Operation CFO

Rikke Christensen's blue eyes give the cocktail party a once-over as she pours herself another glass of chardonnay.

The tall, blond, striking 31-year-old Dane fixes on a target: Three guys who are short-haired, clean-cut, and apparently in their late 20s. They're all wearing derivations of the Internet uniform -- a turquoise V-neck here, a bare chest showing through a splayed white work shirt there, dark slacks all around -- and displaying the facile confidence that comes with making a lot of money at a young age.

In other words, they're dot-commers.

And easy marks.

"Let's attack those boys," Christensen says, raising her chardonnay glass as a mock sword, and she and her tattooed sidekick, 30-year-old Monica Dougherty, herself an alluring blonde, charge though the cocktail crowd.

When they arrive, though, there's a physical barrier to easy pickings. The trio of young men is standing in a closed circle, a wall of backs. Rather than try to find a natural opening, Christensen simply bursts through, turning slightly sideways, raising her wineglass, and, after one penetrating-but-measured step forward, unleashing a glistening smile as she blurts out a single word:

"Cheers!"

For an instant, the three young men freeze -- they'd be deer in headlights, if deer could wear Banana Republic -- before taking what seems like a reflexive step back. Dougherty pounces into the opening. After a few moments of small talk and card-swapping, it's evident the three targets think they're doing the chasing, and think they're doing pretty well. In fact, the bare-chested one, arms akimbo, is beginning to recount vacation stories when, ever so subtly, Christensen's radar begins tuning in to nearby conversations. With a fluid, unobtrusive grace, she peels herself away, slides over to a fortysomething man with peppery graying hair, and breaks right into introductions. Dougherty is still swapping travel tales with the dot-com triad -- the bare-chested guy is midsentence, in fact -- when Christensen leans back into the group, uttering three letters to her sidekick:

"C ... F ... O."

"Awwww," Dougherty hams, flipping her blond-on-top, dyed-brown-below hair back and casting apologetic eyes onto the three vanquished targets, "but we were talking about skiing."

The use of past tense is appropriate. Quickly, politely, but absolutely, the dot-commers are dismissed, and the CFO is surrounded. He seems unlikely to withstand the attack.

"I don't think her hugging people is bad for business"

Christensen is the president of TecHunters, a tiny local headhunting firm that deals solely in the technology sector. On its face, it is a company that probably shouldn't still exist. Not after the "tech wreck" folded hundreds of dot-coms in only a few months, plunging much of the industry into a prolonged hiring freeze and making it impossible for the rare company that was looking for employees to pay the hefty commissions it would have a few months earlier. Yes, common sense suggests that the TecHunters should have gone the way of Webvan.

But they didn't.

When it seemed like everyone around them was laying off or folding altogether, the TecHunters -- after making a few budget cuts -- went out and partied. The firm, a trio of beautiful San Francisco women, worked over networking events, company parties, and even random bars like government operatives on a mission to find more clients. And it worked.

Sitting in a corner booth at Liverpool Lil's, the dark, inconspicuous Marina pub that, if you believe the stories, used to be a favorite haunt of Joe DiMaggio, Christensen is swearing it was an accident, that she never intended to hire only women to recruit in a male-dominated industry married to social spending like none before it. She certainly never expected to have a staff she could contact through a Yahoo e-mail group dubbed "Angels."

"It's not by preference, really," she says. "But that's the way it happened. ... And it's funny: Because we're really fun, people have gotten to know us that way. At parties, it's like, "Bring on the TecHunter girls.'"

As the Denmark native tells it, it started with a few observations about the city she returned to in 1998 after stints as a recruiter in Australia and Tokyo: First, San Francisco's glut of tech workers were changing jobs at absurd rates, and second, when they jumped they got equally absurd raises. To Christensen, it was clear that a good headhunter could make a killing on commissions in that climate. And Michael Harris, who was running an Internet security company that Christensen was hiring for at the time, was sold enough to invest in the idea.

It paid off: Dot-coms needed so many people to accommodate their growth that a handful of companies wanted Christensen to work out of their offices to fill a steady stream of posts. She wasn't willing to give up all her other clients, so she hired help.

