Seattle-area high-tech movers downsized by choice, and are shaking up new worlds

IMAGINE HOW it must have felt in 1995 to be Suzi LeVine, a 24-year-old with college degrees in aerospace engineering and English, traveling the country for Microsoft to promote something called Windows95.

On airplanes, she'd be tinkering with a beta version of what later became the world's dominant personal-computer operating system, and curious passengers would cluster around to see what the fuss was about.

As a member of the marketing team at headquarters in Redmond, she helped perform a demo for Jay Leno during a Windows launch party and gave the band Barenaked Ladies a tour of the sprawling campus.

And every day, she says with earnestness even now, she went to work feeling as if she and the tight-knit team that designed Windows were doing something monumental.

"There I was two years out of college with this enormous responsibility, and it was amazing," she says. "I felt very much that my efforts were changing the world for the better. It wasn't an abstract idea."

This was more than a dream job for a 20-something making her way up the career ladder. After all, it was the peak of the Seattle area's reign as the center of all things hip and progressive, a time when the Puget Sound's tech boom was pumping out young, workaholic millionaires by the thousand. By 2001, some 130,000 people in the city and its suburbs worked for tech companies, making this region the most robust for that sector in the country.

Even those who didn't become filthy rich did extremely well. In 1998, the average yearly wage for a technology worker in Seattle was more than $129,000, a figure boosted by Microsoft salaries. That was 220 percent higher than the average wages of nontech workers, according to the annual Cybercities report.

Microsoft, Amazon and Expedia took a slot next to revered names such as Boeing among the nation's most recognizable and important brands.

Think about it. The world we inhabit today has been so transformed by high technology developed in the cramped cubicles and glass offices of Seattle's tech sector that using a land-based telephone for commerce — or any reason at all — seems almost quaint just a decade later.

For young professionals like LeVine, the opportunities couldn't have been any better. When people moved on to try something else, as LeVine eventually did, it was largely by choice. And most enjoyed the luxury of being financially stable enough to spend months or years pondering where to channel the creative energy that so defined Seattle's workers in the '90s.

But that was then. Now even the great wealth turbine Microsoft is handing out pink slips by the thousand. The choices have narrowed; everything seems harder. And yet.

The people who led those charmed work lives will tell you that what they discovered in moving on is that if there was to be a second act, they'd need to write it themselves.

Perhaps what they learned along the way could serve the rest of us as we struggle to answer a question that feels more pressing every day: "What next?"

IN THE BOOM years, Suzi LeVine had, like so many others, taken a career leap and landed at Expedia where she rose to head up the travel Web site's marketing division and, later, its luxury travel business. But married to a Microsoft software developer and seven months pregnant with her second child back in 2005, she decided to leave Expedia. Perhaps she'd have even greater impact on society in the nonprofit arena. At the same time, she began searching for an outlet to practice her Jewish faith.

The options in her Seattle neighborhood, Queen Anne, were nil. So she decided to interview rabbis around town, thinking she might find a synagogue that met her need for a "pluralistic" religious community — one that possessed the small-scale, cooperative quality she'd grown used to in the tech world, where individuals were allowed to chime in and participate in different ways. That led her to Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, who told her point-blank: "I'm sorry, that doesn't exist. But when you find it, let me know because I'm interested, too."

By the following year, the two had enlisted like-minded Jewish professionals and launched Kavana, a religious network where education, cultural events, community service, social interaction and faith-practice all came into play.

Not surprisingly, LeVine thinks of Kavana — a Hebrew word meaning "intention" — as more of a business than a virtual synagogue.

"It's a startup," she says. They wrote a business plan, formed a launch team and raised venture capital.

"People are not members, they're partners," she says. "This isn't about passive involvement — everyone has a job." The rabbi and a few other staffers are paid, but Kavana operates mostly with volunteers.

There are movie nights, book clubs and intimate "living-room learning" tutorials hosted by Rabbi Nussbaum at her home.

LeVine says Kavana and other intentional communities around the country are at the forefront of a movement toward reinventing the very idea of community, one that is more inclusive and bottom-up.

LeVine put those values to work again in 2007 when she got heavily involved in Barack Obama's presidential campaign, which was bolstered by the intense grass-roots organizing of people like her.

"Small is the new big," says a cheerful LeVine, who is clearly aware of the irony that she honed her savvy startup skills at the company she helped make one of the world's largest software firms.

AS IT HAPPENS, several of the people who helped form Kavana also cut their teeth professionally at big-name companies like Microsoft and were looking for new pastures.

Yoram Bernet, for example, left Microsoft in 2001 after eight years of working on programs aimed at making it easy to shop online and access video on demand. He and LeVine became friends his first day at Microsoft.

"It was intoxicating," he says of his time there. But "it was like burning a candle really fast. I said I can only take this for a certain number of years. When I finally did leave, I was kind of exhilarated at the idea that I would never work again."

Financially set from his years at Microsoft, Bernet spent that first year renovating his house, the second traveling the Inside Passage, Southeast Asia and Patagonia among other exotic places with his soon-to-be wife, Maya. By the time 2004 rolled round, intentional joblessness had lost its luster.

