Ten Webheads in a Pen

By Romesh Ratnesar

What will a pack of recent college grads endure to work at a start-up? A visit to the "offices" of MongoMusic.com in San Mateo reveals the answer: anything.

For two months the company's founders have crammed 10 people into an office the size of a dorm room. There are two computers on each of the four folding tables. The employees wear headphones to muffle the din of co-workers chattering inches away from them. MongoMusic's executives hold management meetings in the middle of the room. A network cable droops from the ceiling and disappears into a hole in the wall, connecting the office to a similar one next door, where eight more headphoned employees hunch over keyboards. When the door opens and a stranger walks in, everybody looks up and smiles.

Despite appearances, MongoMusic.com is doing pretty well. The start-up, which will help consumers search for and buy music on the Internet, has raised enough money to move into spacious new digs in Menlo Park next month. Right now, the company is "incubating," renting two rooms in a dreary high-rise for $3,800 a month from HQ Global, a company that leases temporary office space. There are 10 other start-ups in the building. "It's not very cost-efficient office space," says MongoMusic's 28-year-old CEO, Jeremy Hinman, "unless you pack people in."

No one complains, in part because most of the employees just graduated from college and don't know any better, and in part because, as one says, "we're in the music space, and people think that's cool." If any employees do gripe, Hinman--who recycles old business cards by crossing out his former employer's name and scribbling MongoMusic.com on them--can remind them that for six weeks in 1995 he lived in a tent on the roof of a Stanford physics lab. And despite the sweatshop conditions, Hinman is a benign manager. "When 5 o'clock on Friday rolls around, I expect them to be out the door," he says, surveying his callow charges. "I know that at 5 p.m., you can find me in my backyard playing beer pong."

--R.R.