Start-up mania.
Teenage entrepreneurial millionaires. Explosive IPOs. Information revolution.
This was the Internet world last year, when the author and his associates entered a quarter million dollar competition
sponsored by a
The author and his
team found themselves hapless visitors to this strange new continent where
there seemed to be no common language, just a surfeit of hype, boatloads of
pretence and seemingly endless supplies of Venture Capital. One year on it seems like a story from
another lifetime, and what, finally, was the relationship between the
philanthropic urge and the allure of money and success?
I.
For some years now my friend Stephen Ortega and I, like millions of other human beings, have been kicking about ideas to achieve a number of different ends: make money (maybe not millions); change the world (just a little); indulge our passions and intellects (such as they are). It is entirely conceivable that these are mutually incompatible, but last year, during the height of the dotcom madness, when the entire world seemed to be in the malarial grip of the untamed genie called the Internet, we hit upon an idea that could very conceivably have achieved all of these goals and, as they say, then some. The next three or four months were a carnival of absurdity, full of sound and fury, signifying a number of things, depending upon your perspective.
Let me back up a little. Back up to
a snow-filled night in
Then we realized that this was bigger than we thought: If people would pay for danger, they would also pay for non-dangerous thrills. Let’s say, for example, that a powerful CEO wanted to meet a celebrity but didn’t have the connections. We would broker a deal whereby Jack Welch gets to spend the night with Queen Elizabeth. Let’s face it, said Steve, the House of Windsor will probably be privatized soon anyway, and they could use the foreign investment. It wouldn’t be long before the Europeans began getting the hang of this capitalism thing, anyway.
So the conversation ran. Adventure.com
didn’t take off for reasons which will be readily apparent to the reader but
which eluded us for some time. Some days later I was sitting at my desk in
I went to Steve’s place that night.
He and his wife Nancy lived above Jane and her astrophysicist husband in a
mid-nineteenth century wedding cake of a house in
Easy, intuitive, fast. It became like a mantra after that. The question, we realized, when marketing the idea to people in our heads, is not Why to give? The question is, Why ever not to give!? Here we had a minute concept which, grown in the right way could provide millions for millions of needy people. More important, we realized, it could set the tone for philanthropy in the age of the Internet. The Internet generation was different from its offline forebears; it was a youth culture, an idealistic one, one concerned with social change and justice. Doing good while shopping was something that would come naturally to online customers because they were cool, they were engaged -- they cared. Furthermore if we had a check box on a final payment page of an internet site, we would be seeking donations where the customer already has their virtual wallet open, and was in the midst of a financial transaction. It was the exact equivalent of the cup at Starbucks where people quite literally throw their change.
Looking at the idea in the clear
light of day the morning after it seemed to glow even brighter than it had upon
discovery. That night we had hammered out a simple description of our aims, the
Big Idea. Electronic retailers –hereafter Etailers--
would insert a small check box on the very final page of their payment
processing system, asking the customer if they would like to round up their
purchase and send the change to charity. Someone buying a book, therefore, for
$14.77 would round up her purchase to $15.00. The remaining $0.33 would go into
a fund that was distributed to charity. So far we had an incredibly effective
method of fundraising, but many questions were still unanswered. The process of
answering these questions, and in the end of getting money to set it all in
motion, involved pulling in a few more people, and this was Steve’s strong
suit, an unending ability to network. That Saturday morning Steve called me at
home with news that he had an almost direct line to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.
This was ground zero for online retailing, “If we have Bezos, we won’t need any
other etailers!” Steve bellowed over the phone. The contact, it turned out, was
a receptionist in Steve’s wife’s office.
I pulled all the articles about
Amazon and Bezos I could find off the web, and read about him. His story was a
classic one of the internet explosion – rags to riches riding on the biggest
wave of innovation and change possibly since the industrial revolution. I read
about his grandparents’ ranch in Cotulla,
I went over to Steve and
Jen had spent some time in
Jen had called her brother, and he
had called his mother in law. She, in turn, had called Bezos. “She’s on her way
over to his place right now to run the idea by him,” Steve told me. She had
called Bezos, given him a one sentence description of the idea. His reaction: “I’m Interested.” This was like
benediction from an angel. “Imagine,” I said, “We put Jeff Bezos in a car to go
and meet someone to discuss our idea. We interested the Time Person of The
Year!” We sat in a heightened state of anxiety most of the day; while we waited
we drank pints of coffee and discussed charities. Steve spent a long time on
the phone to his friend Michael who, as some kind of a trader in
We were unphased. If Bezos was not available we’d find someone else, or we would approach him later. As it was we were coming into contact with all sorts of people who were keen to help us and enthusiastic about the idea. It was attractive partly because it was Internet, and partly because it was charity. Charity had never had much cache, it seemed to me, did not possess the same glamour as business or entertainment, for the simple reason that you had to deal with Need, and that was not usually very pretty. But the idea of helping kids on a large scale and in a very public forum, using the latest and greatest technology was sexy; “This is more than an idea,” Steve said to me, Jen and Nancy one night, looking a little crazed by the anticipation of it all, “it’s a movement!”
