“Are you all right with this? Tell me if you’re not. We don’t want to put in time on something that the parties aren’t happy with.”
I nodded. The chance to get rid of Rubin seemed so sweet that I said, “Yes, I’m sure I can work with it.”
“Then,” he said, raising his glass, “to a deal.”
“To a deal,” his wife said.
Rubin wanted this deal. Making ten times his money no longer mattered to him now. I could hear it in the background, I picked it up in every break of his voice—Jesse and his father deriding his business acumen, his smarts, his guts.
He was desperate to get out.
I do not honestly know if it might not have been, in some part, just to torture him that I became Hamlet-like all of a sudden. To be, or not to be a businessman.
I said to Rubin, “I don’t know if I can do this. I’m so tired. I don’t know if I have a clear idea of what’s happening in the industry anymore. What I see, I’m not sure that I like.”
I was in an end-of-the-world confessional mood.
In some fine irony, Rubin thought I was negotiating. He began to reach out, to make concessions. He would sweeten my deal with Little One and Big One at the expense of his own if I would just do the deal and let him get away.
Ambivalence, I thought, can be a trump card; before, they had had me by the scruff of the business that I had built. The game changes, your own leverage changes, if you suddenly find you can take it or leave it. (That was something else Bob Machinist always said, which now I understood: “Never negotiate with a hard-on.”)
Even Jesse called to play nice.
Rubin and Little One, calling from Little One’s office, found me on the cell phone as I sat in a cab driving into Providence, Rhode Island, from the airport to have another talk with American newspaper people about the triumph of technology and the imminent demise of their world.
Rubin and Little One were very eager to tell me that they had cemented their deal. They told me how good this was for me and how all that remained then was for me to sign on. We could close almost immediately. Get back to work. Set this industry on fire. I expressed the greatest enthusiasm for the deal. I’m not sure Little One knew, but Rubin certainly knew that I was stalling.
I went on to my newspaper conference. It was noteworthy that I continued to be invited back to these meetings; I certainly never said anything reassuring. My role seemed to be the whip. To taunt them. It wasn’t hard.
But this meeting was different. Times had changed.
I was to attend some seminars in the morning and then speak to the assembled group in the afternoon.
The seminars were workshops, a motivational laying on of hands to bring the reluctant managers of America’s newsrooms into the cyber age.
I was startled by what I heard. The newspaper people of America, one after another, stood up to profess their faith in the Web and their acceptance of the end of newspapers as we knew them.
It had happened, apparently: in the course of six months or so, the Web had become a strategic avenue for every mid-size paper in the country.
The promise here, I heard from representatives of the great old names in American newspapers, was to be able to bring retailer together with customer in some new, wonderful, and efficient relationship. That was the future. Sixty billion dollars in local advertising was at stake.
There was real excitement. They had really gotten it.
Maybe it was my Hamlet funk. Maybe it was my increasing dread of Little One and Big One. Possibly, it was just the writing on the wall. All I could hear was that the Web—this great experiment—had become the catalogue business.
In the cacophony of Web analysis and instant analysis and overnight paradigm shifts, people were now insisting that what worked—the only thing working with any consistency, with any predictability, with any prospect for long-term business growth and profitability—was transactions. Shopping. More and more, with greater and greater confidence and comfort, people were buying stuff on the Web.
When at last it was my turn to speak, I said, “I usually come to these conferences to tell you that history has passed you by. But I think I’m wrong. I think you should go back to where you came from. At some point in your lives you made a career choice. Instead of choosing the retail business, you chose the newspaper business. But all I’m hearing today is that you want to put your papers on the Web because you’ll be able to become a middleman, you’ll get a piece of the transaction. You can become retailers.”
I was lashing myself as much as them.
At some point, you have to decide what you do for a living. What your skills encompass. I certainly knew that I did not have the talent for the retail business.
I didn’t go over well. I strongly suspected I wouldn’t be invited back.
I had an unpleasant epiphany: What if the Web, the Internet, this whole thing, wasn’t, well, media?
Four years ago, at the dawn of cyberspace, virtually everybody not strictly in the technology business found themselves saying, “Wow, a new communications technology! Must be media. New media!”
There was a leap there that certainly seemed logical at the time, so logical that I don’t recall anyone questioning it. But now, to me, it seemed glaringly untested.
After all, the telephone was a communications technology that never became “media.”
Which begged the question.
For several days, trying to avoid Jon Rubin and Little One and Big One, I called everybody I knew and demanded to know their definition of media and their opinion on whether or not the Internet was the media business.
I can’t say that a lot of people thought this was the central question. “Call it whatever you want” seemed to be the general response.
But I found that I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that I had gotten into the wrong business.