"We got back, and that's when the introspection started," Bernet says.

Whatever it was Bernet thought he would gain from all that freedom didn't materialize. Like his peers in the tech circles he left behind, he was, at heart, a worker. But he didn't want to go back to that exact environment.

"I wake up every day just feeling so fortunate for what I got at Microsoft, what I got in so many ways," the 47-year-old says. Still, "For many of us, there's just this sense of being defined by what we do. It gets so ingrained in our culture: 'If you're not productive, then what good are you?' I think it's kind of a curse."

Or maybe it's a blessing. Fact is, when Bernet returned from his travels, he had a stockpile of photos taken along the way.

In those moments of introspection, he realized he might be able to turn that passion for photography into a second career. Bernet started showing his work at cafes and small galleries, and eventually lined up contract work with architects who needed images of their projects, something he continues to do today.

"But I still couldn't get away from that pressure of wanting to know how successful I was, how productive I was," he recalls.

Having two kids with his wife, joining the investment group Social Venture Partners and helping start Kavana all helped Bernet find value in things outside himself. And that yearning to work, to be a part of something, has led more recently to a foray into environmental concerns.

Bernet has launched an online community called Carbon Salon, which helps people track their impact on the environment, their carbon footprint, then find ways to reduce it. A test version of the project will go up in April.

"It's not so much about the carbon footprint as about community," Bernet says.

On a personal level, the project helps satisfy Bernet's jones for work while giving him a greater sense of purpose. He works at home out of a basement office. He can see his two young boys, Zakai, 2, and Malachi, 8 months, whenever he wants; he doesn't need a car, and there's no commute in any case.

"The irony is that I feel like I'm back at Microsoft," he says with a chuckle. "I get up at 4 in the morning! The difference is family is still my top priority."

"It doesn't come as easily now," he says of the long hours. "I have days when I'm just so excited and days where I sit and stare at the monitor."

In other words, he's just like the rest of us, especially now that his investment nest egg has been cut in half by the stock-market plunge.

He lives modestly these days, but living like a prince was never a goal in the first place.

After all, he comes from a generation of what he calls "intense, Type-A overachievers" for whom the idea of working was as important as the reality of a big paycheck.

"A LOT OF PEOPLE in their mid-to-late 30s have gone on to do very different things than they would have anticipated doing," says Jodie Jones, who's a prime example of the phenomenon.

Today Jones, 41, is a child psychologist and counselor at College Place Middle School in Edmonds, where she occupies a windowless, closet-size office filled with students' artwork and slogans about anger management.

The job is a huge departure from the Cincinnati native's previous incarnations at Procter & Gamble, AT&T Wireless and finally Amazon from 1997 to 2002 as a marketing executive during that company's nascent years.

An ambitious professional who boasted a "100 percent and then some" work ethic, she had what she describes as a "hankering" for something more.

Community service, teaching and working with kids had always appealed to her, but it took walking away from Amazon, volunteering at Seattle Girls School in the Central District and going back to school at Seattle University for the pieces to fall into place.

She graduated from SU last year with a dual certification in school psychology and counseling.

Not that she's ungrateful for her corporate opportunities, but Jones says, "It never felt totally, truly fulfilling."

"Being in my business career gave me the benefit of saving some money, so I could go out and experiment," she explains.

"It's the first time in my professional career where I really enjoy my work — this marriage of things that I'm passionate about, things that I'm good at and an environment where I really feel like I'm making a difference."

It's hard not to look at people like Jones, Bernet and LeVine and feel, just for a moment, that they are still living a dream, one that is out of reach for workers who nowadays will be happy with a fraction of their opportunities and success.

The tech boom may be behind us, but it's behind them, too. They can't replicate those glory days, either.

Faced with uncertainty, mostly of their own doing, they took a plunge and in some cases invented new ways to stay afloat. Seattle is still a good place to do that. Its small-business climate was ranked No. 3 among U.S. cities for vitality in a recent bizjournals survey.

Suzi LeVine notes that her husband, Eric LeVine, also quit his job in 2005 — leaving behind 12 years at Microsoft to start working full-time on an idea he had to create an online community where vinophiles could share tasting notes and tips on managing their personal wine collections.

Today the site — cellartracker.com — now has 70,000 registered users and listings for more than 600,000 wines in its inventory.

Suzi also mentions a neighbor, another former Microsoft employee, who parlayed his love of the winter sport curling into a forthcoming sports-timer application for Apple's iPhone.

Follow your passions. Seize the moment. Could it really be that simple — in a crippling recession, no less?

It sounds like so much pie in the sky, but so does Bill Gates' famous pitch for a computer in every home, or Amazon's bet that people would shop for old-fashioned parchment books in the futuristic climes of cyberspace.

Suzi LeVine says working in software, where "you're creating something from nothing," you learn how important it is "to see an issue or an opportunity and just go straight at it."

There is probably no better time to put that lesson into practice on a grand scale.

Tyrone Beason is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. He can be reached at tbeason@seattletimes.com. Ken Lambert is a Seattle Times staff photographer.