Only the Whole Life Plan leads to personal success. It has the greatest chance of providing satisfaction and contentment that one can take to the grave, tomorrow. In the Deferred Life Plan there will always be another prize to covet, another distraction, a new hunger to sate. You will forever come up short.
Work hard, work passionately, but apply your most precious asset—time—to what is most meaningful to you. What are you willing to do for the rest of your life? does not mean, literally, what will you do for the rest of your life? That question would be absurd, given the inevitability of change. No, what the question really asks is, if your life were to end suddenly and unexpectedly tomorrow, would you be able to say you've been doing what you truly care about today? What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life? What would it take to do it right now?
On this hilltop I look left toward the Pacific Ocean, across the sloping fields where artichokes and poppies grow, where cattle and horses graze. This is rustic, rancher country. And to the right—all the frantic splendor of the Valley, a teeming maze of highways, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and business parks. Speculators, the Lennys of the world, still keep coming to this small patch of land, this boomtown settlement, and pay astronomical real estate prices for a chance to work their stake. Like the forty-niners 150 years ago, most will leave empty-handed. But some, a few, will amass fortunes and become the leaders of the New. This is a Valley of optimists.
Me, I like being on this ridge, one foot in both camps, one whole from two very different but equally compelling pieces.
In school I belonged to no particular clique, hanging out with a group of people both brilliant and crazy. These peripheral people were highly talented, with off-beat passions, like performing autopsies on busted televisions and computers, building telescopes, practicing ventriloquism, or painting watercolors of dissected animals. Wrapped in their passions, they stood outside the mainstream. I loved their talent and innovation, and I acted like a bridge, connecting them to everything else.
Now I work with inventors, entrepreneurs, and others highly skilled in their own right but not necessarily capable of bringing their ideas to the commercial light of day or achieving the impact their ideas could and should have. This is the creative edge of business — startups, working with a blank canvas to challenge the status quo and make change happen. I work with brilliant entrepreneurs who have a vision for how things can be better and who can't resist doing the next great thing. I am their consigliere.
THE LAST TIME I was in Amsterdam I spent an afternoon in the Rijksmuseum studying the Vermeers and Rembrandts. Rembrandt's The Night Watch particularly impressed me. Like many of the Dutch Masters, he painted it on commission for a group of well-heeled patrons. The work portrayed a dozen or so elaborately attired commissioners, reliving the past glory of their civic militia, arrayed according to their financial contribution and status. These were some of the many movers and shakers of Holland's economic Golden Age, affluent and prominent, seeking immortality on canvas. But I was struck that I didn't know any of them, nor did it matter. They were just characters in another man's masterpiece. The only person of importance, the only one whose fame had lasted beyond that period, was the eventually penniless artist— Rembrandt.
Think about The Night Watch today, when so many people push and shove with their wealth, fame, and power. In a few hundred years, all of today's movers and shakers may be reduced, at best, to another group of supporting characters on a canvas.
That painting brings to mind a headline from a few years ago: Sam Walton had died the richest man in America, making him, I realized, only the latest in an eternally long line of such record holders. As John Maynard Keynes postulated, in the long run we're all dead.
Time is the only resource that matters.
* * *
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Re: One Last Question
I think it's up to you, Allison. If you want to pursue the idea that you and Lenny first discussed, you'll need to take the reins and pull Lenny forward.
You have nothing to lose. Try to answer as many of the questions as you can, but don't worry that you won't have all the answers. Plan how you will discover them.
Good luck.
best
r
* * *
Chapter Ten
THE
WHOLE
LIFE PLAN
“WE'RE GOING TO put the fun back into funerals,” Lenny said.
Was this my cue? “The fun back into funerals?” I asked.
“Cut it out, Lenny,” Allison chided. “I hate that.”
Lenny laughed. “I wanted to see your reaction,” he admitted.
He handed me a copy of his new business plan.
“Besides,” he said, “it's more the case now than it ever was.”
No denying it. Lenny's sense of humor left a little to be desired, but I was glad to see he was his spunky self again.
“Maybe I should say we're going to put the fun back into Funerals.com,” he said. “Except it's not Funerals.com anymore.”
Lenny pulled out his extendable pocket pointer, poked at the cover of the plan, and read the title to me: “Presentation to Randy Komisar.” Some habits were impossible to break. “Business Plan for Circle-of-Life.com,” he continued.
“I can read, Lenny, remember?” I looked at the cover page. “Circle-of-Life. What's that mean?”
“Let's go through the pitch,” Allison suggested. “It should all become clear.”
“Fine,” I said, my curiosity piqued.
