The Big Exit (21 page)

“I want numbers. I want to know where you’re at, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. And who the players are.”

“I can only tell you what’s public already.”

“You need to do a little better than that. Even if it’s off the record.”

Gattner lets out a little laugh. He knows Bender well enough to know he has a way of accidentally confusing “off” with “on.”

“Have a little fucking respect,” he says. “Just a smidgen. Would you?”

“Play a little ball and I will. I’m not going to fuck you, Don.”

“I’m going to tape the conversation. If you make anything up, I’m going to post the recording.”

“I don’t make shit up unless it’s true. That’s the truth.”

Gattner shakes his head, clearly questioning his judgment. He weighs his options one more time, then tries to set the terms.

“Okay, you can come back,” he says. “But he stays here.”

“You sure you want to do that, Don?” Richie counters, inspired. “Leave an accused killer out here with your lovely traumatized
receptionist? You may end up with a lawsuit yourself.”

Gattner looks at the receptionist, who now truly does seem traumatized. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s go.”

The office is just an open room or “pen” with cubicles in the middle and some small offices around the perimeter that have
glass fronts with shades you can draw for privacy. The place doesn’t look much different from the outfits where Richie worked
a decade ago. The décor, the minimal amount of it anyway, is right out of the Grind School of office design, exuding a creative,
merry-band-of-misfits vibe that doesn’t quite ring true. A small electric car is parked toward the front along with an electric
scooter propped up against the side of a cubicle. On the floor, he notices a Nerf football, a Frisbee, and a cardboard box
with a remote-control helicopter sitting on top of it in the middle of a homemade bull’s-eye that marks its landing pad. It’s
fucking FAO Schwarz, the Lite version.

He suspects there’s a small break room somewhere with Ping-Pong and foosball tables and perhaps a large flat-panel TV with
a game console connected to it. Knowing McGregor, they probably also
have access to some sort of outdoor space for “unwinding.” The guy could be a slave driver but he’d also been a big believer
in throwing impromptu celebrations for irrelevant successes. Richie remembered him walking out into the middle of the office
on more than a few occasions and gustily proclaiming, “Are we having fun yet?” Plenty of people loved him but just as many
came to the conclusion that he was a raging asshole.

Gattner is an equally polarizing character, but for different reasons. Where McGregor’s charm was in his alpha-male bluster
and directness, Gattner’s good-intentioned straightforwardness is tinged with a touch too much weasel, like a diet soda with
a questionable aftertaste.

Needless to say the guy is cagey. He says he met with detectives on Sunday and that they seized McGregor’s work computer and
some other items in the office. They questioned him for over an hour, asked the things you’d expect them to ask: Had McGregor
expressed any concern that someone might want to do harm to him? Did he have any trouble with any particular individuals?
When did he leave the office? And finally, did he mention having had any contact with Richie Forman?

At least from what he’s telling them now, Gattner didn’t seem to offer up any terribly revealing leads. He says that McGregor
told him that someone claimed to have evidence that he was driving the car the night of the accident all those years ago and
was now trying to blackmail him. While McGregor suspected Richie might have something to do with it, he wasn’t sure.

“He told me that he was going to get to the bottom of it even if the police didn’t,” he tells Bender. “He was determined to
figure out who was behind it. That’s what I told the police.”

Richie’s sitting next to Bender, across the desk from Gattner, but he feels ignored, excluded. Gattner addresses only Bender,
making it a point to pretend that Richie isn’t in the room. Which is why he’s surprised when all of sudden Gattner turns to
him and says, “I’m going to take a SWAG and assume the cops asked you about blackmailing him.”

Richie: “SWAG?”

“Scientific wild-ass guess.”

“When did he hire the Tongans?”

Gattner’s eyes blink, not once, but twice, then a third time. The question’s clearly caught him off guard, but he decides
to feign ignorance anyway.

“Who?”

“Come on, man. You fucking know damn well who.”

“I’m not going to talk about them. There is an ongoing police investigation.”