My business, my somewhat unique skill set, was to compose point of view and story and character in such a way that a more or less broadly defined group of people knows what I’m talking about and perhaps even thinks what I want them to think or feels what I want them to feel. Putting it that way, it sounds like a somewhat manipulative business. Well, it is. For good and for evil: Rush Limbaugh or the New York Times; Sesame Street or the Marlboro Man. There are literary messages, commercial messages, and political messages. But the message, whatever its particular legitimacy or integrity, needs to be delivered in a more or less coherent fashion if it is to be understood. You have to hear it the way the message creator wanted you to hear it, starting at the beginning, with the right music, with the right typeface, in the right setting (a message in the New Yorker has, quite likely, a different meaning from the same message in the National Review). What’s more, it’s usually relevant that you get the message in a controlled time frame—for example, this morning on the Times op-ed page, this evening on Seinfeld. The message is, of course, reinforced by the fact that other people you know have gotten it, too.
Something fundamentally not like this had developed on the Internet.
I’m not sure any two people came away from the Net having had anything close to similar experiences; that is, gotten the same message. Much like the telephone, the Internet was an instrument through which we were all finding we could exercise a highly individual and idiosyncratic control over the messages we were getting. You got it when you wanted to get it, not when someone wanted to serve it up to you (hence the bleak outlook for push technology); you controlled the look and feel; you entered into the message where you wanted to enter into it (hypertext’s breakdown of the linear world); you could put together pages from a hundred magazines into a magazine of your own, defying the authority of context; you could, and I was thinking almost inevitably would, reduce the medium to a dataport enabling you to take in what you wanted, when you wanted, how you wanted. And lastly, and most importantly, you could, if you wanted, make your voice as powerful as any other. You could send your own message. Good for you. God save us.
Or was my angst just a tangled rationale for getting out of doing what I didn’t want to be doing anymore?
I said to Little One, with what seemed to him no doubt like cunning frankness, an artful negotiator’s stance, “I’m not sure that I should be leading this business anymore.”
“I hear you,” he nodded. “All right. I think what you need is a strong COO. We’ll bring one in. If you want, we can bring in a CEO and you can be chairman. You won’t have to do any shit, just be a visionary.”
“I’m having some doubts about the business.”
“Doubts about what business?”
“The Internet.” I shrugged.
“What do you mean? It’s the Internet. Today. Tomorrow. It will happen. Don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t doubt that it will happen. What I’m thinking about is whether I belong in it. Whether the Internet is a natural place for what I do.”
“What do you do? You do the Internet.”
“The Internet, actually, was just something that happened to me. I never planned it.”
“Yeah? And so? You seized an opportunity.”
“This is hard to explain. I am really a—”
“Visionary. You’re a visionary. You get the big picture. You see the future.”
“Not exactly. In fact, honestly, I’m feeling like a relic. I’m a writer. And occasionally a publisher. With a little television and movies here and there.”
“I know. Great! That’s why you really get the Internet. You’re so eclectic!”
“I am starting to feel, however, that my early belief that this was . . . that the Internet was a new kind of publishing system, offering a new kind of manufacturing and distribution economics, was misplaced.”
“It is what it is. Don’t get all crazy.”
“No, no . . . what I’m trying to say—”
“Hey, we’ve spelled out a deal for you. It’s on the table. If you have issues with it, let’s talk. We’re willing to press Rubin for you. We can squeeze.”
“I’m not really negotiating. Honestly. Believe me. I think . . . I’m just not sure I can lead a company in a business that doesn’t seem very interesting to me. I don’t want to sell Ginsu knives.”
“Who’s asking you to? Don’t sell Ginsu knives.”
Even I could appreciate that I was acting strangely. Why was I pouring out my doubts to someone I didn’t know? Someone I was in a business negotiation with. Logic said, therefore, that I was still negotiating. Perhaps, even unconsciously, I was. That was it. I saw my circle in hell: I would never be able to stop negotiating.
“I just deposited three million dollars this morning. I’m ready to write you a check. It’s for you. I’m not going to give it to anybody else. I’m not going to give it to Jon Rubin. I don’t want this company without you.”
I nodded. “I appreciate that. I do. But does that make sense? Let’s think about this. It’s a promising company. It’s ready to happen. It’s ready to take off. What it needs is somebody who believes the Internet is the greatest business opportunity of our lifetime.”
“Don’t you?”
“I do. I do. There’s no question it is the greatest business opportunity of our lifetime. It’s bigger than the telephone. It’s an incredible telephone. An unimaginable telephone. Not just voice, but now we can control the back and forth flow of data in almost every form imaginable. We’re going to add robots and intelligent agents to this, and we’ll occupy a new universe of data and information. It will change everything. Yeah, I believe that.”
“Well, that’s it then! You’re there. Everybody’s going to want to be there. But you’re here already. You talk the talk.”
“Yes, but I’m not sure I’m really suited to the telephone business, even an incredible telephone business.”
