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

by Randy Komisar

  “We forgot to tell Randy,” Allison said.

  Once they had formulated the new idea for Circle-of-Life.com and put together the rudiments of a new business plan, they'd gone back to a small group of angels Lenny had approached months ago. The angels had turned Funerals.com down, but a few were now intrigued enough with the new plan that they had invested $500,000 in seed money.

  With that, Lenny and Allison had quit their day jobs to work full-time on the business.

  “I thought very hard before turning down that HMO job offer,” Allison admitted. “There was a lot I liked about it, the opportunity to build a community of people struggling with serious illness, but once Lenny and I agreed on the basic premise underlying Circle-of-Life.com, I didn't hesitate. This is what I want to accomplish, and if I didn't at least try to do this … well, here is my chance. The Internet seems to offer the potential now to do something important in a way never possible before.”

  I looked through the plan. They had made assumption after assumption about the services offered, sources of revenue, their ability to enter alliances with traditional brick-and-mortar businesses and organizations to form the crucial referral networks, the potential fees and charges. Lenny must have been uncomfortable with those leaps of faith, but the plan also laid out a timetable that identified both the crucial steps and what they hoped and expected to learn at each stage. They were candid and detailed about what they didn't and couldn't know at this point, and they identified how they would refine and reshape the plan as they continued to educate themselves about the market. The plan was a reliable compass, as it should be, not a road map.

  They had indeed already made some progress in putting together a team, identifying a strong candidate with a technical background and some startup experience to bring the site up and beginning conversations with a small group of counselors and doctors who were amenable to serving on an advisory board. Someone with accounting experience had expressed interest in joining them part-time in the beginning, expanding to full-time if the thing took off. The team wasn't locked up, but they had apparently found some good candidates who would join as soon as more financing was secured.

  They had created simple, pro forma financial statements based on the segments of the existing market they expected to migrate to their service and form the core communities in their network. Then, for each community, they had identified the various potential sources of revenue and the estimated total revenue. It added up to a number that would probably be large enough to get Frank's attention.

  “What do you think?” Lenny asked.

  Less tidy and tightly wrapped than the Funerals.com presentation, this plan was a bit raw. All in all, though, not a bad job for ten days' work. Most important, the plan communicated a stronger vision, an idea with a wider horizon focused on meeting a critical need. For all its loose ends, it had real potential.

  I told them to be completely candid with Frank. Engage him in the power of the idea behind Circle-of-Life.com and enlist him, to the extent he was amenable, in helping them find the answers that would make it a success.

  “What if it fails?” I asked. It was a more defensible idea with stronger commercial underpinnings, but it was still a crapshoot.

  “We've talked about failure,” Lenny said, “and I agree with what Allison said before. I'd always be sorry if I didn't try this. We're realistic about the chances, but we believe we can make this work and grow.” He shrugged. “If we do our best and it fails, we'll still be glad we did it. It's worth doing.”

  “And if it's a great success,” Allison added, “this is just the beginning. We'd like to build communities around the entire spectrum of significant life events, like births and graduations and weddings, all the events people want to share with friends and families.”

  “That's the circle of life in the name,” Lenny said. “When we thought about what weaves together all those events, we realized it was the family. People will still be able to build sites for individual events, like a birth or a wedding or a death, but we also want to provide the opportunity for life events to be organized around families. That's the context in which most of those events are celebrated anyway.”

  “And once you make it easy for family members spread around the world to link up,” Allison continued, “you open up a whole new realm. Imagine this—families could connect to form broad and deep genealogies. In a few years our children will be able to go on the Web and surf their way back through generations or jump across a family tree, from the tip of one branch to the tip of another. Rich with pictures and words. Imagine the sense of community that makes possible, even in a world where extended families rarely stay together.”

  The web of life. The forces of technology pull us apart, and yet that same technology provides the means of staying together.

  Lenny smiled. “Most of the advantages of living in a small town with all your relatives,” he said, “without living in a small town with all your relatives.”

  “None of this,” he added, “requires new technology. All the pieces exist. What will make Circle-of-Life.com different and attractive is the valuable information we'll provide, the common ground for communication, the simplicity and accessibility of the site, and, ultimately, the communities that will form there.”

  Lenny looked at his watch and realized they needed to leave for their meeting with Frank.

  As they packed their cases, Lenny said, “You must have lots of questions.”

  “It's a rich idea,” I said. “I'll look at the plan in more detail and e-mail you my thoughts.”

  “Do you think it will work?” he wondered.

  “I don't know,” I said honestly. “I think somewhere, somehow, something like it will work. As you said, the technology for creating on-line communities exists today. Somebody just has to figure out how to put it together with the right content and information in a compelling way that people will value and someone will pay for.”

