From IS to marketing, via Germany and a comedy club
By Paul Desmond
Network World, 07/17/00
Some IT pros have a definite career plan in mind and follow it to a T. For
others, the plan is a bit more vague and luck plays a leading role.
At the beginning of his career, at least, Michael Surkan was squarely in
the latter category. But Surkan started younger than most. While he was in junior high and high
school, Surkan ran a computer consulting firm, hiring his younger brother
and some friends to do database programming for companies in his native
British Columbia and nearby Washington state.
Upon graduation from high school, he took his talent to Germany and got a
job as a programmer. He returned to Canada after a year and in 1990 took a
drive to Las Vegas to attend Comdex. He stopped in San Jose to visit a
friend he'd met in Germany. "He offered me a job with his company and I
stayed. My brother drove the car home," Surkan says.
The job, with Amdahl, involved desktop-support. "I was hired in a mainframe
company to figure out how to help people use PCs."
From there, Surkan went to a startup chip fabrication company, nChip, where
he was MIS manager, albeit in a one-person department. The company was
acquired by San Jose-based Flextronics International, which fired most of
its North American MIS staff and put Surkan in charge of those who remained.
One night in 1995, the accounting group from the former nChip was going to
a comedy club and invited Surkan along. "I always seem to hang around with
accountants." One of the accountants brought her boyfriend, who was
technical director for a trade newspaper's testing lab. "We spent the whole
night talking about computers," Surkan says. "I think his girlfriend got
kind of mad."
Within about a week, he was offered a job with the lab. He stayed for four
years, eventually becoming technical director.
Last summer Surkan tried his hand at his own startup, a tech support site
called easyassist.com. After admittedly making some bad decisions and
burning through too much money, he pulled the plug on that effort in
January. He took up the job search again, ultimately landing at Contact
Networks. This time, however, he focused squarely on a marketing job,
determined to gain experience that will help him on his next startup
go-round.
