Migrant Coder: Waiting for The Big Hit

Nanda Kaushik hardly looks like a loser. He’s making good money as an engineer at Corio Inc., a start-up in Woodside. And his face lights up when he talks about his two daughters. Yet he lives in a modest home in the middle-class East Bay, drives a Toyota pickup and wears faded jeans and old Nike high-tops to work. “What I’ve learned is that the most important thing in life is to have fun and enjoy what you’re doing,” he says. “That’s what I’ve always looked for, and I’m more and more convinced that I’ve found it.”

Engineers like Kaushik, 39, once regarded as the Valley’s geeky proletariat, are in such high demand that many of them shrewdly migrate from one start-up to the next, pulling in six-figure salaries and collecting bushels of potentially lucrative stock options. Kaushik should be rich by now, but thanks to a string of bad luck and bad decisions, he is not. He’s worked for seven high-tech companies in 10 years. His first employer was bought by another firm shortly after he was hired. He joined another company in 1992 before it went public, but by 1996 the company was floundering, and “my options weren’t worth anything.” Next came a stint as director of engineering for a database firm called ADB Matisse. The company couldn’t nail down venture-capital funding and went under after three months.

Kaushik soon landed a job at Oracle, one of the Valley’s blue-chip firms. Two years later, he quit to take a job at a hot start-up called CrossWorlds Software. Had he stayed at Oracle, “I would have made a lot of money. Not multimillions, but not pocket change either.” Kaushik left CrossWorlds after a year–the company has yet to have its IPO–to start his own dot.com with three friends. “I thought starting my own company would complete my contribution to the world and my profession,” he says. But after three months of trying to raise funds, Kaushik gave up. “I needed a steady income. The bills don’t stop, and I have two daughters,” he says. “At this point in my life, I’m not independently wealthy.”

Still, Kaushik isn’t bitter about his misfortune. “Everywhere I go,” he says, “I make a point of learning something new.” Launching his own start-up, he says, “seemed like absolutely the right decision but may have been a stupid one, looking back.” So he’s returned to programming, a gun for hire, although he’s confident that his current employer, Corio, will finally hit the ipo payola. At times, though, he can’t help sounding weary. “I don’t foresee things anymore,” he says. “If it happens, great. If not, I can’t do anything about it.”

–R.R.