Karmina De Lumen, a Berkeley professor's daughter with a regular tennis game, became the second TecHunter. After languishing in the same software marketing job for two years, she sought Christensen's help in landing another marketing job. But as Christensen got to know the Spanish-Filipino De Lumen, and noted her marketing experience and love of chardonnay, she felt she'd found a kindred spirit.

It wasn't a tough sell.

"Originally, we talked about me coming on in a marketing role, but the revenue was really in recruiting," recalls De Lumen, now 28. "Everyone was changing jobs, there was a lot of money, all these titles nobody ever heard of before. It was very lucrative."

Once hired, De Lumen was placed on site at Livemind.com, a San Francisco-based e-commerce company in the midst of a hiring binge. Livemind's human resources manager was Dougherty, now 30, who eventually became the third TecHunter. A pickup-driving Montana native who her boss says "dresses dot-com" while sporting unusual tattoos and unorthodox dye jobs, she offered the perfect foil to the more traditional business backgrounds, personalities, and styles of Christensen, the "go-getter," and De Lumen, "the nice one," according to her boss.

Now that the team was assembled, of course, it needed to find more candidates to fill job openings. And the place to get them during the dot-com boom was at the industry's countless venture capital-inflated bashes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of stories in major media outlets have chronicled the excess that defined the dot-com scene, which, for a while, featured a different elaborate launch party almost nightly.

Derinda Gaumond, a former Acteva. com employee who runs the popular Internet event calendar WorkIt.com today, says she didn't give a second thought to some of the features of her former employer's 1999 launch party: Held in a Treasure Island airplane hangar, it hosted thousands of people -- most of whom had no ties to the company -- who were bused to the bash by the company and, once there, got to enjoy an open bar, trapeze instructors, a climbing wall, and, most bizarrely, pig races with a play-by-play from Mayor Willie Brown.

"Those parties," she recalls today, without a hint of regret in her voice, "were just what you did."

The bashes were tailor-made for the TecHunters, who were trying to recruit exactly the population that showed up at the parties, which they didn't have to pay for or organize. What's more, because most tech workers were employed during the boom, they seldom sought out headhunters, but at parties they could be found all in one place. And, as the TecHunters quickly learned, most of those candidates were men, who were often there as much for the socializing as the networking.

"It definitely worked to our advantage, just hanging out, the three of us," De Lumen recalls. "It wasn't too hard to network with guys." Nevertheless, the girls didn't just stand around. Before a typical party, they would meet beforehand and strategize, decide who would work which part of the floor and, occasionally, if an event called for it, even show up in their "uniforms," which were black, logo-emblazoned jerseys.

Despite all the preparations, the TecHunters understood that to be the most effective, they had to feel like they were just out having fun. It's a precarious balance. "I'm half having fun," Christensen explains, shooing away a waitress who had been looking to give her a chardonnay refill. "But I'm also half not getting too drunk, so I can remember if I meet a good client. It's a little bit of work all the time. You're never off."

Of course, if one of the three happens to drink a little too much, and gets a little extra attention in the process, well, that's marketing. "Monica got so drunk at the Certicom party that she was just hugging random people," Christensen recalls, "but I don't think her hugging people is bad for business."

And, for a while, that business was prospering. By the height of the boom, the three-woman company (supplemented by a handful of commission-only freelancers in other cities) was pulling in between $600,000 and $800,000 a year. That's cash, not the Monopoly-money stock options so many of their clients settled for.

"It really was a perfect world last year," De Lumen sighs. "Now, well, it's definitely changing." It changed fast: Between January and April 2000, six Internet companies folded, according to data from Webmergers, a company that tracks dot-com transactions. In the four months that followed, 60 died. One hundred fifty-seven dot-coms died during the last third of 2000; 217 died between January and April of the new year; and 108 more shut down in May and June.