One night my friend Amir came to see me. He knew I was involved in something; we hadn’t spoken for a few weeks, but Amir wanted to know what I was up to. I explained the premise to him and saw his eyes becoming larger and larger. Amir was the kind of person that once enthused about something, became deeply involved, but he and I had run with a few concepts, and had not, in the end succeeded. Like me, he was looking for something that would speak to intellectual, financial and possibly even spiritual parts of his personality; like me he had done lots of things but still had not found his grail, for most of the last few years he had been living with in his parents’ basement, musing over the nature of his sexuality which was not what his parents wanted it to be.
Amir thought that this idea was it, and he immediately wanted to be a
part of it. He had a penchant for the
prophetic, and had for the last few years been writing, somewhat obsessively I
thought, about
Amir rented a small one room office
in a church near
Several days later, Steve
discovered something that changed all the goal posts, turned up the heat, upped
the stakes, and ultimately took control of the entire endeavor. He came across
a competition on the web, sponsored by a local Internet incubator. The
competition was for the best non-profit Internet idea, the prize was a quarter million dollars in
cash and services, space in the incubator’s state of the art new facility in
It was now imperative to pull our
ideas together into proposal form. The first step was to create some guidelines
for the charities and a list of charities that could work with us. We figured
Jen was the only one of us who had the kind of in-the-trenches experience of
charity. We spent hours going over philanthropic guidelines, looking at what
makes a good charity, how much of their annual budget was spent on actual
programs and how much on overhead. This became a major issue, and we realized
that the most important thing in charitable giving was accountability. We read
a lot about a new organization in
Since the focus of the charitable giving would
be children we had to build into our proposal a clear representation of the
problem. This was something that was clearly dear to the Incubator’s heart;
they wanted plans with a mission, they wanted us to identify a social evil that
needed to be fixed, and in this they were, we assumed, looking to attract
people committed to their cause. As we researched child poverty, what had been
a strategic choice became a mission. The plight of children, as Jen knew from
her work, was truly dreadful in this country. Obviously it was much worse in
other countries (although in the developed world, the
In reading this kind of material we began to realize the innate incompatibility between the New Profit model of “non-profits” and the traditional philanthropic world: it lay in the different cultures inhabited by non-profit organizations and their constituents, and this new breed of social entrepreneurs who were first and foremost business people. Since 1995 the numbers of starving kids in this country had suffered a dramatic increase. This was directly related to the rolling-back of government subsidies that had, since the sixties, made huge inroads into poverty in this country. The kind of government assistance programs initiated since the GI bill had kept a lid on a seething pot of poverty which, once uncovered simply spread incrementally. When the Republicans took over Congress in 1995 the cutbacks in social security sent the statistics skyrocketing. The point of these statistics was simple; if you wanted to really get to grips with child-poverty, you had to tackle poverty, period, for all kids have parents and if the parents are poor, the kids are likely to be too. Anti-poverty activists are by necessity left-leaning politically for the simple reason that the scale of poverty cannot be reduced except by government intervention, and is not helped by fashionable trends like de-regulation and laissez-faire economics. Consequently the non-profit folks tend to be left-of-center to the annoyance of social entrepreneurs who, like other business people lean to the right. Because of the inevitable necessity of choosing bottom line over poverty line, rare is the CEO who carries out acts of random and senseless charity, without a keen interest in the firm’s financial advantage or public image. We were to experience this conflict of interests between philanthropy and business first hand during this competition, although at this early stage we almost began to believe in the wolf lying down with the sheep, without the prospect of kebab.
We were slowly fleshing out our
charity ideas, but on the other side we needed an idea, or least the appearance
of an idea, about how much money we could raise. We needed solid statistics about people’s
giving habits online and good projections for our income. For these numbers I
went to my friend and old employer John, who ran a small market research firm
in
John was skeptical at first, not
just because of the idea, but because I was associated with it. Last time he
had seen me I had been setting off for
We realized that all three of us were suffering from the same malaise. We had all spent several years in graduate school, and its effects were somewhat debilitating in the real world. We could not be satisfied with
platitudes and copy written for business purposes, full of marketing jargon and gutsy, can-do language which was mostly form, little substance. We also had the tendency to second-guess ourselves, as we were doing with the whole notion of philanthropy and the debate that New Profit had sparked amongst us. Furthermore, we all realized that there was real potential here, in the core depths of this idea; potential for all of us to extract ourselves from unrewarding professional lives and find engagement in the world and possibly some reward. I had burned through several jobs in several years, and was working for a translation company trying to persuade school publishers to render their textbooks in Cambodian; Steve was struggling to finish a doctorate in Medieval history, trying to figure out how the Turks in sixteenth-century Venice formed their identities, and Amir had been ranting at the Iranian Theocracy for several years, in between stints working in his cousins’ bakery in Washington, D.C., another cousin’s fruit stall in L.A., and the occasional semester teaching a section at Harvard. He was fired from the fruit stall after confusing the sales pitch “Five for One” -- referring to five oranges for a dollar-- with “One for Five.” We all knew we were holding a precious thing in our hands, the correct development of which could have significant results for our personal success and self esteem.