  Allison stood and shook my hand with a satisfied grin.

  “Nervous about your meeting?” I asked them.

  “Sure,” Lenny said. “This is important to us. Frank is doing us a big favor. We can't blow it.”

  Good, I thought. Welcome to the Whole Life Plan.

  “Do you think Frank will like it?” Allison asked.

  “I'm not sure,” I said. I worried they were seeing Frank a little too early. They had so many ideas that still needed winnowing, refinement, and integration. Focus and organization would be key, as it is in all startups. They would need help strategizing and prioritizing. The good news was they had a wealth of enthusiasm and vision to work with now.

  “We're going to make this happen, one way or another,” Lenny said. Then he lowered his tone a notch. “Allison and I have talked about it, and we'd really like to have you join us in some fashion. Give it some thought, will you?”

  I smiled, flattered as always when someone invites me along for the ride.

  I walked with them to their rental. They got in, and Lenny rolled down his window. I leaned over so I could see them both.

  “Let me know,” I said, “what Frank says. If he's not interested, I might know somebody who is.”

  Epilogue

  THE

  ROAD

  WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE, the journey is the reward. There is nothing else. Reaching the end is, well, the end. If the egg must fall three feet without a crack, simply extend the trip to four.

  Nearly twenty-five years ago, stranded on a deserted road in Scotland, this certainty struck me.

  It was a damp and dreary day. Cold April rain spit from the steel gray sky. The wind whipped down the hills and ripped right through my winter coat. The landscape was forbidding—craggy, rock strewn, good for a few sheep but not much else.

  A friend and I had been on the road for a week or so, hitchhiking from London. A ride with a long-haul trucker had gotten us to Glasgow, but as we headed east to Aberdeen and then north to Inverness and Loch Ness, friendly drivers, or any
cars at all, were harder to come by. Near Aberdeen, we finally landed a ride from a bonny lass, a bit of a talker. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, she admitted, and she seemed intent to practice her flirting. We obliged her and practiced too.

  She wasn't going far, so she invited us back to her farm for a bite to eat and a drink. It was clear she meant alcohol, and with my rotten luck—a vegetarian looking for something green to eat in the British Isles—a steaming bowl of haggis.

  Hmm. A friendly girl? A little food and a lot of drink? A warm, dry cottage on a cold, wet afternoon? How could I say no?

  But my plan simply would not permit it. This place was nowhere, certainly nowhere on my itinerary, and I needed to set my eyes on Loch Ness and hightail it back to London, so I could cross the channel to Paris. I had planned this trip for months, studying the maps and circling the names and places I had to see. I was intent on packing all of Europe's monuments and museums into four or five months, a low-budget, seventies version of the Grand Tour. I had spent years deferring to the exploits of my preppy friends who had already made their tours; I was determined to catch up.

  So I dragged my buddy out of the car. On the roadside, the invitation disappearing in the rearview mirror as she drove off, we surveyed our situation: two figures alone on a two-lane road running north-south. I could see in both directions for miles, and there was nothing. No cars. No people. No houses. Only some lonely, dirty sheep, keeping low to stay earth-bound in the bluster.

  For the first hour or so, we maintained our spirits by joking about our predicament, convinced it would end soon. The few cars that passed paid us no mind, and depression gradually seeped in as we realized there would be no surprises. We could see for miles in both direction, and nobody was coming for us.

  As the sky darkened, we left the road and began foraging in the pasture for rocks, optimistically turning back from time to time to scout for our ticket out. A narrow ravine divided the pasture in two, and we started to build stone ducks along the edge. For something to do. To prove we were here. I started tossing stones into the ravine, trying to gauge its depth. Sometimes I could hear the rocks hit the water deep below; sometimes they would bounce off the ravine's steep sides. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand. I counted the seconds and tried to calculate the ravine's depth using my best high school physics, but my measurements varied wildly with each throw. I gave up.

  Deflated, I sat down in this pasture, head in my hands, trying to figure out how I could reshuffle my painstakingly prepared itinerary to get back on my schedule and salvage this trip. At this rate, it wasn't going to happen. And then, in the middle of my anxious what-iffing, I began to feel a subtle change — the warm touch of the sun on my shoulder. It had succeeded in breaking through the shroud that had enveloped us all day, leaving bright streaks and a burgeoning rainbow. Behind the curtain of mist I finally saw the beauty that had been right before my eyes the entire time — a mad torrent rushing through the sheer ravine, the snaking ribbon of tarmac ahead and behind, and the emerald green hillsides dotted with sheep contentedly munching and chewing. And me, sitting in a quiet pasture on a lonely road in a lost patch of Scotland, in Europe, on an adventure. As the sun burned away the dampness, I realized this was it.

