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Life is full of hidden doors that mark beginnings and endings of opportunities and time. Some doors are entrances and others are exits. Yesterday was my last day at ChannelWave. It was an exit I had been anticipating for a long time.

They finally tore that old house down on St. Paul just before you reach Longwood. It was an old and spooky house and looked like it should have been torn down a long time ago. It was missing on Monday after being totally leveled by a big yellow iron monster that was standing proudly in front of and atop the piles of shattered wood on the ground.

On the official ChannelWave EXIT INTERVIEW CHECKLIST the dates of my employment at ChannelWave are listed with a start date of 1/19/1996 and the last day worked as 02/02/2005. I logged an employment period that spanned from start-up concept cradle to asset sale grave. During those nine years I nurtured a baby ChannelWave into existence, watched it grow customers, employees, products, culture, and space. I watched the baby ChannelWave stumble and move towards my own dreams of what it could become and then saw it weaken in the face of faults, limitations, and gaps. Eventually I watched it become an empty and hollow corpse of a company that first was put onto the life support of an acquisition and then finally lurched passively towards the grave of a final asset sale to a public company.

ChannelWave was the logical extension of a dream I had at MIT to start a restaurant with interesting and eclectic tables shaped like oranges, basketballs, and other odd items. I figured I could make creative tables after building what was called the reality proof chair out of an old printer noise cover that I found in the hallways of MIT marked as garbage and a lot of plywood shaped in the wood shop. The original locations that I had scouted for my restaurant were in Kenmore square. One location would eventually become IHOP (International House of Pancakes) and after that it would become the new hotel above the Kenmore T station. The other idea for a location was where the Landmark Center now is. Back then it was an abandoned Sears building. I finally settled on the basement of a house that my family bought on 930 Mass Ave. in Cambridge for the objective of more than one of us to start a business and as a real estate investment. Jeremy and I gutted the office like basement of the house by ripping out a drop ceiling to expose the wooden beams, installing tiffany lamps, painting the walls a southwestern brown and blue, building simple round tables out of wood, and laying halogen track lighting through the ceiling pointing to a stage at the front for performers. The restaurant was incorporated as The Door in the Wall Inc. I named it after The Door in the Wall, one of my favorite stories by H.G. Wells. It is about a man who passes by a wonderful garden with a beautiful woman a few times in his life but never enters. To me it was about missing opportunities and taking advantages of times.

The ending lines of the Door in the Wall:

"You may think me superstitious if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something--I know not what--that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination.

We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that?"

The Door in The Wall cafe was never completed. Instead I moved into the building with Ron and started VirtuMall, an online shopping mall, then VirtuFlex a development tool to make dynamic web sites, and then VirtuMedia, a consulting company building dynamic web sites, finally evolving into ChannelWave around 1997.

I remember a lot of last days for other people who were Channimals that came and went with much fanfare during the Internet bubble period and even through hard long declining years. We had parties and gatherings to say goodbye to important people as they left like Jeff Durand, Jack Connors, Tibor Vais, Drew Williams, Stephanie Lin, Bob Orr, Gary Howard, Chip Greer, Bob Guillocheau, Ron Schmelzer, and Rhea Plosker. During the big lay-offs we had gatherings with crying, hugging, and drinks. The goodbye parties shrunk as fewer people were around and as budgets shrunk to pay for wishing our parting partners towards their next great success. I am sorry I can’t list all of the people whose names I have escorted into our doors and then out with their EXIT INTERVIEW CHECKLIST with a drink in one hand, some snacks, chicken wings, and speeches. Maybe we can have a party some day with everyone.

I should have known the last time I wished someone goodbye what things would be like on my last day. During various times I had envisioned a last day at ChannelWave the way that every person envisions their own funeral. Chris and Ron would make speeches about the time I had woken-up in the middle of the night to get coffee and had forgotten that I had driven to 7-11 and walked back only to think my Volvo was stolen the next day. Some people would tell about how I had been inspirational to them in Chatham when I urged the management team to have faith that our worst hours are always before our brightest dawns. Others would cheer me. Some people like Alex would quietly thank me for helping them get a Green card and for keeping the company long enough for them to have the opportunity for their family become an American citizen. Some people would just let me know that I had been the soul of a machine that they had been happy to take a ride in. At some point after everyone was sufficiently drunk people would hold me in a chair above their heads and dance to Havana Gila.

I had taken Hattie and Rhea out to Cuchi-Cuchi the day after Rhea had moved on. She had been tired of commuting back and forth and she was relieved to start her life back in Toronto again without the weight of ChannelWave behind her. There were only three of us there then.