While all of this was going on, we were operating under the working name of Round Up, but it soon became apparent that we did not have this domain name, that in fact there were two Round Ups already in existence, one was a weed killer and the other was some kind of a rodeo. We had several meetings and considered “Round Off” but it sounded vaguely like an insult. Then “Check Up” and “Check Off” which brought to mind a doctor’s visit and a Starship officer respectively. After many hours of bouncing off the wall Amir came up with ClickUp, and soon it was amended to Click Up for Kids. The deal was sealed, and everyone seemed satisfied. Once the name had taken hold we were able to become truly grandiose in our designs. This came naturally to Amir who truly believed in the possibility of changing the world and one could see (not without some concern) his hyper-idealistic side swinging into action like some rough beast whose hour had come round at last.
Rudy and Jane came up to Steve’s
apartment one night to hear to us pitch. Rudy clearly wanted to know more about
what was going on in the upstairs apartment, all these feet up the stairs.
Maybe he was characterologically involved with things; when Steve and Nancy had
a moving-in party, Rudy had taken it upon himself to lead all of the guests
through the house and give them a detailed tour of the 1850 property. During the interview Amir took over with a
story that had originated in People magazine. It involved a small boy on a farm
in
Whenever we stepped back and contemplated our mission we were re-invigorated with urgency, drive and enthusiasm. But the daily details of putting several people to work in a common goal often caused tension. We traded enormously long emails in which we debated every sentence of the proposal. Amir dissected the first draft I had drawn up, and had many brilliant insights, but sometimes his thoughts plunged so deep that I felt they would threatened to undermine the whole edifice: “Up until now something, almost like a pebble in my shoe, has been bugging me about our proposal and I have not quite known what’s giving me this feeling, a combination of inconvenience and suspicion. Now I do. It’s the idea of “passive donation,” specifically this line in the proposal: We will meet them at the virtual check out with their wallets already open and suggest a donation so small that few will decline. This line drives me bonkers, in fact, it makes me angry, and frankly it is the kind of approach and thinking and commercial positioning and emotional posture that will drive ClickUp into the ground.” This kind of wrangling went on for a number of weeks over the proposal and initiated many arguments about the cynicism of raising money, the corrupting nature of philanthropy for giver and receiver and the dubiousness of the whole enterprise. George Soros himself, we discovered, considered philanthropy to be destructive to the donor and recipient because of its empowerment of the donor and the disempowerment of the recipient. But what really emerged during these exchanges was how Amir’s vision was purer and less co-opted than mine, or Steve’s, and once or twice, privately, Steve wondered aloud whether Amir would eventually refuse to compromise, ever, on anything. and this grated on both of us, who felt we were pushing things forward pragmatically, and Amir’s constant questioning could have a deleterious effect. I found myself torn between Amir’s purity of vision and no-prisoners mentality and a certain pragmatism, perhaps even cynicism which, like Steve, wanted to race ahead, maneuver for success, respond to the external world. It was also clear that Amir’s prophetic pronouncement and his ten page emails were beginning to irritate Steve. Things came to a head between them over the issue of Linda, a friend of Steve who he had (perhaps injudiciously) invited to join the team. Amir voiced strong objections which instantly galled Steve, partly because no one likes their actions or judgement criticized, and partly because he still felt proprietorial about the idea. Linda was very keen to join us, and was dynamic and intelligent, so after much heated debate she came up to meet us, to Amir’s great concern. During out meeting Amir interrogated her like a Human Resource director grilling an interviewee. Afterwards, when Linda had left the discussion disintegrated into a highly personal exchange. Steve paced up and down while Amir sat cross-legged on the futon, stock still as he began to perceive how angry Steve was at having his executive action called into question.
We were all learning how
organizations face their biggest challenges from the aggregation of people and
the subsequent clashes of personality. During the two or three weeks it took
preparing our proposal several other people became involved. This was always
from now on a tense subject and we tok pains to make no promises to anyone and
agreed we could not expand the core team until much later. We all knew in the
back of our minds that what we really needed was a rock-solid programmer who
could actually produce the software for the rounding-up mechanism. Steve found
someone in
By early January we had just about
finished the proposal and were almost ready to deliver it. I went to
It was not long before Steve got an email from the incubator. A woman named Sarah di Troia told him that she was very pleased to inform him that ClickUp had been selected to advance to the semifinals of the competition, and that the “answer from the community of social entrepreneurs was overwhelming both in the power and promise of your ideas.” Her email outlined the deal, should we choose to continue. Since we were not a for-profit organization, they would not take an equity stake, but would reserve two seats on the board. The sum of the award was described as $150K in cash and $100K in services provided by outside sponsors. They were “exploring legal and accounting ways for administering the cash award; it will not be deposited directly into the winning team’s accounts.” As a part of the incubator we would be expected to pay for services, at their (below market) rate. The incubator’s function was to increase our chance of success, and to this end we should exhibit a willingness to “evolve” our business concept.