For a company like TecHunters, which thrived off the free spending in every sense, it was a terrifying time. Many of the people they'd placed were losing their jobs. Many of the companies they'd placed those candidates at were unable to pay commissions that were already owed. In a cruel twist, their largest debtor wound up being Livemind, De Lumen's first on-site client and Dougherty's former employer, which left an $85,000 bill unpaid when it folded.

But the TecHunters' problems were bigger than Livemind: Their business was placing people in tech jobs, but the entire tech industry was in a prolonged hiring freeze. The company went two months without a single placement. Finally, on a Tuesday morning in late April, De Lumen entered Christensen's Sausalito house (which doubles as the TecHunters office) and found her boss and Dougherty stressing over the books.

"I could tell, just looking at them, that something was wrong," she recalls. "And that was when I remember thinking, "Oh my God, I'm gonna have to find another job.'"

Christensen sat her "angels" down for a meeting and explained that the company's second-quarter earnings were only about one-third of what they had been a year earlier, which -- barring a quick upturn -- wouldn't be enough to survive.

Desperate, the girls scoured the city's e-commerce directory, cover to cover. They made cold calls. And they plotted their survival, which was to involve a lot of cost-cutting (they shed their occasionally used Market Street office and lowered their already modest commission charges) and even more partying. That would be tough: The launch parties and job-hopping of 1999 were a thing of the past. The girls knew that survival meant going out to every event they could find and working the rooms hard.

"We just have to treat everything like a networking event," Christensen says. "It doesn't matter if it's supposed to be, or if someone's just having a happy hour somewhere. There could be clients there."

And then, after their toughest day, Christensen dragged her angels out for a drink at the Marina Lounge. And they went to work.

Social Hacking

Tonight, Rikke Christensen is trying to get past the bouncer standing guard beneath the oversize marquee for the downtown club Ruby Skye. And the way the evening has unfolded, there is little question that she will.

Truly profligate, business-sponsored social evenings are a lot harder to come by now than they were six months ago, but tonight Christensen is riding on the crest of one: She's fresh from the posh bar at the W Hotel, where on cigarette break No. 1 she snared a card from a businessman looking to hire 10 positions, and on cigarette break No. 2 she snared an invite to an exclusive cocktail party upstairs with free food, free drinks, and plenty of potential contacts.

But here, face to face with the burly bouncer outside Ruby Skye, a touch intoxicated from three glasses of chardonnay and stuffed with pot stickers, crab cakes, and a "roasted meats sampler plate" from the free buffet, Christensen's a tad off her game.

"Can I see your invite?" the bouncer asks.

"Oh," Christensen says, flipping her blond mane forward, "we don't have one. We lost it."

"Who are you with?"

"Uuuuuh," she stutters, blatantly scanning for promotional signs, eventually catching sight of one, "Compaq."

"All right," the bouncer sighs, as if he didn't have a choice in the matter, while unbuckling the velvet rope gate and granting Christensen, Anne Saunders -- who manages human resources at software-maker Yakatus.com and occasionally helps out as a fourth TecHunter -- and the male entourage they picked up at the W access to the opulence within.

By Christensen's standards, gaining access to Ruby Skye on this night hardly amounts to a coup. After all, sneaking into parties is basically part of her job, and it is increasingly essential in the newly downsized tech party scene. "We've been told we're very good social hackers," she says, setting up her favorite TecHunters anecdote: the night they posed as trophy wives to sneak into a $3,000-a-plate chief executives dinner at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, where they found a candidate who may soon translate into a hefty commission.

After completing their latest social hack, however, they find themselves in what feels like a scene out of Moulin Rouge: a circus of overwhelming visuals with wealthy, well-dressed thirtysomethings.

It is immediately obvious why Ruby Skye has been a favorite of the Internet crowd: As in their industry, a lot of things at this nightclub are overblown and overstated. The centerpiece of the club is a boulder of a disco ball that colors the entire room. A faux opera-balcony facade lines the mezzanine overlooking the dance floor, where there are exotically dressed, midriff-baring female dancers on stilts and others, dressed in battery-operated neon clothing that outlines their forms, on foot.

