The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living

by Randy Komisar

  “Just get on the back,” I say, then realize that he speaks no English. So I wave my palm and shake my head: “No.” Gently his hand rests on my shoulder. We take off, quickly overtaking the pickup truck. The monk's robes flutter in the rush of air that gives us both relief from the scorching midday sun. Half an hour down the road, we come upon my cycling friends, lunching at a little roadside inn—a dirt-floored shack, wallpapered with faded posters of Hong Kong beauties and far away beaches. They are clearly amused that I have been adopted by one of Buddha's apprentices. One by one they approach to greet my new companion, meet the insurmountable language barrier, and retreat to their plates of pungent stir-fry.

  “You want some lunch?” I ask in a crude sign language that has served me well in my travels.

  He shakes his head and slips off to a corner of the table. He might be able to manage one American, but twenty overwhelm him. I offer him a plate of my curry, but he won't touch it, preferring to sip at a sickeningly sweet local soda pop. He waits.

  I wolf down my lunch, because I can tell he's ill at ease. He re-dons the pack, and we are back on the motorcycle, tooling down the road. His soft touch on my shoulder lets me know he's still there, but except for the buzz of the two-stroke Japanese engine, we travel without a sound. More endless highway. A scattering of thatched houses on stilts. An occasional open-air market. We slow down for water buffalo pulling a caravan of carts and weave paths around lumbering herds of cattle who wander onto the road, their bells chiming in the dust. At this rate, we won't reach Bagan until after dark.

  Half an hour later, the monk signals me, with a tap on the shoulder, to pull over in front of a ramshackle, windowless shed. We enter a crowded room filled with farmers and loiterers, members of a full-fledged profession in Burma. The locals are excited to see an American where none usually tread. The monk sits down at a small bench and offers me lunch. I shake my head. Now it's my turn to wait, sipping green tea, cautiously, not understanding a word that is spoken. He sponges up the last bit of thick, brown sauce with a wad of rice, and we take off again.

  Riding for hours, another 100 kilometers or so, we end up at Mount Popa, an ancient Buddhist temple built on a mountain of rock that erupts from an otherwise flat landscape. It's an old, shabby temple, popular with the monkeys. Nats, humans who have suffered tragic deaths and have been transformed into animist deities, are worshipped side-by-side with Buddha here and are feted with offerings of fruit, cigarettes, and chewing gum. At night, trance dancers take on the spirits of the Nats in their gyrations.

  An older monk in sun-faded robes emerges from the temple's entrance, and the two greet each other with bows. My monk disappears quietly up the hill, without so much as a peep in my direction.

  “I'm Mr. Wizdom, the abbot of Mount Popa Monastery,” says the older monk. An angular man with day-old stubble on his pate, he wears crooked wire-rimmed glasses that look like they've been mangled and bent back to form many times.

  I'm relieved to hear English. I have no idea where the hell I am, my bicycling buddies are long gone, and now I'm almost out of gas.

  With the noble hospitality of one who has nothing, Mr. Wizdom motions for me to sit down.

  “You know, I picked him up 150 kilometers ago, and I have no idea where I'm taking him?” I say, gesturing toward the one who disappeared. “Is this where he wants to go?”

  “Oh, yes, this is where you take him,” Mr. Wizdom replies elliptically. We talk briefly, travelers' chitchat, before I ask for and receive directions to Bagan. He hands me a dog-eared card, all unintelligible Burmese except for the odd English phonetic spelling of his name, “Wizdom.” Seeing that I'm not rushing to copy down the particulars, he snatches back what must be his one and only calling card. I accept a drink of water and shake Mr. Wizdom's hand. My work is done.

  I head back to my motorcycle to find the young monk waiting for me. Confused, I look plaintively toward Mr. Wizdom who is gazing at us from the temple steps.

  “He wants to go back to where you picked him up,” Mr. Wizdom offers with a shrug.

  “But you said this is where I take him,” I call out.

  “Yes, but he wants to go back. Now. Can you take him?” Mr. Wizdom comes forward, a monkey squealing behind him. For his part, the young monk reaches for my backpack, readying himself for another journey.