Clearly they wanted a hands on approach to managing us. Amir gave off a few signs of discomfort. Steve and I were purely ecstatic, as even getting this far was beyond what we had hoped and extremely satisfying in itself. We had beaten 150 competitors from across the country. The excitement we felt about the idea was evidently mirrored elsewhere. Amir’s discomfort came from the suspicion that what we had might be bigger than the incubator, and he went as far as to almost outrageously suggest that we should consider going no further, on the basis of blowing our chance before we were mature as a concept or an organization. This was the kind of risk Amir relished, and in a perverse was it was quite balsy, we all admitted. But tt was nearly impossible for the rest of us to stop at this stage. Amir possessed a quasi-spiritual quality that allowed him to consider the ascetic alternative to continuing on into the jaws of the incubator, into Aladdin’s cave. From my perspective, this was our best, in fact our only opportunity for cash, and without cash we were nowhere. Not only that, but the incubator would provide us with know-how, technology, public relations, and space. Amir’s reservations were, consequently, brushed aside and he even seemed quite relieved, as if he was just stating a position in case we should latch on to it.
We were to have an interview with
the Incubator as the next step. If, on the basis of this and one further
proposal, we advanced to the finals there was to be a judging event, involving
nine judges from various walks of life, and three finalists. We would prepare a
Powerpoint presentation after which a winner would be announced immediately.
The date of the interview came around quickly. It was a bruisingly cold day in
late March. I took the day off work (things weren’t going too well there
anyway) we all sat around Steve’s apartment interviewing each other. Steve
paced up and down coming up with pithy catch phrases about the future of
Internet charity, memorizing statistics about child poverty and the prospects
for online giving. Amir sat cross-legged on the futon, grinning at Steve’s
energy and maintaining a calm in this storm of nerves. Finally we took the “T”
to
The incubator occupied a temporary
office in
Afterwards, in the elevator we gave each other high fives. “Jen sealed the deal,” Amir exclaimed, always keen to support Jen and sensitive to her alienation from the boys’ club. Jen had hit it off with the twenty-something Jesuit and they had chatted privately for a while after the interview. “We’re going to win!!” Steve exclaimed outside on the sidewalk, nodding his head meaningfully, and for that night it seemed as if we would. It seemed we would as we sat around a large table at Dali’s tapas bar later that evening, celebrating our successful interview. Several of our “supporters” came to drink with us, including Jeff, who had recently quit his job to sell baseball cards on Ebay, a profession which brought in more than he had been making as a junior marketing exec. Jeff had been busy critiquing our business plan, and his chief executive demeanor enabled us to pretend we were facing the real thing as he fired tough questions at us. Like all of us, though, he was searching, too; his business cards read IdeaHunt.com suggesting he wasn’t sure quite what he was looking for, but he was looking nonetheless. He spent most of the night explaining to us how ClickUp would work on Ebay, where they were about to institute a standardized payment process, into which the ClickUp checkbox could be inserted in order to capitalize on the one million transactions every day. The scale of it all, he kept repeating, the scale of it all! Tim also dropped by. He worked or some kind of Internet business and had been stopping by our meetings for a couple of weeks as he had a serious interest in charity, and was on the board of a local homeless shelter and several church committees. Tim had made a suggestion that we were toying with for further proposals. He claimed, rather grandiosely, that if ClickUp really became established it could be used as an argument against sales tax on the internet. Currently there wasn’t any tax on goods sold over the net, but this was bound to change as soon as the IRS found a way to implement it and as the internet matured. “If people clicked up instead, etailers could use ClickUp in their arguments against taxation, and this would be an added incentive to etailers to adopt you. The benefits would go straight to the needy and not be frittered away on bureaucracy.” We drank our Rioja, not able, in the glow of the evening to take in any more proposals for the time being.
Afterwards we went back to Steve’s apartment. He lived upstairs from Rudy and Jane, the landlords, but to get to the apartment you had to walk through their entrance hall that gave on to their living room and study. Usually when I went up I would have to walk past Rudy napping on his futon in the study. On this particular evening there were crowds of people milling around the house, many of them seated in the living room. As I walked through the door, I recognized the silvery head of a local radio celebrity who had once been a TV anchor. Lots of other people moved around the room talking in hushed tones, and there was a woman with short gray hair standing up addressing the other guests. A man in his mid forties leant over to me as I shouldered past to climb the stairs to Steve’s door: “Abduction party!” he whispered, grinning. I nodded knowingly, and continued slowly up the stairs, straining to hear what was being said. Clearly Rudy had made it back from Rangely lakes, but maybe he had picked up some devotees on the way.