On an elaborate stage, a 14-piece band -- 10 male musicians in white tuxedos, fronted by four women in brightly colored, shimmering dresses -- is exhausting its catalog of late '70s and '80s radio hits. During "Hot, Hot, Hot," Christensen snares a business card while dancing with a shorter, Latin guy in an unfortunate checkered shirt. The dance continues, a tad closer, as the band segues into a slower, sultrier disco number, prompting Saunders to declare, her normally pleasant facial features scrunching together: "Uck. Death in a room full of geeks."

Eventually, after a few dance partners and a few more snared business cards, Christensen wrests herself free of the dancing and rejoins her companions near the bar, apparently in a mood to lecture about the networking display she just put on. "When you're not trying to sell, you sell," she says, probably sounding a tad more smug than intended, while sipping yet another glass of wine and showing off the latest stash of cards.

There's little question that Christensen relishes the covert, bounty-hunting aspect of her job. And she loves that a scene like this sensory-overload dance club is her version of the trading room floor. To hear her tell it, she's a sort of born schemer, "the girl who wore too much makeup" in high school. Her greatest caper during her childhood in Denmark, she says, got her and a friend out of gym class for her entire senior year in high school. She convinced the teacher that she wanted to run cross-country instead of playing team sports. He responded that she would have to bring him back some sand from the beach, a considerable jog from campus, each day to prove she wasn't cutting class. Which was fine with Christensen, who promptly drove down to the beach and filled her trunk with a semester's worth of sand.

Christensen is splaying the cards out, fanlike, when the band, knowing its audience, kicks into "I Will Survive."

"TecHunters' theme song," Christensen says. "We used to sing it drunk down Chestnut Street." And then she pauses, scanning the room, apparently considering the evening as a whole. "A party like this costs like $80,000. ... This is what start-ups were doing every day last year.

"Every night used to be like this."

Seeking T&A Engineers

The TecHunters spend their Tuesdays sifting through all the contacts they've acquired and managing their ongoing prospects at Christensen's splendidly situated Sausalito pad, a boxy, dark-stained structure that sits like a treehouse above the intersection of Sunshine Avenue and Sausalito Drive.

Inside the living room, which features wall-size panoramic windows with stunning vistas of both the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay, the TecHunter girls are seated around a Spartan dining room table as the mellow vibes of Duran Duran's greatest hits hum on the stereo.

Each TecHunter sits in front of a laptop rigged to a wireless modem; they're bouncing résumés back and forth and sharing impressions of candidates, not all of which seem terribly businesslike. "So," Dougherty says, "I was talking to this guy Josh, and he's like, "I've got a position for you.'

"And I'm like, "What is it?'

""T and A engineer.'

"And I'm like, "Oh, shut up.'"

It turns out that "T and A engineers" actually exist and have nothing to do with female anatomy; they are, Dougherty explains, responsible for "testing and automation," which gives the other TecHunters a chuckle. A few minutes later, a metallic "ping" emerges from Christensen's laptop, signifying a new e-mail message from a prospective candidate.

"I don't remember meeting him, but he says we met at the party the other night," she says, sounding a touch confused. "I sent him an e-mail with one of those little smiley faces in it, and he wrote back that I have such a cute nose."

"Aaaaaaw," the girls say, swooning.

And this is how the TecHunters work, gossiping and e-mailing and perusing résumés. As silly as it seems, there's a method to it. The TecHunters' clients say the women's intuition about how different personalities will mesh sets them apart from other firms. "They're very technology-savvy, very professional, and very friendly," says Motoko Aoki of Netvein, a client. "They've got this ability to get exactly the kind of person that we want. They can get me past the PC job description stuff and get to the point."

Christensen sees that as the greatest perk of an all-woman team. "I think that women sometimes understand corporate cultures better," she said on an earlier occasion. "You know, how people feelabout a person being there."

More than gossiping, though, the TecHunters are waiting for the phone to ring. As Tuesdays with Christensen go, this is a slow one. By early afternoon, she has broken out a brand-new copy of the You Don't Know Jack video game, and, three hours later, a bottle of chardonnay follows. In between, there are three cigarette breaks and a timeout to clip the fluffy cat's toenails.