I was chatting with the asset management guy from the acquiring company who thought that the PCs were of no real value and was looking to give them away to a school or whoever would take them. He figured nobody would want the cubicles. I had always protested cubicles. I wanted things to be open air so that people could see and trust each other. The cubicles will outlive the move when the lease runs out in June. The asset management guy is just going to leave them there.

I cleaned out my desk as best as I could for a half day. I had been keeping personal financial statements in the desk like my old bank statements, stock transactions, and old checks. I had checks from BayBank. In those nine years Bay Bank had become BankBoston and then BankBoston had become Fleet and now Fleet has become Bank of America. I shredded five generations of blank checks in Trey's office. He had a shredder that he had found when Susan, a lawyer, had been let go. I liked to think I might actually be shredding something of real value, like I was at Tyco or Enron, racing to destroy evidence of some accounting scandal. Shredding can be fun and cathartic. I wasn't erasing anything but records that I was here.

I had been locked out of the email system as though I might steal something from the corpse of my own company. I had Peter request that I have my email still on for the next 30 days so that I could transition the many personal things that are intertwined with my existence with ChannelWave. I had become for some years, maybe the first five, integrated as a single being with the company only to slowly fade back into a living person again. It is a mess to clean-up.

My secret utopian experiment had been to build a company less like Dilbert, a company that had learned from the book Catch-22. What Would Yossarian Do (WWYD)? People would be valued and it would be a place where people wanted to be. We were going to be a family at any size that trusted each other. We would electrocute our guests with the synergy emanating from our hands when we greeted them. This experiment failed like so many other efforts to create a better world in a little microcosm. Before only a few years had passed people had circulated Dilbert cartoons throughout the office to illustrate what it was what it was like to work here. We were sending work to the Elbonians in Canada and India weren’t we?

Following the completion of the EXIT INTERVIEW CHECKLIST through the long snake of time I recall that various people were happy and some did tell me that being at ChannelWave was one of the best times of their lives. They had said that it was a different place from anywhere else that they worked and that they hoped to work again somewhere with such a loving atmosphere. But in reality people always had plenty of conflicts, trouble, frustration, and defeats to ensure that the reality of having been here was both sweet and sour.

I took a trip to the water cooler alone. As I stood there pouring water into a paper cup I felt like a losing general after a grand war. I couldn’t help but concede that the acquiring company had won the competitive battle to create the lasting company and despite my stubbornness, intelligence, strength, and will they had defeated the best that I had to give. So I felt like an expatriate walking the soil of his former homeland; a farmer evicted from his farm. I didn’t belong here any more. I said goodbye to Trey, CJ, and Dave L. but I didn't make much of an effort to do a full round. I figured I’d see most of them again. I was haunted by the ghosts of all the people I had shared the past ten years with who weren’t in the building more than the few people who still remained. Those ghosts were all around me.

I had to hunt for a box to put my remaining items into. Most of the boxes suitable for moving had been taken already. I left alone and quietly with a long box filled only in the first fifth. The box included a millenium clock that Ron had given me that originally was supposed to count down the days to year 2000. Ron had taped over it to mark the days to the IPO and then modified it to count down the days to the next financing. Ron had given it to me the day that he left to count down my own days. The count down clock had become a clock on my desk that was incorrect in time and quietly ignored with no real goal associated with it's special function. I set the countdown to zero and took a picture of it. Time had come for an ending and things had come full circle for me to leave as much alone as when I started.

I went to get fitted for a new pair of glasses in case my prescription had changed. Now was the time to make a fashion statement and my vision plan wasn't about to last forever. Sarah was sick, soon to be diagnosed with strep throat, but she went with me to the Sprint store to get a new phone to transfer the number from my ChannelWave paid for Blackberry. We stopped at Rami’s falafel to grab a few fully packed pitas. At CVS I bought a card for my mother’s birthday and vitamins to prevent macular degeneration per the eye doctor's warning.

At home Sarah and I watched the Door in the Floor. It was about a screwed-up family living after their two sons had died. The main character wrote a Children's story about a boy afraid to be born that began "The little boy was afraid of what was under the door in the floor, and the mommy was afraid, too. Once, long ago, other children had come to visit the cabin for Christmas, but the children had opened the door in the floor and they had disappeared down the hole." The unborn little boy was afraid to be born into a world where there were holes in the floor. Eventually he was born and he did open the door at the end of the story because his curiosity couldn't be withheld.

Throughout the evening I successfully fought off a buzzing desire to drink a beer from the fridge.