The next day Steve got an email from Sarah of Troy. He called me at work: “Here’s the deal. They want you and me to go forward, and they want us to drop the kids. If we do this we can advance to the finals with two other teams.” I was stunned. This would gut us completely. “What do you mean, drop the kids?” I asked. “Well, Sarah feels that we have to let etailers choose what they want to ClickUp for.” This sounded dangerous. “They also want us to get some third party validation.”
“Third party what?”
“Validation. You know get some etailers to endorse our idea, to say, we’d do that, sure!”
I went back to the Amir and Jen issue, “You mean we can’t have them on the team?”
“Well, they don’t see how they’re
relevant, especially if we drop the kids, then why do we need Jen, and anyway
our team is too big for their budget. You and me they see as the salesmen and
the principal actors and I guess they didn’t understand Amir’s Mullah act,
partly because it spoke to the charity part again. In a sense,
The question of dropping Amir and Jen was much touchier. Clearly, if we asked them, they would say don’t sacrifice the kids, we’ll keep our plan in tact and go on without the Incubator. The dilemma for Me and Steve was whether to sacrifice the “whole” idea, and continue with what seemed like our best (or only) chance of success, albeit on a reduced scale, or refuse to compromise, forego the incubator altogether and hope for other funding down the road with fewer strings attached? That night we all met at Steve’s place and Steve repeated his conversation with Sarah of Troy, destroyer of charities, disperser of teams. This, I realized was the power of money; they had the power, just like a venture capitalist, just like the International Monetary Fund, to set policy, change business plans, to call shots. What was not clear, it turned out, was whether Sarah had meant that Amir and Jen were to be cut from the team permanently or just so as to advance to the final, then be replaced when things were up and running. Jen and Amir were silent, clearly processing what Steve was saying and dealing with their sense of rejection, and the idea that Steve and I could go on alone for the time being. They knew that their positions were seriously in jeopardy and this cast a strange and unpleasant aura over the gathering; until now we had worked with a communal sense of energy, each team member feeding off the next one’s enthusiasm. Something would change irrevocable if we agreed to their terms. After much heated and tense discussion we decided to continue; the incubator was our only chance so far of funding, and see if we could rebuild the team and re-instate our charitable goals when somewhat established. I was relieved. When Steve had called me earlier in the day, I knew there was no other option as far as I was concerned, and although part of me felt guilty over incubator’s demand, the other part was screaming, “I made it! I made it!”
A few days later Sarah summoned Me and Steve to her office to discuss the next step. We met her in her office, greeted, again by the gangly youth with silly putty eggs. Sarah wore her standard leather jacket with tighter pants this time and black boots. We dispensed swiftly with niceties and she proceeded to plaster the walls of the small office with what appeared to be garbage bags cut up so as to be sheets. They stuck to the walls with an inherent adhesive quality that I commented on, spurring her to a lengthy disquisition on the efficacy of these new space-saving and reusable memo-wall-patches. Innovation at its most beautiful. Steve kept on asking personal questions about how long she’d been out of business school, and what it was like working here. He was fascinated by her, mostly by her aura of capability and confidence, something you don’t often see in liberal arts academics. She wasn’t very interested in discussing this, though, and was more intent on telling us exactly what we had to do if we wanted to succeed in the competition.
“I hope there was no misunderstanding about Jen and Amir,” She started saying, “Jen was great, I really thought so, but I’m not sure that we really need a charity person. And Amir, I have to say I admire the human rights work he has been doing, but I guess we didn’t really see where he fit in. Now you two: well Steve, you’re a bingo, an absolute bingo.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a great salesman – I bet you could sell anything.”
“Oh, yeah! I love sales. In fact I sold my own mother once. Or was it twice…”
“And
She went on to explain to us how we should structure our next proposal, just a page or two, and some back-up information. I asked her what she had thought of the numerical projections we provides. She looked a little nonplussed, “Oh, yeah, they’re fine. But don’t worry about the numbers – we can put in whatever we like, the important this is to get up and running, just put in whatever looks good.”
Sarah was of the opinion that we should allow the etailers to choose their charities, which was why she thought we should drop the kids. “People will be looking for something of value in your idea – apart, of course from the obvious value to your constituents.” I nodded, as if in agreement, but there was something I really didn’t understand; “But this might only be a problem for the first few; after that we will have an established “brand” and people will want to be on board. I kind of feel that if we have no “mission” then we won’t have any credibility. Isn’t this about social value, anyway? It is in the final analysis, a charity, aiming to exploit the success of business and channel some funds to needy areas.” I felt the mission welling up in me; I remembered Macy’s stories and the families written about by the Maria Wright Edelman, and how, if thery were here, they’d be pounding on the table, saying, “No! Goddammit! We don’t give a fuck about how the etailers want to look better by channeling the funds to their customers’ pet charities: This is our mission, it happens to be about the most urgent one on the planet, and it is non-negotiable.