“Oh, sure you are. God, this is great! Listen, I don’t doubt at all that we can work out a deal. Don’t worry about that. We want you to be happy. If you’re not happy, we’re not happy.”
Alison was amused. “You only get what you want when you don’t want it,” she said.
“What should I do?”
“If you get rid of Rubin and Patricof, the faces change. But do the players?”
“Well, these guys would be less involved. Really. They seem to like me, too. Really.”
“Come on.”
“Anyway, they have a track record of getting these companies public. Outside, they’ll get this company public in six months. And for a solid price. Twenty-five or thirty million.”
“Only twenty-five or thirty? How the mighty have fallen.”
“Seriously. Six months more. I get thirty percent.”
“You won’t have registration rights, so it won’t be liquid. You won’t be able to sell your shares when the investors sell theirs. Also, thirty percent is on a pre-money or predilution basis. You won’t have a chance for a liquidity event, as Machinist would say, for close to a year. In that time, your interest could have shot to the moon or crashed to the ground. In other words, it’s all meaningless.”
“Then why is anyone doing this? Why have I even put in the effort?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Because it’s interesting,” she offered.
“May your life be interesting,” I said, using the Chinese curse. “Really, would anyone do this if they didn’t believe they were going to make a fortune?”
“I think it is interesting.” She rolled the word around. “In a good way. Of course it’s interesting. You have a bird’s-eye view of the world changing. But the industry is consolidating. To really do what you’re doing, to run a company in this business at this point in time, you have to be a serious, serious control freak. I mean a crazy person kind of control freak. You have to want to monopolize every detail, every relationship, every idea. Your main interest has to be in gaining control, in eliminating every other player. You have to do this both within your own business and within the industry as well. That’s what you have to be driven to do. If you don’t have that absolute drive, then it’s probably not a good idea to be a CEO of an Internet business or of any technology business right now.”
“In other words, in the end the world divides between Bill Gates and everybody else?”
“Between Bill Gates and the next Bill Gates and everybody else. I’m right.”
“I didn’t say you were wrong.”
“So just walk away,” Alison said.
Could I?
“Well, there’s no such thing as slavery,” said the employment lawyer Alison had me talk to. But that seemed clearly not to address the issue of personal responsibility.
I had gotten people to invest money in the company. There were other people whose dreams were part of this business, too.
“It’s not the local factory,” Alison said. “It’s unsettling, but maybe it’s good that a business can play out its destiny in a couple of years instead of a lifetime. I like that. It is good. It’s the Internet business, after all. There’s no assumption that you have today that you had a year ago, practically. Entities, corporate entities, should be able to shift, to transform, to transmogrify, to be shed, as well as paradigms.”
In fact, the idea of having to do this for a lifetime, of having to do anything, let alone squabble with Jon Rubin and the Patricof boys, for a lifetime was a sickening thought.
I had a decision to make.
Little One and Big One truly seemed ready to write a check. I could do this deal. I could start another chapter. I just had to say yes—by the end of the week.
Here are some signs that you’re having problems with your job: Your twice-weekly half-mile run grows into marathon training. You don’t arrive at the office until noon. You’re current with every major museum show in town. You don’t feel guilty at all after an afternoon film.
Pounding through the park, I laid out my issues:
1. Personalities. I detested Jon Rubin, I distrusted the Patricof boys, and I had no reason to doubt that pretty soon I’d be in
the same soup with Little One and Big One.
2. Exhaustion. There are limits, and without some new adrenaline rush—and it didn’t seem that the renewed promise of potential millions was going to supply it this time—I had reached them.
3. The Internet. I just couldn’t get excited about selling stuff, online or otherwise. Also, I was certain that if one more person said to me, “Have you seen my Web site?” I would scream. I was realizing that the success of the Internet, the astounding mind share it had captured and the ubiquity it had achieved, meant that it would necessarily be less interesting, less inspiring, less, well, mine.
4. Business plan. I didn’t have one any longer. My business, after all, was to create content that would be interesting and useful to an audience reachable through the Internet. But, frankly, I was not seeing a clear demand for such content. A demand for services, for applications, for efficiency, for data but not a demand for point of view or reporting or discernment or entertainment. And why should there be such a demand? Did we need more media? I found myself wondering. More entertainment? The Internet was, possibly, just a communications system. One that people controlled; they could do whatever they wanted with it. That was good. Except that I had no particular plan for exploiting it.
5. My wife. It wasn’t really a question of having to choose between my wife and my get-rich-quick schemes. It was never presented like that. But philosophically and temperamentally she had a lot of difficulties with the pyramid schemes that cyberspace was founded on. While the pure excitement of the mad dash toward quick money could generally deal with my reservations—and sometimes even hers—the reality of Jon Rubin and the Patricof boys was a sobering one. If I had to choose, it was an easy choice.
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