  “But he just got here. I drove him all afternoon. It's nearly sunset. Now he wants to go back? What's the point?”

  Bemused, Mr. Wizdom shrugs his shoulders again and turns back toward the temple. “I cannot easily answer that question. But let me give you a riddle to solve.” Pausing, he exchanges a smile with the young monk, and turns back to me. I'm wondering how I ended up in a script with a monk named Mr. Wizdom and a magic riddle. “Don't try to answer it now. You must sit with the riddle a while, and the answer will simply come to you.”

  The truth is I don't much like such games, but the monk doesn't give me a choice in the matter.

  “Imagine I have an egg” —Mr. Wizdom cups an imaginary egg in his hand—“and I want to drop this egg three feet without breaking it. How do I do that?”

  The monk seems pleased with himself, having mustered enough English to perplex a simple American traveler. My mind flips fast through the forgotten pages of elementary science texts. I am tempted to blurt out answers, for if I solve Mr. Wizdom's riddle, perhaps he will explain what's going on. Instead, I take his instructions to heart and let it go. For now.

  With a final nod, Mr. Wizdom retreats, leaving the question with me as a souvenir of Mount Popa. We're back on the motorcycle, me and my wayward monk. This time, the monk leads me to gas. Forget gas stations in rural Burma; instead, dusty bottles lined up at infrequent intervals along the side of the road, each with an old rag stuffed in the mouth like a wick. When you stop to fill up, local merchants mysteriously materialize to take your money.

  On we go, yo-yoing silently across the desert. As we approach Bagan, gorgeous brick and stone temples rise up everywhere—some reaching toward the sky, some so tiny you cannot enter without evicting the Buddha in residence. This intricately variegated line of pinnacles and spires is backlit by the fiery red sun dropping into the desert, the Aye Yarwaddy ablaze from the sun's torch.

  We keep driving, looking for the old town and my hotel. It has been an exhausting, dusty, hot day on the road, but suddenly I am delighted to be here, at sunset cruising the wonders of Bagan on a motorcycle, a monk on my back. When we first left Mount Popa, I wanted nothing more than to get to my destination, but now I don't have the slightest desire for this trip to end.

  The answer comes to me.

  Chapter One

  THE

  PITCH

  “WE'RE GOING to put the fun back into funerals.”

  With that declaration, the meeting began. It was a curious elevator pitch.

  “The fun back into funerals?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. We're going to make it easy to make choices when someone dies. You know, the casket, the liner, flowers, that kind of thing.”

  “Fun?”

  “Sure. All those decisions. It's not easy. So why not use the Internet?”

  “But fun? Why fun?”

  “Come on. Catchy marketing. You know, a play on words.”

  “Ah, the fun in fun-erals.”

  “Right. That's it. How many hits do you think you get now if you put the words ‘fun’ and ‘funeral’ into Yahoo!? Hundreds? I doubt it. You'll get one, just one. Us.”

  Giving the pitch is a fellow named Lenny. Something about using the Internet to sell items most people buy at a funeral home when someone dies, items that arouse as many varied and complex feelings as sex toys.

  We are seated in the Konditorei, a comfy coffee shop nestled in bucolic Portola Valley. With the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and Palo Alto and Route 280 to the east, we are but one exit away from Sand Hill Road, the famous home to Silicon Valley venture capital. The Konditorei is where I meet people like Lenny, the pitchmen
of the Internet era. Here, or in a couple of restaurants in the same rustic strip mall. This is my office. (Forget Buck's Restaurant in next-door Woodside. That's where venture capitalists prefer to meet supplicants and huddle around deals under a giant painting of Roy Rogers on Trigger rampant. If you sit in the corner of Buck's all morning, starting with the power breakfast crowd, you can quietly observe who is funding whom. It's a voyeur's embarrassment.)

