A Truck Full of Money (14 page)

In later years, Paul was often asked to tell his success story to business students—for instance, at MIT, which had a course in entrepreneurship called “The Founder's Journey.” Paul's journey upward began at Interleaf, where the CTO, Steve Pelletier, recognized a quality that removed Paul from the ranks of most programmers. The best of them, Pelletier had found, could keep entire complex schemes in mind. But only a few could look beyond the code itself and see its “meta content,” its place in a company's strategy, its likely effects on customers and sales. Early on, Pelletier thought he spotted that rare ability, “a superb meta sense,” in Paul. Other executives agreed. Paul had “management potential.”

Does programming attract strange people, or does it make them strange? Either way, a coder moving into management is apt to find the transition hard. A friend of Paul's put the matter this way: “Eventually, if programmers are successful, they rise and have to deal with people.” Paul was first made a product leader, not managing people exactly, but coordinating the work of five other programmers. Soon he took a scunner to one of the team and complained to Larry Bohn, who told him: “Paul, you need her. Someone has to do the work you don't want to do.”

Bouts of hypomania didn't help. On a day after Paul had been promoted, one of the elite programmers approached Joe Mahoney and said of Paul, “I half expect to see him come out of the bathroom with green lithium powder around his lips.”

Mahoney was puzzled. He didn't even know what lithium was. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“When he's in a really good mood and he's around a bunch of people and he's doing a bunch of really positive stuff, you just watch him. A week later he's gonna whack someone.”

Mahoney replied, “You're full of shit. What is this? Your fucking armchair psychological shit?” And afterward, of course, Mahoney couldn't help but start to watch his young friend. Soon enough he saw the pattern for himself—cheerful, enthusiastic Paul in a sudden fury, dressing down one of his team. “Don't you know how to write code? This stuff is crap!”

Nonetheless, Paul's bosses kept offering him promotions. He resisted. He didn't want to run meetings or deal with other coders' problems. He wanted to go on writing code. But then his wrists began to ache. He began to imagine they were bleeding within. He visited a doctor, who diagnosed carpal tunnel syndrome and suggested surgery. Real management seemed like the only alternative.

His idea of managing at that point required that he write some code, but only in bursts, short enough to be endurable and necessary, for the simple reason that he didn't know another way to do the job. When he disagreed with others on his little team, he would begin by drawing diagrams on a whiteboard and criticizing their approaches. He thought of this as “beating up their code.” And when they ganged up on him, insisting that his solution would take three weeks to execute, he would stride back to Speed and spend about an hour writing some of the code in question. He called this “coding the proof into existence.” He thought of management as “battle.” He was bound to win when the odds were only one to five. He could handle ten, though it was hard, especially with aching wrists. But when he was made responsible for fifty, he realized that he had to find new ways of contending.

Can people reinvent themselves? Many must believe they can. Otherwise, the great self-improvement library of America wouldn't keep on growing. Paul had never felt a need for self-help books, but he had a quality of mind that was open to their sort of promise, a quality more generative than reflective, a childlike innocence about impossibility, or at least, as his old friend Karl had noticed, a straightforward way of facing difficulties: “You see the problem, you solve the problem.”

How to manage people when outcoding them no longer sufficed? For the first and only time in his life, Paul turned to books of business advice. One was called
Executive Leadership: A Practical Guide to Managing Complexity.
Another was
SPIN Selling.
The acronym stood for Situation, Problem, Identification, Need. The book was full of advice on ways of promoting one's ideas inside an organization. He went at those and other self-help guides with much the same intensity that he had brought to programming.

Several trained philosophers joined Interleaf in its early years. One was a marketing executive named David Weinberger. He remembered the figure Paul had cut on arrival, a young hotshot developer fairly typical of the breed: “brash, self-confident, ruffling feathers, professionally arrogant.” How many years had it been since then? No more than three or four, and Paul was hardly recognizable. He still wore jeans, and he was still extremely energetic. But now, in his elevated role as a manager of managers, Paul seemed judicious, considerate, and even, when necessary, patient. Evidently, others liked to work for him. What had happened? Weinberger felt he had to ask. Paul had become a really talented manager, Weinberger said. How had he done it?