Sarah looked at me softly and thoughtfully. “Yes, I see what you’re saying, but trust me on this one, no etailer will let you on the site, onto the last – sacred – page of the site, in their underwear, if you will, unless you are there expressly on their terms.”
We agreed, finally, that the etailers were the kings, what they wanted must stand, and if we didn’t let them ClickUp for whatever the hell they wanted to click up for, then they wouldn’t be any clicking up going on. Period. Of course she was right. Steve and I sat there staring at the sticky memo garbage bags, like chastened third graders, nodding our heads. When she terminated our interview with further instructions to go forth and get third party validations, and prepare for the final “judging event” with a twenty minute Powerpoint presentation, we felt a sharpening sense of unease, and remembered Amir’s warnings prophetic warnings about staying in control of the idea until we were strong, in a position of power in case we were consumed by the forces “out there.”
Amir and Sarah were poles apart
characterologically speaking. But after our interview and before Steve told us
what the verdict was, Amir had declared his love for Sarah, which was unusual
for someone who did not have an overridingly amorous interest in women. It was
also strange given their apparently dichoRudyous characters. Amir embodied the
non-profit ethic; someone who in college had always been concerned about
progressive causes, felt deeply for the world’s huddled masses, wore
multi-colored “ethnic” jackets manufactured by small craftsmen in
It was true; we had put up no fight whatsoever to keep Jen and Amir, or for that matter to retain our core mission: the Kids. So keen were we to blast ahead, at Internet speed, with Internet flexibility, with the Internet ability to “evolve” our business model, that we leapt off a precipice and began flailing in thin air, with no solid footing underground. But working with all four of us had become so hard: Amir’s tendency to pontificate and his ten page emails grated on me and Steve; his excessive attention to detail clashed with our natural inclination for speed and agility which, we were beginning to feel, was a commodity the Incubator wanted, and for the moment we were willing to lay down almost anything on the altar of the Incubator, the God of the Moment. No, the thought of more meetings with endless discussions and endless tension between Amir’s caution and Steve’s forward drive was unappealing. But on the other hand we dimly perceived how Sarah was taking us like the silly putty inside those incubator plastic eggs and molding us in a different image.
We agreed that Steve would give the actual presentation since I would have to be at work on the day of the final “judging event,” and would therefore have no time to practice it. My role would be to take on the questions afterwards for 15 minutes. The plan was for all three teams to assemble in the Incubator’s new high-tech space, be given a tour of the premises and then in front of an audience of incubator employees, hangers-on and associates, team members and their invitees, and one or two members of the press, we would present. There would be nine judges in the front row - celebrities from the world of venture capital, journalism, non-profit and high-tech industries. They would hear out the presentations, ask their questions and then, over dinner, decide the winner.
III.
The new offices of the incubator
occupied the entire fourteenth floor of a seemingly dingy sixteen-story
building overlooking the
On the sixteenth floor we
encountered a space ship. Where the rest of the building had been recognizably
Seventies, the Incubator’s offices had been re-made in the image of Star Trek.
Sheet metal and steel girders gave way to translucent walls of blue corrugated
plastic. There were few recognizable offices, but desks scattered haphazardly
about. From the windows we could see the
They had about three incubatees at
present in the facility. Each of them occupied an office they referred to as
“bays.” Each company could name their own bay, so they had the “
The tour concluded at the presentation space, a medium sized room with a raised dais at one end and seating for about eighty people. At the other end was their kitchen; this was fitted with a stainless steel restaurant quality stove top, two giant refrigerators and a massive chimney system which had to be specially built-in to the building. They had the fridges permanently stocked with beer, fruit, vegetables and hamburgers. Next to the kitchen, with its huge marble-topped preparation counter was the nap room; “people work around the clock here,” said the CEO, “Occasionally they need a rest, and who wants to go home?” Next to the nap room was a shower and changing room. “If business isn’t so good, we could all move in here and save on the rent, “the CEO quipped dryly.
There were two other teams who we were finally to meet. One of them consisted of two sisters of Filipino origin in their mid twenties with the name Geronimo. Looking at them we knew that these women would be trouble. Their minority status on two counts alone would benefit them even before they opened their mouths. When they did make sounds, it was clear that they were very articulate, and more threateningly, they were full of youthful, non-profit minded energy and commitment. In contrast to this dynamic duo, Steve and I felt like two cynical old tricksters out to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. The other team consisted of a smart young lawyer with a strong southern accent, and a tall very thin scarecrow of about the same age with holes in his jeans and two or three days growth of stubble.
We had little time to get to know our competitors, as the room was quickly filling with Incubator employees, friends and family of the teams and a few members of the local press, no doubt bribed into turning up at the event. The front row was reserved for our distinguished judges. Rudy, Steve’s alien-hunting landlord was already seated, looking around the presentation space and scratching his beard, perhaps imagining this was indeed the space ship he had been hunting. We had run a test presentation by Rudy the previous evening and his response had been positive. He was active in philanthropy and liked our application of new technology to old problems. Finally the judges filed in, all nine of them. They included a women who had been a member of Bill Clinton’s economic advisory board, the founder of the Lotus Corporation, a senior executive for Fleet, and a couple of high level non-profit consultants, and finally, the moderator for the questions was the co-founder of New Profit itself, who had clearly been closely involved in the whole competition.
