#6 Depression

I left the comfort of working for Haskins & Sells in 1983 because I realized I would never be happy or very good at being a partner in a CPA firm. In retrospect I should have left right after getting my MBA in 1980 and gone to work for an investment bank. But that’s a story for another day.

I joined International Power Technology (IPT) in the summer of 1983 and their office was in Sunnyvale, CA which meant I had to drive over an hour each way to get to work from our home in Castro Valley. It was a thrilling first couple of years. I had so much to learn about being a CFO including my first experience with computer spreadsheets on Lotus 1-2-3 which I mastered after several months of intense study.

I didn’t realize until later that I was a workaholic and being in this type of startup environment added fuel to the fire. To avoid the deadly commute to the South Bay, I chose to work staggered hours starting around 10 am and getting home late. That avoided the worst of rush-hour traffic. I also worked most mornings from my home office as I’ve always been an early riser. Kyle was born in Feb 1984 only adding to the daily responsibilities.

The problems at IPT didn’t begin until after we had our first two cogeneration plants up and running in early 1985 at Sunkist in Orange County and at San Jose State University. Our proprietary, patented technology injected super-heated steam into gas turbine engines, making them more powerful and fuel efficient. What we didn’t realize was that the steam had unintended consequences on the gas turbine blades, causing them to fail after a few hundred hours of operation. It took a few years for our engineers to solve that problem, but it took all the momentum away from our story and we never really recovered.

In addition to my CFO responsibilities, I was later given the responsibility to relocate our office to Palo Alto and to manage the day-to-day operations of our three cogen plants including SRI which came online in 1986. This was a lot to manage and 12-hour days became the norm. And then Lance was born in May 1986.

I knew how to work hard. That was not the problem. The problem was I didn’t understand that I wasn’t Superman and that you could only work so long in the red zone before bad things begin to happen to your body and mind. Bad on me.

I first started feeling depressed in the summer of 1986 and Liz convinced me I needed to see a therapist. I reluctantly went but didn’t really listen to the advice I was given. I cut my hours back to maybe 10 a day. That was not enough.

Things only got worse at IPT. Our venture capitalists were not happy and our prospective customers all got scared with our gas turbine issues. The dream of my stock options making me a millionaire vanished. All that was left were long days and no future.

I managed to gut my way through until I resigned in the Summer of 1987 after Liz had taken a new job with Dayton Hudson in Minneapolis. I figured a few months off and a move to MN would cure my depression. But I was wrong.

We’ll pick up the story in Chapter Two. Long story short, the move to Minneapolis did not cure my depression. In fact, it got worse, much worse.