“The brash young developer wasn't working for me anymore,” Paul replied. “So I read books and tried to change.”

An extraordinary statement, the kind one remembers. “How unusual that is,” Weinberger said years later. “To realize that you don't just need to change techniques, but also personality.”

Paul wasn't transformed, of course, just modified. He went back on lithium now and then, but he found it easy to quit the drug, and he avoided it most of the time. He still spent some nights awake staring out the bedroom window, and there were still moments when everyone around him seemed too slow to understand him, moments that he spent writhing with impatience. The difference was that he usually managed to hide his anger and to make his points laboriously, going from A to B to C even when the way to C seemed obvious.

As all help-in-business books have promised since Benjamin Franklin, self-improvement paid. Paul became vice president of engineering. In the fourth quarter of 1994, after Interleaf reported a loss of $20 million, the board fired the CEO and made Paul one of a triumvirate temporarily in charge of the entire company. His rise in the hierarchy brought the first international travel of his life—a trip to Germany to make a pitch to Siemens, and two others, even headier, to visit customers in Japan—and it also offered him the chance to negotiate his first taste of wealth. The board wanted the triumvirate to find a new CEO, and they also asked Paul to fix the problems with the product line. But the board had fired the CEO and made these requests before determining Paul's pay, and he took full advantage. They'd have to give him a salary of $175,000 a year and $2 million in stock options, he said. Otherwise he would quit. In fairly short order, Paul and the two other triumvirs cut the number of vice presidents by half and found a new CEO, who gave Paul a choice of jobs. He could run engineering and all the business units, or, if he liked, he could run marketing. Paul said he didn't know anything about marketing, and the new boss said, “Great. Run marketing.”
Why not?
Paul thought.
I'm way over my head already.

On the face of it, he had become a different creature from the people writing code on the bottom floor. He had become a suit. But the transition was far from complete. From the time when Paul had first joined their ranks, as vice president of engineering, business executives had seemed like an odd bunch to him.
What do these guys do?
he had wondered. They seemed to spend a lot of their time creating jobs for themselves, managers creating a need for management. He would look at the man who was the CEO at the time and tell himself,
Okay, he's a suit. He probably plays a good golf game, probably has a fancy house. Okay, he's different. That doesn't mean he's bad.
Paul would tell himself that programmers and suits were too dismissive of each other, but then he'd go to a meeting in the CEO's conference room and give a presentation about a revision of the Interleaf software and everyone in the room would look puzzled or start glancing out the windows. And then another executive would get up and give what seemed to Paul like an endless, mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation about the company's financials, and all the executives would be nodding at each other and shaking their heads and pursing their lips as if to say, “Good point.”

He was a suit who rarely wore a suit, and who thought of himself as a programmer at heart. He tried to keep track of his former compatriots by reading their “release mail,” all the notes the programmers wrote when they added code to the system. In this way, he met the young Bill O'Donnell, and was moved as a craftsman might be moved by the work of a newfound peer. The kid, Billo, was a monster coder, a “10X coder,” able to do the work of ten, one of the best in the company, Paul thought.

Having ascended to management, Paul wasn't supposed to code anymore, but for a long time he had kept his hand in surreptitiously, working with various programmers. One of them was Schwenk, a youngster then. During their first time of working together, Schwenk really feared the experience would give him an ulcer—emails from Paul coming at all hours, Schwenk misunderstanding many of them, Paul misunderstanding Schwenk's replies, until finally Schwenk worked up his courage and told Paul, “I'm not going to answer emails in the middle of the night anymore.”

Paul had also kept in touch with his old classmate Karl Berry, and when the Free Software Foundation had run out of money to pay Karl's salary, