The Weed Agency (18 page)
Authors: Jim Geraghty
Raj, two years older and from Edison, New Jersey, was another bright mind determined to escape the boring suburbs.
“Look, nobody on the East Coast appreciates people who build things,” Raj said as the traffic eked along. “Deep down, you’re a builder. An engineer. You build Web sites and systems and networks instead of bricks and mortar, but the basics are the same. Nobody goes to the Ivy League for an engineering degree. It’s seen as manual labor.”
She laughed. “Glad to see all this dot-com money hasn’t eroded that chip on your shoulder,” she said.
“Out here, lawyers, bankers, politicians—they’re all secondclass,”
he continued. “Nobody here cares much about movie stars or athletes. This is where the nerds get to be in charge and we’re the kings of the hill.”
“Funny, I used to think of Washington the same way,” Ava replied. She tried to remember when she stopped liking D.C.
“Two kinds of kings rule our kingdom,” Raj said. “One is the inventor—the one who actually comes up with the idea and makes it happen. The other kind is the venture capitalist. Anybody who can’t develop Web-based cold fusion in his garage wants to be the guy who discovered and financed the genius who developed Web-based cold fusion in his garage. It’s the star player and manager or coach. Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson.”
The traffic moved agonizingly slowly. Pretty heavy for mid-morning, thought Ava, frowning.
“Today, when we finally get through this traffic, you’re going to meet the next Phil Jackson of Silicon Valley.”
Ava checked in to her hotel in Palo Alto, showered, changed into what she thought were good interview clothes, and Raj drove her to GlobeScape’s campus, just a bit off Sand Hill Drive in Menlo Park, at that moment the most expensive patch of commercial real estate in North America.
“Our founder, Len Silver, inherited some wealth from his grandparents’ tire company,” Raj said.
“Lenny,” she chuckled, noticing he looked surprisingly like an old hippie in the company’s portrait in the brochure and on the Web site.
“He legally changed it to Lennon in 1980,” Raj corrected her. “Invested the wealth he inherited in a few startups, also got in on Apple and Netscape early. I’ve seen a lot of executives who
have brains, but no vision. Well, Lennon Silver has vision by the bucketful.”
WIRED PROFILE
When you walk into the Palo Alto offices of GlobeScape.com, the first thing you notice are the giant portraits of world leaders in the hallway leading to the office suite of CEO
Lennon Silver
. They’re originals, copying Andy Warhol’s Day-Glo-style portraits of Marilyn Monroe: John Kennedy, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Evita Peron. At the end of the hallway is a specially commissioned portrait of Lennon Silver, in the same bold red, green, pink, and blue.
The implicit comparison is a big boast, and Silver is a man determined to back it up.
“I’m not a man who plays it safe,” Lennon says in an interview. “I’m different from a lot of other people because I really care about things. I really mean that.”
In past years, California investors derided Lennon Silver as one of the higher-risk venture capitalists playing in the silicon sandbox. He racked up some legendary wins—getting in on Apple and Netscape early—and some spectacular failures, including ill-fated efforts to sell produce, jewelry, and coffee beans over the Internet.
Now GlobeScape is Silver’s latest thriving baby, and the venture capitalists are swarming. And he’s particularly excited about his company’s newest project, EasyFed.com. Like many of Silver’s ideas, a personal moment of frustration provided the spark of inspiration.
“Some House Budget Subcommittee was talking about increasing the tax rate on carried interest—an absolute war crime of a policy idea—and I had no idea
how to get in touch with them,” Silver recalls. He found his calls to the IRS, the Joint Tax Committee, and the Securities and Exchange Commission only generated what he called “stunningly unhelpful” responses, and so ending that frustration, on a global scale, became his all-consuming vision.
Enter EasyFed.com, where the average John Q. Public can log on, search for the government service or interaction they require, enter some data and use some dropdown menus, and voilà!—the frustration of taking on City Hall is gone in a puff of electrons.
Silver and his team are betting there’s a mint to be made in handling inquiries to the U.S. Mint, but he’s playing his cards close to the vest about how EasyFed.com will operate beyond its currently undisclosed—but reportedly quite considerable—sum of venture capital.
Asked to detail EasyFed’s revenue model, he demurs. “To truly find something, first you have to lose yourself,” he says with a cryptic smile. “Because the Internet is just beginning to reveal its potential.”
Ava’s first hour on the small GlobeScape campus was a succession of handshakes. Ava kept waiting for some sort of formal interview process, but mostly this was meetings and greetings.
She met plenty of folks whose body language and office location
seemed
important—their titles were “director of inspiration” and “director of innovation,” nothing as mundane as a “chief financial officer”—but their questions about her work at the agency seemed perfunctory. Either all that these guys needed to hear was Raj’s endorsement, or they simply had faith that she would take to the environment like a fish to water.
The computers on every desk were sleek and astonishingly fast. She knew the equipment back at the agency was dated, but now she felt embarrassed by how clunky and slow her usual tools were.
“The best computers, servers, software, and everything else we could need,” Raj beamed.
“This is …” She groped for the right word. “
Utopian
.”