  With four to five months away from the habits and routines that I had chained myself to at home, this was precious time. What was the sense of rushing down a beaten path with a map I had cribbed from others? This was my trip, my life, and I needed my own journey. I decided to throw away the itinerary and see where this might lead.

  More than an hour later, an older couple picked us up and drove us the rest of the way to Loch Ness. We settled in, hung out at the pubs and cafés, took in some of the sites, and savored our time. Eventually, we returned to London. At a party in Soho, I met some people who set me up with their friends in Paris. A week eating bread and cheese, drinking wine from the bottle, and trading off between the jardins and the museums — I was ecstatic. Next I met some people grabbing a train to Spain and tagged along. I kept going: Madrid, Lisbon, Morocco, Barcelona, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Athens, Santorini, Crete, and everywhere in between. An ever-expanding realm of new characters and experiences greeted me at each stop. A local gadabout in a bar tipped me off to a secluded beach, full of naked travelers, in Corfu. I found it. The border between Greece and Turkey was shut tight over some hotheadedness, but a Swiss girl showed me another route on a fishing boat from Rhodes.

  At a crossroads again: Marmaris, Turkey. My Swiss guide was heading for Afghanistan and points east, and she welcomed the company. It was July, getting late, and according to my schedule I should have been heading to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to start another leg of my life. I thought back to the road in Scotland. The choice was all mine. Where was this life headed?

  Regrets either way, I forged ahead — to Istanbul. Rumor had it that I could get to Amsterdam from there and that Freddie Laker would honor my ticket to New York. I had never been to Amsterdam. Why not extend my journey another foot?

  No time to waste.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  * * *

  A HIGHLY COLLABORATIVE CREATION, this book leaves me heavily indebted to a remarkable group of people: Hollis Heimbouch, my trusty editor and guide, who saw a book where none existed and rolled up her sleeves to make it happen. I am forever hers. Kent Lineback, my partner in crime, who had the unenviable task of trying to form my incoherent ramblings into a story. He worked tirelessly and deserves the credit for much that is right about the book, but he can't be held responsible for its shortcomings. My lovely, precious wife, Debra, who continues to stick by me through thick and thin, even though I give her countless reasons to give up on me. Bill Campbell, my mentor and longtime friend, who refuses to take the blame for anything I may have learned along the way. Bob Roden, lawyer extraordinaire, who shepherded me through the Byzantine business of publishing. Patty Cullen and her merry crew, whose cheery Konditorei makes the best nonfat chai latte in the Valley. Constance Hale, cooler-than-thou, who translated my gibberish into English and got us out of a tight spot. Genoveva Llosa, who was always there with kind and generous support. Dan Kellogg, who put the fun into funerals. The many entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other business associates who have given me much more than I can ever return. My dear family, especially my mother, who mercifully avoided any mention in this book, and the innumerable friends, teachers, and fellow travelers I have had the good fortune to meet along the way, all of whom have given me plenty to think about. And, of course, my constant sidekicks, the Horrible Hounds, Tika and Tali, who lounge listlessly at my feet as I toil, rolling on their backs from time to time to demand a rub when they think I may be missing the point.

  I thank you one and all from the bottom of my heart.

  —Randy Komisar

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  * * *

  RANDY KOMISAR lives in Portola Valley, California, with his wife, Debra Dunn, and Tika and Tali, the Horrible Hounds. He currently incubates startups as a Virtual CEO, helping to build businesses from vision and ideas. He has worked as an attorney in private practice and at Apple Computer, as the CEO of LucasArts Entertainment and Crystal Dynamics, as a cofounder of Claris Corporation and CFO of GO Corporation, and as a janitor, baker, and music promoter. He has also helped to build WebTV, TiVo, Mondo Media, and many other emerging companies.

  KENT LINEBACK is a writer, producer, and consultant living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has produced seventeen film and video programs for Harvard Business School and is currently collaborating on a book about L.L. Bean and completing a screenplay.

  Table of Contents

  Preface to the New Edition: P OSTMORTEM

  Prologue T HE R IDDLE

  1 T HE P ITCH

  2 T HE R ULES OF THE G AME

  3 T HE V IRTUAL CEO

  4 T HE D EFERRED L IFE P LAN

  5 The R OMANCE , N OT THE F INANCE

  6 T HE B IG I DEA

/>   7 T HE B OTTOM L INE

  8 T HE A RT OF L EADERSHIP

  9 T HE G AMBLE

  10 T HE W HOLE L IFE P LAN

  Epilogue T HE R OAD

  A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A BOUT THE A UTHORS