Richie leans forward in his seat and in a low, conspiratorial voice, says: “I heard they worked for the company. They were
on the payroll.”

Gattner’s eyes shift to Bender, then back to him, then back to Bender.

“Where’d you get that photo of them you posted on your site, Tom?” Gattner asks. “Did Beth give that to you?”

“McGregor’s wife?” Bender replies. “Why would she give it to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, something made you think she’d give it to me, what was it?”

Gattner suddenly takes on the look of someone who’s cornered. He realizes he’s dug himself a little hole and it’s not going
to be easy to get out.

He shrugs, offering up a second “I don’t know.”

“Try again, Don,” Bender says. “I know when someone’s full of shit because I’m so full of shit.”

Gattner falls silent. After a moment, he says, “They were interns. They did a little office work. Errands and stuff mostly.
But McGregor was also using them for security. I didn’t ask what they were doing but I know Mark was paranoid, clearly for
good reason. And I know he was concerned with what Beth was up to. He didn’t trust her. I can’t say it any more simply than
that. After hours, I think he paid them out of his own pocket. My impression was he was paying them extra because I can tell
you they weren’t making much here. I cut the checks.”

“But why would you think Beth gave me the photo?” Bender asks.

“Because she knew they were following her. After that photo ran on your site, one of the guys—one of the Tongans—called me
and
said he was sure Beth had given it to you. He said he always knew she was a conniving little bitch. She was setting them up.”

Richie: “That you calling her a conniving little bitch or them, Don? ’Cause the way you said it methinks it was more you than
them.”

“No, it wasn’t me. Those were his words.”

“Beth didn’t think too highly of you, you know that, don’t you?”

“News to me. We got along fine.”

“She said you were unhappy with how much stock Mark had given you,” Richie goes on. “She said you’d didn’t think it was fair
given how much work you were doing and how instrumental you were to the company.”

“Did she? When did she tell you that?”

“Recently.”

“Just before you killed Mark?”

Richie gives him a hard look that Gattner returns with his own don’t-fuck-with-me stare. They lock eyes for a moment, then
Gattner says, “We might as well get specific here while you’re insulting me. I know where you were that day. I know you were
with her. How did she convince you to do it? Tell you she still loved you?” He starts laughing. “Is that what she did, you
dumbfuck?”

Richie sees himself stand up and grab Gattner by the collar and violently yank him over the desk and slam him to the floor.
But before he can actually do it, Bender says:

“How much of the company do you have, Don?”

Gattner looks over at him, a little surprised by Bender’s flat, unemotional tone.

“What?”

“You heard me. What’s your piece of the pie?”

“Around five percent or so.”

“So, what are we talking about, a thirty, thirty-five million dollar valuation. I think that’s what I heard.”

“Something like that.”

“And you haven’t made a dime.”

“Course not. But we’ve got plenty of strategic partnerships lined up. We’ve been signing up vendors for the last three months.
We’ve got over a thousand on board so far. We’ll have over twice that at launch.”

He then gives them a brief history of their financing. Gattner says McGregor put up the better part of a million in seed money
and had then gone out and raised close to twelve million. They hadn’t expected to raise that much. They were looking for more
like half that. But the mobile market was so hot and this Australian investor, Grant Cahill, came along and didn’t blink twice
at the valuation they insisted on.

“We talked to a few of the big VCs and the truth is we could have gotten them to invest based on Mark’s track record. But
they were going to drive a much harder bargain and Mark didn’t want them up his ass all the time. You know how it is.”

Richie knows that one of the big benefits to having a Sequoia, KPCB, or Andreessen Horowitz on board is that it’s easier to
hire engineers and programmers. They figure that, with one of the heavies behind you, the odds are greater for an exit event,
which is ultimately what all these guys are after. But the heavies also keep very careful watch over their investments. They
dole out payments in smaller chunks and do rigorous due diligence every step of the way.

“Truthfully, Mark’s strategy was to get a foreign investor all along. He dabbled with the Russians and Chinese, but was happy
as hell this Aussie Cahill came along. The guy was like eight thousand miles away and he spoke fluent English. He’d made a
fortune in minerals but wanted to broaden himself into high tech. Mark knew he’d be much easier to deal with.”

Gattner says everything was going well until they discovered that another start-up was basically on their way to doing the
exact same thing they were doing—except their way seemed better and they seemed about six months ahead.

“Mark kind of panicked,” Gattner says. “These guys—it was only two of them—were in stealth mode and somehow Cahill got wind
of it. Mark tried to convince him that it would be okay, but then we just ended up buying the company. It was the easiest
thing to do.”

“How much did you pay?”

“We didn’t disclose that,” Gattner says.

“Ballpark?”

“Let’s just say it ate up a nice chunk of the initial investment.”

“So how much do you have left?”

“Enough. Mr. Cahill put up some additional money recently and
he has no intention of letting this thing go down the drain, especially with us so close to launch. He called to tell me that
yesterday in fact. If you want to speak with him, I’ll give you his number. He’s got deep pockets.”

Bender isn’t impressed. He says they all say they have deep pockets until they have to reach inside them.

“Shit, they could have pockets to their goddamn ankles, but what good is that when they suddenly develop stubby thalidomide
arms.”

“I sent you a code for our private beta,” Gattner says. “We’ve got twenty-five thousand people using the service. I don’t
suppose you checked it out.”

“It was on my plate and then it slipped off.”

“Well, maybe you should check it out before you dismiss it.”

“Frankly, I didn’t see the there there. It seemed derivative, another Groupon/Living Social clone.”

“It’s far more sophisticated than that. These are real-time deals in real space. This is the grail.”

“You say grail, I say fail.”

“Well, if that’s your fucking attitude, I don’t think we have anything else to talk about.”

“Come on, don’t take it personally. What the fuck do I know? I’m only batting nine twenty and was the Tech Blogger of the
Year five of the last seven years. But who’s counting?”

Gattner shakes his head. “You know what your problem is? You’re so morally and emotionally bankrupt that your sole goal in
life is to bring everybody down to your level.”

“I can’t totally disagree with you, so I won’t. But here’s my question. The company McGregor picked up, who were the guys?
Who were the coders? I assume that’s why he paid what he did for the company.”

“For competitive reasons, I can’t disclose that.”

“I’m going to find out.”

“Go ahead.”

“Are they still at the company?”

“I’m not going to disclose that. I’m honestly not sure what I should and shouldn’t be saying, so I really have to talk to
someone before I overstep myself.”

“Tell me this then: how hands-on was McGregor? You can answer that, right? He doesn’t do any coding himself anymore, does
he?”

“Nah. Not that it’s beneath him or anything. I mean, I’d see him talking to some of the guys about certain bugs—we had a couple
of marathon bug-bash sessions recently. But at this point, we were mainly tweaking the interface and talking about features
we wanted to add in the next version. He’d draw up wireframes and give it to the programmers and tell them what he wanted.
The engine was done. We were just refining it. We were planning a one point five version for next year that was more robust.”

Bender: “Who’s is in charge now?”

Gattner flashes a smile. “For the moment, me. But it depends on what the will says, right? Mark had the controlling interest.”

“Did he leave it to his wife?”

“I’m not in a position to comment on that. I think we should know soon enough, though.” He pauses for a moment and when Bender
doesn’t say anything right away, he says: “Is that it? Are we done here? Because I think I’ve been pretty damn accommodating
if you ask me. We’ve got nothing to hide. As hard as it will be, the company can survive this.”

Bender nods, then gets up and extends a hand, suddenly and remarkably kicking into affable Tom mode. “I owe you one,” he says,
and promises to cover the app when it officially launches, please give him an early heads-up.

Gattner sees them back to the reception area and begins to say his farewells when Bender mumbles something about his protein
smoothie running through him and that he needs to take a leak. Is there a bathroom he can use?

Gattner points him back toward the offices. “All the way down to the left,” he says. “There’s a little hallway. First door.”

Richie realizes that this is the you’ll-know-when moment Bender was referring to back in the car.