that could even let you draw on uploaded TIF images. Along with this a web site service erupted providing marketing opportunities at a very low cost, and the ability for leaders of large groups to provide customized web sites for their teams to use. FlashTalk hadn’t just been a P2P VOIP service for years.
Alas, it’s not cheap to run banks of servers to handle thousands of people connecting to each other and conference, web servers to serve up the sites for those using that service, and even banks of modems so that people could call into a FlashTalk conference call when away from their computer or the Internet. None of the companies we worked with were willing to commit to FlashTalk and actually promote us as an official solution to their associates. We hobbled along on venture capital and the small numbers of people who learned about the services we provided from their team leaders or colleagues. We knew things were coming to the point where FlashTalk would need an official commitment from a big company to survive, and we tried.
Of course, I kept trucking along, helping customers with their support issues as if nothing was wrong and all was well, as if FlashTalk would be running strong for ten more years. I was very rarely given the scoop on our actual situation, though, so it was easy to feign ignorance. In fact, I thought the web service WOULD keep going indefinitely, even after I knew the more expensive to run conferencing service was to be shut down.
As with the failure of all businesses, it all came down to the fact that we weren’t getting enough money to keep the company going, and so it has to close down. With the company, goes my job.
Am I in some kind of state of stress or worry about what I’ll do next? Not really. I am fortunate to have a loving wife who has a REAL career. She brings home the bacon so we can have a roof over our heads and food on the table. My job let us (her) worry less about eating out and buying the things that we wanted rather than needed. While we won’t be able to be so extravagant, we won’t be hitting hard times. As such, I have the luxury of being able to consider what I’d like to do, and find a job that will allow me to do that.
Stay tuned to this blog to find out where my life goes from here.