  Every morning a stream of humanity stops at the Konditorei for coffee — joggers fueling up, businesspeople in a rush, Stanford students on their way to class, and a handful of deal makers en route from hillside homes to Sand Hill castles. It's also, ironically, a stop for the parade of incoming workers who saw, mow, paint, rake, and hammer away busily at the homes of the Valley shakers. Porsches, Mercedes, and BMW's queue up to enter the freeway, indifferent to the oncoming line of pickup trucks that replace them each morning.

  I had arrived a few minutes earlier, and Lenny was waiting for me.

  “You're Randy,” he began. “I'm Lenny. Frank said you'd be easy to spot.”

  Shaved head, cowboy boots, jeans, motorcycle jacket—I seldom get mistaken at these blind dates.

  With a solid grip, he shook my hand; then, his left hand on my elbow like a politician, he guided me to the table where he'd already set up shop. I could tell by his amped up confidence that he was probably not an engineer. Too outgoing. Too well dressed. So it's not a technology pitch, I said to myself.

  I looked at my watch on the arm he didn't have in a power lock. Nine o'clock exactly.

  “I hope I didn't keep you waiting,” I said. “I had this down for nine.”

  “Nine is right. Come on,” he commanded. “I'll get you some coffee. My treat. You take cream, sugar?”

  “Thanks. I don't know what I'll have. Why don't you sit down while I decide.”

  He started to resist, but I retrieved my arm and walked to the counter. He took one step to follow but then turned and sat down. I let out the breath I'd been holding since he grabbed my arm.

  I watched him askance as I waited for my low-fat chai latte, putting his age at twenty-eight. I took stock of his thick, blue-black hair and his pale and drawn face. He looked like he'd been pulling some all-nighters, and by noon he would need another shave. Beneath two smudges of eyebrows, his dark eyes gripped his target like his double-lock handshake—no gazing off and gathering his thoughts. He sat with his body coiled, tense, ready to spring. At me.

  Lenny's standard-issue corporate uniform — navy blue suit, crisp white shirt, tie a rich mosaic of reds and yellows— pegged him as not from the Valley: sales guy, I'd guess. The only one in the Konditorei wearing a suit and tie. Personally I hadn't worn a suit in years. When I was at GO Corporation a few years ago, spending several months negotiating an investment in the company by IBM, my opposite number was one of their seasoned negotiators, Dick Seymour. He was a classic IBM fixer. The equivalent of Foreign Service diplomats, these fixers knew how to manage both the internal IBM organization — all the different inside stakeholders whose interests could often be at odds—and the outside oddballs like us at GO. Seymour was probably in his fifties, fit, highly articulate, utterly professional, and impeccably dressed in a blue suit and crisp white shirt. There I was, in my thirties, in my jeans and T-shirt and florid socks and skateboard shoes, going nose to nose on complicated deal points. Dick treated me like a professional through all our wrangling, not as if I were a creature from a valley of lunatics. GO accepted some tough terms to get IBM's support, but I came away with nothing but admiration for Dick. He had class. He was the consummate deal guy. For all his professional savvy and maturity, though, I couldn't ever imagine a guy like Dick founding a startup.

  Now I'm wondering whether Lenny is the corporate type, just younger than Dick and not yet so polished and accomplished.

  Connie leaned over the register as she handed me my chai.

  “Your friend want another cup of coffee?” she asked.

  “I don't know. Sure. You know what he takes?”

  “You bet. French roast, black.” She whispered, “He's had five cups in the last hour. I'm surprised he can sit still at all. I hope you're wearing your surge protector today.” With her sleeves rolled up to handle the morning onslaught, Connie still had time to offer some neighborly advice.

  When I rejoined him at his table, Lenny glanced at the coffee I put in front of him and laid a black three-ring notebook in front of me. “Thanks” was obviously not in the script.

  “I usually make the presentation on a computer, you know, throw it up on a screen, if I can. That's how Frank saw it. But I checked it out earlier. Too much glare in here. So we'll use the dead tree version.”