It had been ten days since I'd heard from either of them, and I'd assumed the clock had run out. I'd felt sorry that Allison hadn't prevailed and frustrated with Lenny's steadfast denial, but I was also confident the Internet wouldn't lack for casket floggers too long.
Then out of the blue, an e-mail.
* * *
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Still Breathing
Randy,
We are not dead yet! After a lot of soul searching in light of all that's happened, we revised the business plan and convinced Frank to give us one more hearing. He'll see us in two days, early afternoon. We'd like to run our ideas by you first. Can we buy your morning chai at the Konditorei?
Thanks,
Lenny
* * *
So, here we are again, déjà vu. As usual, the Konditorei had quieted down by midmorning; except for a young couple with a baby in a designer carrier and an occasional takeout customer, we had the sunny place to ourselves. A bootleg tape of the Dead's “Friend of the Devil” played in the background. Connie was kibitzing with the staff, taking a breather. She had welcomed Lenny like an old friend, forgetting for now the putrefying bacteria. She had a natural way with people, and she knew more about business than most of the young bucks who come around here looking for me. I really should discuss a partnership with her.
Lenny's “fun” remark had caught my attention because it was at least the third echo of my first encounter with him, some three weeks earlier. In his corporate uniform again this morning, he had greeted me at the door (without the arm-lock) and guided me to the table where he and Allison had set up shop.
There the similarities, thankfully, ended. Lenny was just as intense, but his energy was leavened with warmth and a sense of humor. Allison, too, seemed to have settled into her own skin, no longer ambivalent or hesitant. She and Lenny were in sync now.
After I sent her my reply, Allison explained, she had spent the weekend strategizing with Lenny. He had been ready to throw in the towel, but she had persuaded him to try another approach.
“So Circle-of-Life.com came out of that weekend?” I asked.
They both nodded.
“What we first described to you in Funerals.com,” Lenny said, “is still here. But it's only one part of a much bigger idea.”
“Does your family all live around here, Ran
dy?” Allison asked.
“No,” I replied. “Upstate New York, New England. And my wife's family is from Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina. Everywhere but here.”
“It's the same with Allison and me,” Lenny said. “My family is strong in Boston, but two brothers live in the Midwest, and my sister lives in Florida. My father had seven brothers and sisters, spread all over the East and South, and one out here. Allison's family is scattered around New England and the Southwest.”
“In this day and age, families and friends have to work hard to stay in touch. No one writes letters anymore,” Allison added.
“When my father died,” Lenny explained, “I paid a neighborhood kid who knows HTML to make the site you saw. I wanted a place where the family could gather, post messages, and remember. Not only did it shrink the distance between us, but it made it easier to share feelings. You saw some of the postings. A couple of my aunts and uncles told stories about growing up with Dad, and some of my relatives posted old photographs that we'd never seen before, pictures of Dad as a kid and of the entire family through the years. It was a comfort to all of us to remember Dad and commemorate his life.”
“It was a good thing,” Lenny went on. “Many of my friends who have visited the site said they'd like to set up a place for their families, too.”
“Anyway,” Allison chimed in, “when Lenny and I looked at everything fresh we returned to a simple premise. The business should make it possible for people to come together and cope with death and dying. That's our mission.”
“And we'll sell caskets,” Lenny interjected.
“And we'll sell caskets,” Allison concurred. “Absolutely. That's an expensive decision people have to make at a difficult time. The more information you have, the better the choice.”
“Wherever we can find reputable funeral homes who provide good service and take reasonable margins,” Lenny said, “we'll work through them. There still needs to be someone local to make the final arrangements. We can steer people to the best facilities and protect them from gouging.”
“Not just caskets and liners, but other services too,” Allison quickly added. “Counseling, burial sites, gravestones, options for final disposal.”
I raised my hand.
“Whoa,” I said. “Let's start with the plan.” I generally prefer to get off the pat presentation and into the passion, but too much was tumbling out at once for me to absorb.
Lenny and Allison's original idea, the one buried beneath Funerals.com, was to create Internet communities in which family and friends could honor and remember someone who had died. In returning to that idea, Lenny and Allison had expanded it to include people in the process of dying, the terminally ill, and those who care for them.
“We'll make it easy for communities to form around someone's dying and death,” Lenny said. “We'll bring together family members and friends, wherever they are in the world, and give them an opportunity to grieve, remember, mourn, and show their support in ways not possible until the Web. At the same time we'll help the dying cope with their own deaths and give them the resources to make plans — financial arrangements and estate planning, for instance—for the families they leave behind. We need to deal with death and dying much better as a society. This business can help.”
“We want to make one's last moments as meaningful as possible,” Allison continued, “by providing people with the opportunity to connect to those who have given their lives meaning and purpose and, in the end, to make sense of their lives, in an intimate and caring community.”