The room fell silent as the CEO wandered loosely up to the podium. There was a laptop on a raised table onto which our Powerpoint files had been loaded. We had had a few minutes to familiarize ourselves with it before our presentations. The CEO explained how all the companies in the incubator were involved in one way or another in the betterment of society. The competition was about setting up a new one with a non-for-profit perspective. He then said that they had chosen three finalists who it would be equally happy to work with, should the judges choose them. As for the runners-up, he claimed that they, too, would have access to many people and organizations that had been observing the competition and had shown interest in the teams. This sounded like good news: perhaps there would be life after the competition even if we didn’t win.
After his opening remarks the CEO
invited the Geronimo sisters onstage. They, clearly nervous, began their sister
act, going back and forth between each other with lots of smiles and laughs
punctuating their talk. They had used their
We were next. After the introduction, given by Sarah of Troy, dressed this time in a long black dress, which seemed uncharacteristically formal, we walked up to the podium. I turned my attention to the laptop, but as soon as Steve reached the floor, he began his talk, which we had been carefully rehearsed so as to be synchronized with the slides. A few grunts from Amir and Nancy in the audience had Steve reigned in and we started again after I had opened up our presentation. Although this did not look good, as soon as we were into the presentation everything went smoothly and we clicked through the slides with Steve giving his best performance to date, swinging his arms about, pausing for reflection, inserting humorous asides. And soon it was over, we had reached the last slide, and the floor was open to the judges. The questions, remarkably, mirrored many of the ones thrown at the Geronimo sisters, and luckily I didn’t find anything that really stumped us. They asked us nothing about the technical feasibility of our plan that I assumed meant that the incubator had signed off on this before hand, and they were more interested in how we would persuade Etailers to go along with us. I threw out statistics I had remembered, all the statistics John had been so dubious about, those reported by Forrester and Jupiter about on-line nose pickers, and I referenced several online philanthropic operations which suggested a consumer interest in this field and a likelihood that online shoppers would, in fact, click up.
We sat down again and waited while the smart southern lawyer took the floor. He heckled, cajoled, amused and ran around the stage as if he had been born on it, but in the end, we thought, came across as a little opportunist. The idea was interesting but contained one or more fatal flaws. He intended to build a site that allowed kids to play math-related games which would take real-life cases and extrapolate math scenarios from them. Only boys, it seemed would be interested in this, and if more than fifty percent of the judges were women, then they’d be in trouble.
The event wrapped up with the CEO taking the floor again, commenting on the quality of the presentations and thanking all the organizers. Steve and I were asked to step aside to give a quick interview to their camera team, which, we found out, was producing a segment on the competition for the local news networks. Clearly, the incubator was milling the competition for all the PR they could get. In fact the whole competition was clearly an exercise in publicity, enabling the incubator to establish itself more firmly in the sandy soil of internet start-ups. Steve and I, still on somewhat of a high from the presentation, and enormously relived that it was over, but also still craving a little more intensity and spotlight, stood in the glare of the arc lights and talked stupidly about how much coffee we had been drinking and what we wanted etailers to do, who was going to benefit from all of this money. We had both found it difficult, once the “kids” had been taken out of the picture, and out of our name, to talk with much enthusiasm about the big picture. Drive in this endeavor came usually from a commitment to the mission, and if we didn’t know who we were helping until the etailers told us, then weren’t we little more than mercenaries? Ironically the incubator had made a big thing initially about teams explaining the problem they hoped to solve, and helping a social cause, but two of its finalists which they themselves had molded, were little more than fundraisers with no direct cause attached to them. This, we realized afterwards, might put the southern lawyer and his scarecrow partner in the running after all.
We were expecting to hear later that evening, after the judges had dined on the experience. But no word came. The tension had been building for weeks, and it seemed like our futures waited on this decision. I had been preparing to make a speedy and long overdue exit from my day job, and Steve was preparing to similarly re-arrange his life, and possibly put his dissertation in a bottom draw of his desk. The next morning Sarah called us and explained that the judges had been unable to come to a decision and wanted to postpone it for “a while.” I was stunned, and a little angry. The judges had come from different parts of the country and getting them together again was unlikely. Therefore the decision would have to be made long distance, on conference calls and email, all more difficult and time consuming. There was nothing to do but wait. The days turned into a week, and then almost two. One day, when, having let go of the whole experience enough to focus for the time being on my job, I was making the same marketing calls with my boss skulking around behind me listening in. I was busy trying to persuade Newsweek to let us translate them into Arabic when Steve called. For the last few days I had been very jumpy each time he called, this time he cut straight to the chase: “It’s the Geronimo sisters.”