  Here it comes. The pitch. People present ideas for new businesses to me two or three times a week. If I chose to, I could hear a pitch every day—all day, every day. Just as everyone in L.A. has a screenplay, everyone in Silicon Valley has a business plan — most of them nowadays for Internet businesses. I've been around Silicon Valley and involved with young companies since the early ‘80s — startups, spinouts, spin-ins, what have you. I'm not in the phone book or listed in any professional directory. If you don't know someone I know, you can't find me.

  I wonder what Frank had in mind when he set me up with Lenny. I prefer to riff on ideas, brainstorm, prod and provoke, have some constructive give-and-take around a business concept. It didn't feel like there was going to be much of that with Lenny. I gazed out the picture window at the bright California day, the eucalyptus trees rustling in the breeze.

  “Before you get started, Lenny, tell me how you know Frank,” I said.

  “He's, uh, a friend of a friend. We presented to him Monday, and he sounded interested. He wanted us to meet with you right away.”

  Sounds like the early bird special, a quick chat before Frank and his partners hold their weekly gathering to talk shop and audition new deals. Obviously Lenny didn't know Frank at all. Thanks, Frank. You owe me.

  Frank is a headliner in the VC world, whom I've known since I raised money for GO. His firm is “top tier,” a term reserved for firms with such a long wake of winners that the mere mention of their names imparts instant credibility and a whiff of inevitability to a startup. We stay in touch. A few days ago he'd called to say he was sending me a prospect. “Intense guy,” he confided, “unusual idea but may be ‘interesting’. If you like it perhaps we can work together on this one.”

  “What do you do, Lenny?”

  “I sell group life insurance to companies, part of the employee benefit package. National accounts. So I'm out to the West Coast every two or three weeks. I'm the company leader in new sales the last two years. Millions of dollars in value.”

  Lenny paused a split second and slid some kind of legal document across the table.

  “I brought along an NDA. Could you please sign it before I go on.” For a second his supreme confidence faltered.

  Without a glance, I pushed it back at Lenny.

  “I see dozens of companies each month, Lenny. I can't sign a confidentiality agreement. It exposes me to inadvertent liability. My integrity is my stock in trade. If Frank referred you, he can vouch for me. If you're uncomfortable with that, don't tell me anything you think is a trade secret. Frank didn't sign your NDA, did he?”

  “Ah, no. I just thought …” Lenny said, skidding for a split second. “OK. Let me start.”

  He flipped open the binder. It was a professional presentation, the kind you see in boardrooms all the time. From his pocket he extracted an extendable pointer. He pulled it out a few inches and tapped at the title page.

  “We want to call this business ‘Funerals.com,’ but some undertaker in Oklahoma already has the URL,” he said. “When we get funding we'll buy the rights to the name.”

  Funerals.com. Oh, brother. What next?

  “I understand,” I said. Below the title were the date and the words “Presentation to Randy Komisar.” He would probably read aloud all the words t
o me.

  “Presentation to Randy Komisar.”

  “You don't need to read it to me, Lenny,” I said. “Just tell me about it.”

  “Sure, if that's what you'd prefer.” He flipped to a page that proclaimed, in a blaze of black type: “The Amazon.com of the Funeral Goods Business.”

  Now that's a new one.

  “This window of opportunity is going to close soon, but if we act now, we can make this the Amazon of the funeral business,” Lenny began. “It's going to be big. The world is moving to the Internet—I'll explain that in a minute —and these products will move there too. The Internet's changing the way we live, and it will change the way people die. Someone's going to ride this opportunity all the way to the bank”—or the pearly gates, I said to myself— “and we think we should be the ones.”

  Next page: “Projected Revenues.”

  “In the first full year after we're up and running, we expect $10 million in revenue. Fifty million the second year. The third year we really hit our stride — 100 million.” Lenny paused for effect. “Exciting, right? It's big.” He waited for my response, then leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “Most people don't like to talk about this. Death, dying. Loved ones passing on. But that's part of the opportunity. You understand that, right? It's a competitive barrier, a hurdle to entry. Most people won't want to do this. Would you?” He looked at me but didn't wait for an honest response. “I wouldn't, if I weren't so damn excited about it.”