As relaxed as the day seems, the girls aren't totally at ease. The week before, a candidate they'd placed in a controller's job at the business infrastructure company Netvein reneged -- without telling the headhunters or the company -- and cost the TecHunters a commission in the neighborhood of $15,000, which is money they sorely need at the moment. As clients go, Netvein is not a company the angels want to upset. TecHunters is looking to fill a series of positions there during the coming months, and having a client flake on his first day without an explanation (or a phone call) does not send the preferred message. Things have subtly started to improve of late -- progress that coincides with an encouraging recent plateau in dot-com deaths -- but these placements remain absolutely crucial.

"A raunchy sex scene suddenly pops up in a cartoon you're watching with a 12-year-old," Christensen says, reading one of Jack's questions aloud. "Do you 1) cover his eyes or 2) play it in slow motion?

"Two!" she quickly answers.

She laughs that look-at-me-I'm-bad laugh until the phone rings, cutting her off. Suddenly, she's all business, and the girls, previously cackling, get a silent but stern shushing gesture from their boss. It's a prospective employer calling to set up an interview with one of her candidates, and Christensen looks tense: her shoeless, black-socked right foot is trembling beneath the table as she gives off urgent verbal nods.

"Anytime this week? Great. I'll set it up. Right now," she says, putting the phone down and turning to her angels. "Well, we've got an interview."

"Fab-u-lous," three angels chant in eerie unison.

Thursday, July 26, was not a good day for the technology industry. Hewlett-Packard, dean of Silicon Valley companies, announced 6,000 layoffs, and the fiber optics giant JDS Uniphase slashed its work force by 7,000. For an industry that had been trying very hard to believe the worst was over, the reports were disastrous: incontrovertible evidence that the slump was far from finished.

At happy hour on this gloomy day, Christensen is, predictably, networking. A group called the "Silicon Valley Vikings" is drinking together at Johnny Foley's on O'Farrell Street, Vikings being an obvious draw for a Scandinavian headhuntress; Christensen is dressed, predictably, in all black, with a see-through plastic strip the width of a stick of gum running up her long sleeves and over her shoulders.

The Vikings, however, prove a relatively small gathering, and it doesn't take Christensen long to exhaust the potential contacts in the room. Walking out the door, her cell phone rings. On the line: Netvein. The TecHunters have placed yet another controller there, which means a $15,000 commission check and a likely inside track on the handful of other openings at the company.

"Oh my God!" squeals Christensen, suddenly skipping down O'Farrell Street as she lets out a joyous, profanity-laced rant on one of the lowest days her industry has ever seen. "I'm so fucking happy!"

Because she's in a partying mood -- in spite of a burgeoning head cold -- Christensen drags Saunders out for more networking fun. Considering the events of the day, their eventual destination is a tad ironic: a party thrown by the San Francisco Society for the Advancement of the Internet, at the Beer Cellar, a dark dance club in a Sutter Street basement.

The joint is a little short on electricity. The dance floor is occupied by a single couple, doing something that looks like a butchered waltz -- to techno. At the end of the bar, two women in halter tops are all but screaming to be hit on, using freebie America Online and Netscape disks as drink coasters.

It's quickly evident that what is supposed to be a high-powered networking event is little more than a lethargic "meet market." But Christensen and Saunders remain on cloud nine, flitting about the bar, schmoozing, swapping cards. In her few less social moments, Christensen torments their male companion, one of Saunders' co-workers, interrupting every exchange he has with women by blurting out, "Hi, I'm John's wife."

After a bathroom break, Christensen and Saunders rejoin a pair of guys they'd been working on earlier, announcing their return with a pinch on the back from Christensen, who employs a kind of jokey gyrating as she saunters back into the chat circle.

All that energy feels a bit out of place in this room, though. And after a while it appears to wear on the headhunters. For them, after all, this has been a good day.

And there will be others.

"Let's get out of here," Christensen says, turning toward the stairs to the door. "It's kind of dead."