One major difference between David Haddad’s old job with a toy company and his new job with a Web site boils down to this: office size.

As the former president of Mattel Media, Haddad had a huge office with a large conference table, desk and bookshelves. In his new job as chief executive of eParties.com, Haddad has a work space the size of a small walk-in closet.

With sliding glass doors on two sides, the office has all the ambience of a fish bowl. Just a few feet away, Haddad’s crew of 30 works at a bank of desks and computers that snake around the corner. Open up the sliding glass doors and there is the dull roar of people conferring on various plans and projects, one of which is to launch the Web site’s e-commerce business very soon. (eParties is in the business of selling party supplies and providing online party-planning services.)

Cramped quarters is just one of the adjustments Haddad has had to make since crossing over from the traditional world of corporate America to the new frontier of the Internet.

One of the more positive adjustments is fewer formal meetings. In Haddad’s old job, he arrived promptly every day at 8 a.m. and was handed a long list of meetings scheduled every 30 minutes, straight up to 6 p.m. “I almost felt I was no longer in control,” Haddad said.

By the end of the day, the former Mattel Inc. executive had 100 e-mails waiting to be read and a host of decisions to be made.

Then there’s the question of lunch. At Mattel’s expansive headquarters in El Segundo, Haddad had the luxury of going to the company cafeteria where there was a salad bar, pizza oven, grill and kitchen. There were real plates and silverware.

Now Haddad just buys endless stacks of frozen macaroni-and-cheese lunches and pops them into the microwave oven. Forget real silverware. This is strictly a plastic-utensils office.

And of course, the Web workers dress as if they were on their way to a picnic. Instead of dressed-up casual, Haddad sports blue jeans, a sweater or shirt, and thick-soled shoes. Occasionally he dons a suit when potential investors arrive for a meeting.

All this is quite a change for the 37-year-old executive, who went to Harvard Business School and had always worked for major corporations. At Mattel, he was credited with publishing the industry’s best-selling new children’s entertainment software products for three years in a row. At his previous job with Walt Disney Co., he was vice president and publisher of Mouse Works/Fun Works, a Disney publishing unit.

So Haddad is used to having more amenities around, like built-in infrastructure that comes with a large company and large staff.

“Here, you need to roll up your shirt sleeves and do it on your own,” he explained, noting that he works 12-hour days and then some at home. His day starts at 9 a.m. and ends around 9 p.m.

One of Haddad’s latest challenges has been to find a bigger office in Santa Monica so the Web firm can expand. “At Mattel I would say, ‘I need office space,’ and a team of people would help you with that,” he said. “Now I’m spending about an hour a day looking for space, and it’s tough.”

Corporate career

Haddad made the great leap to the Internet last October when he became the first and only employee with eParties.com. It is the first Web site hatched by Web incubator eCompanies, which is best known for recently paying $7.5 million to purchase the domain name Business.com.

ECompanies was started last year by Sky Dayton, co-founder of EarthLink Network Inc., and Jake Winebaum, former head of Disney’s Web division. The incubator has started or bought other Web companies such as Icebox.com, an animation site, and eMemories.com, which processes and posts photos on the Internet. They are all housed on the same floor of a Santa Monica office building.

The transient nature of eCompanies’ hatchlings is apparent with a glance at their offices. Instead of a nameplate at each desk, there is a laser-printed nametag pinned to each workstation that could be torn down, reprinted or moved at a moment’s notice.

Haddad said he decided to venture into the Web world because it is still an uncharted frontier.

“I sort of got the sense that this was an unprecedented window of opportunity in the Internet. There was this ability to create new business models and take new consumer ideas to the market,” he said.

He confesses he’s also making more than he was at Mattel, and he will get stock options in eParties, though he declined to discuss their potential value. But beyond the financial rewards, there have been intangible benefits, such as the excitement of creating something from nothing.

But one of the greatest challenges Haddad has had to overcome is this: explaining to his parents exactly what he does for a living.