“The culture here demands a lot from people, so we need to make sure people have everything they need to do their best work,” Raj said.
“That notion is absolutely alien to the federal government,” Ava sighed.
Raj chuckled. “It makes a late night—or lots of late nights—a lot easier to deal with when you’re enjoying what you’re doing. Nobody really worries much about the time clock because what do we love to do? Think, and imagine, and figure stuff out. So we do that for work for a while and then we do that for fun for a while and a lot of the time one blends into another.”
Work-life balance problem: solved!
thought Ava.
Eliminate the distinction entirely!
Finally, she was brought to the office suite for Silver. His secretary indicated he would be ready in a few moments. The television was muted on CNBC; later that year GlobeScape was scheduled to have its initial public offering, trading on the NASDAQ under the stock symbol “GlobS.”
At last, the secretary looked up and said, “He’s ready for you. If he’s not at his desk, look in his meditation garden.”
Ava stepped through the doorway, and found a gorgeous office suite with three enormous flat-screen Sony Trinitron televisions, tuned in to CNBC, CNN, and a soap opera; the sound
was down on all three. A computer so advanced Ava had never seen it before sat on his desk; a computer she thought had just arrived on the market was half-disassembled in the corner, apparently being put back into its boxes for use elsewhere.
The rear wall’s floor-to-ceiling office windows slid open into a large, elaborate, walled garden that stretched around the corner of the building. Ava peered outside, and her eyes readjusted to the bright afternoon sunlight, spying a Buddha statue sitting in a shady corner. Not far away a small fountain bubbled, and orange-and-white carp swam in the waters of a small manmade pond. Over in the farthest corner, on a small wooden platform, the founder sat, meditating.
Lennon Silver was tall, balding, and had a neatly trimmed, graying beard. The remaining hair in the back was tied in a small braid with some sort of shiny metal clip holding it together. He was clad in a polo shirt and khakis, and a pair of glasses lay folded beside him.
“Ava Summers …” Silver called out in the garden.
Ava stepped out, a bit bewildered but enjoying the ride. She waited for Silver to speak, but he sat, eyes closed, seemingly deep in meditative peace. She wondered if she was supposed to say something, or whether she would be interrupting.
But he did call me out here
, she thought.
“This is a breathtaking garden,” she said.
His eyes opened, and he focused his gaze on her.
“What do you want out of life, Ava?” Silver asked.
It was the strangest interview question she had ever heard, but a pretty good one, she realized. She went with her gut answer.
“To change the world,” she answered, a bit ashamed at how far she remained from achieving that lofty goal.
“That’s good,” he said, his visage breaking into a smile as he rose to his bare feet. “That’s my goal, too.”
He put on his glasses, strode toward her, extended a hand, and as she took it he kissed her on both cheeks—nothing sexual or aggressive, just a bit more forward than she expected.
“Money doesn’t motivate me,” he said, unprompted.
“Few rich men
are
motivated by it,” Ava said. “Because they’ve already got it.”
Her answer seemed to surprise him, and for a moment he just looked at her, assessing her.
“Walk with me.” He strode down the path, and Ava saw the garden was much larger than she thought, curling around the building’s corner, vine-covered walls artfully hidden by trees and sculptures.
“We don’t build computers anymore. We figure out new things that computers can do,” he explained. “I hear you’re working small miracles over in the Beltway, using a Commodore 64 and some string.”
“Small miracles are all I can make with what I’ve got back there,” she shrugged, relieved that somebody seemed to know her work, as everyone else at the company seemed to regard her background, education, and experience with blithe indifference. “Walking through your offices, this place looks like Starfleet. Or maybe I’m Alice in Wonderland.”
“Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Silver said with some pride.
24
“I like to think that what we do here, utilizing computers and the Internet in new ways, is really … a revolution. I need revolutionaries.”
She nodded, smelling some nectarine trees, and realizing that the only things she smelled on the way to the Department of Agriculture most days were car exhaust and the Beltway region’s insufferable pollen. “I’ve been on the establishment side
of things for a little too long, I think,” she said. “I’m ready to kick-start some revolutions.”
“So, you’re familiar with Veblen and Romer?”
Ava shook her head. “Was I supposed to meet them before this?”
“Thorstein Veblen was an economist in the late 1800s who predicted engineers would someday run the economy, because the economy moved on technology, and they were the only ones who understood it,” Silver said, not looking at her. “He was right, as we all know. The other key visionary economist who shaped me—he’s still around—is Paul Romer. He says the economy is like a kitchen. Lots of people can cook, but only a few can take familiar ingredients and create something really new and incredible. Those dishes are wealth. Any society that wants to grow richer will encourage this, and these people are almost entirely nonconformists. Like me and everyone else here.”
God, no wonder I can’t stand working for the government!
thought Ava.
Silver’s thoughts seemed to jump around in a way that amused Ava. “They call me founder, they call me CEO, but I really prefer the term ‘chief vision officer.’ I’m really a force of change—and that’s what I’m looking for in the staff around me—not beneath me, but around me. We’re a team. A network. Interconnected, not hierarchical.”
In her gut, Ava knew she was sold.