It was about closing the circle of life, I thought.
“This lets us tap into the huge market we talked about before,” Allison pointed out, “but in ways much more caring and comprehensive.”
“The basic service,” Lenny went on, “would be free.”
It would include templates and guidelines, he explained, making it easy for anyone to create a community site with photographs and writings. The framework for this basic service would be built with the help of experts in grief counseling and terminal illness, as well as doctors. Those who set up or joined a community could simply visit the site, sign in, and choose from what's available there. Then, if they wished, they could participate more actively by communicating with other members. A simple site would be free, and there would be a charge only if the site exceeded a certain reasonable size or if the activity exceeded a specified time limit, say six months.
Clever, I thought. This way people would be encouraged to use the service for free and pay only when they found it valuable to maintain in the long run. Easy adoption, an Internet version of “trying before buying.” Of course, the site would ultimately have to provide real value to convince people to homestead it, but even casual traffic could bring in revenues from advertisers and sponsors.
“Our plan,” Allison said, “is to provide targeted information about care, drugs, therapies, and support services for everyone involved in that final stage of life.”
Community members wouldn't be bothered by advertising; they would see information on specific services only after they had registered their interest in them. As a result Lenny and Allison wouldn't merely be selling eyeballs, they would be providing qualified leads to their commerce partners. Users could request information and receive answers and referrals to all kinds of resources, some local and some on the Internet. Circle-of-Life.com would charge a fee to merchants in exchange for qualified leads, those people who indicated their interest in finding help. Nonprofits would have free access.
It would be a better arrangement for everyone than simply selling gross demographics to advertisers. Qualified leads were far more valuable to merchants than bulk traffic, and the process would be more consistent with the experience Allison and Lenny wanted to create for community members, less crass and commercial. They also planned to host various events and forums, for which individuals might pay a small participation fee, and which could feature special guest experts or the opportunity to exchange information with members from other related on-line communities that share similar problems or needs. The ability to link separate communities, so members could help each other, would be a particularly useful feature.
For example, they explained, family caregivers, the ones supporting a dying person, often face special burdens, suffering alone in their grief as they continue to care for their loved ones. Circle-of-Life.com would give them a place to communicate with others in similar situations.
“They can turn to each other for support, and especially to express the feelings — their anger, for instance — they can't express to family and friends,” Allison said.
Their plan was still to sell the funerary goods they'd identified in the original business. Where there were reputable local sources for those goods, Circle-of-Life.com would refer members to those sources. And where those vendors were commercial businesses, such as funeral homes, Circle-of-Life.com would receive a percentage of the sale, like an affiliate. With this approach, Lenny explained, revenue would come from a larger number of sources.
“One of the weaknesses in the original Funerals.com,” I pointed out, “was the issue of finding or being found by those in need. You still have to generate traffic to make this work.”
“Yes, of course,” Lenny said. “But this approach is more inclusive and less in conflict with the local brick-and-mortar businesses.”
He went on to explain that they planned to form alliances with reputable local funeral homes, for which they could be both a source of business through referrals and a Web presence to supplement the funeral home's physical locations. They also planned to form partnerships with those whose daily work brought them in contact with death and dying, including, for example, social workers in hospitals, hospice personnel, and visiting nurses, as well as related membership organizations. They planned to seek endorsements and referrals from national religious organizations of all denominations, which would inform their member churches of the benefits Circle-of-Life.com offered.
In short, their plan was to form a vast web of those whose aims were congruent with their own—to ease the passage of those terminally ill and the grief of the survivors. If they could establish Circle-of-Life.com as the preeminent place to build communities addressing those needs, particularly for far-flung families and friends, that network would provide a competitive advantage. The more people who gravitated to the site, the more valuable it would become to others as they shared information and attracted more local providers of goods and services. Competitors could try to duplicate this model, but once Circle-of-Life.com established itself at the center of the network, competitors would find it difficult to dislodge. This scenario is referred to as the much-coveted “network effect,” an increasing return on the benefits of growing scale on the Internet with little or no marginal cost.
What Lenny and Allison proposed to do required an enormous amount of work, and success was far from guaranteed. But here the risk was in the right place — in the execution of the big idea. Their idea embraced fundamental life needs and would employ the proven strengths of the Net, making it hard to believe someone, somewhere, couldn't make it work. If it were to succeed, they would have to execute quickly and with great discipline. They would need to build a vast network of relationships as well. No small challenge.
“Have you made any progress on hiring a team?” I asked.
“We've only had a week or so,” Lenny said, “but with our raising some seed money …”
The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living Page 15