I had an image in my mind of falling glass, kinetic energy giving way to gravity, limpness. I briefly flirted with the idea of going postal, but in the end I didn’t have the energy. I found it impossible for a good few days, to stop myself thinking, Why? How? And I had that kind of pain you experience when you simply wish that something had turned out differently, that whatever kinds of gods were up there had rolled the dice in a different way, and how easy it would have been for them to do that. This was fate, pure and unadorned: for a variety of reasons we could never know they had not chosen us. Maybe I wore the wrong clothes that day; maybe a reference I gave them told them I was a slacker; maybe they just liked internet sponsorship ideas better. We commiserated for a while, and did nothing on the work front. We all felt tepid about re-invigorating the plan and hitting the road again looking for support, money, luck. We made jokes about how when Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com, our first golden hope, had said, “I’m interested,” he had just been asked by his wife whether he wanted a ham sandwich, and it was her he had been talking to.
There was still the incubator’s launch party to look forward to, however. And even if we were not the winners to be announced at the event, we would still go and have a good time. It turned out to be a classy event - the debut of a new business in a new economy, announcing in the midst of its natal celebration, the arrival of an innovative non-profit organization. The party, as expected, turned out to be a continuation of Incubator’s public relations hype, which was good news for partygoers. All the bays were decked out with balloons, loaded up with barges of Sushi, Mexican, Chinese and most nationalities’ food. We stopped into one bay in which a geeky couple of white recent ivy-league grads were demonstrating their website. It was one of those obscure marketing sites which offered to do A, B and C for you if you did X, Y and Z for them. These kinds of business plans always seemed too much effort for too little reward, and the premises seemed as laborious and unlikely as a Peter Greenaway movie. What really seemed symptomatic of these strange days was that the ruddy-faced boy standing next to me during the demonstration turned out, upon interrogation, to be the Chief Technical Officer for this concern, and he cannot have been over eighteen.
Outside the bay was a martini bar that was sculpted entirely of ice down which the vodka or gin was poured into awaiting glasses. As the evening wore on and hundreds of Martinis were poured, the rivulet in this mass of ice that must have weighed three hundred pounds grew deeper and deeper, and the uniformed barmen who did the pouring became increasingly loose-wristed with the liquor. Wandering around the darkened passageways of USS incubator I periodically encountered Amir with a differently colored glass of Martini in his hand. With the use of various flavored and multicolored additions they produced every conceivable variation on a traditional Martini, and had lines along the corridor waiting to refill. All around the incubator tables groaning with food awaited the passers-by, stopping them in their tracks for refreshment. Uniformed waiters wafted in-between people proffering canapés and elegant champagne flutes. The space was packed with people of all ages and a wide variety of professions; journalists here to cover another launch party; friends and family of the incubator staff and their member companies’ lawyers, accountants, techies and hanger-on. As Steve and I were wandering from Bay to Bay we encountered the CEO wearing for the first time, a conservative suit. He stopped and looked at us quizzically and started wagging his finger: “I know you guys, where did we meet?”
At about
After the party the momentum for ClickUp petered out. We realized that the factor which probably signaled the death knell for us, was the crash of the NASDAQ composite index in the few days before the judges made their decision. In that week in April the tech market fell apart, John’s bubble burst, and his Cassandra predictions had come to be reality: there was only room in cyberspace for a small number of dotcoms, and the shakeout had arrived. What the future was to look like was anybody’s guess, but smart money was not finding itself attracted to dotcom startups, especially not etailers. Amazon.com, the mother of all etailers, was still not profitable and its great beneficent angel, the Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodgett, was beginning to backpedal on his famously upbeat valuations. Even if Bezos’ incurable optimism was well-founded, investors did not have the patience any more to stick around and see if he was right. Our attempts to get etailers interested after the incubator competition unanimously revealed that they were all fighting for their very survival and were not about to spend extra time and money on a philanthropic side-show unless it gave them than necessary edge over their competitors.
Amir went back to the Blue Foundation, having told Sarah of Troy matter-of-factly that he loved her at the party (That’s nice, she said, but I’m married). Steve dusted off his dissertation, and opened up his mind to sideline profitable activities, Jen continued as the receptionist at Lesley, bereft of Drawbridge and applied for the program in Expressive Therapy, and I made a few calls to charities to see if the spark had really gone out, to see whether any of the enthusiasm over the last few months could be parlayed into something, and then quit my job realizing that after coming so close to an engaging endeavor, I wasn’t going to continue something so unsatisfying. We had been baptised by the experience, divested of our innocence, chastened and taught a lesson. The real winners were people like Macy who had shown by their presence and their commitment that there was a difference between charity and business that few people could cross because in the end it came down not to substance but aesthetics. We would have preferred at all costs to be associated with the Incubator, and not he Church, and as far as the incubator was concerned, we had strutted and fretted our hour upon that stage, and now, walking shadows yet, were looking at tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.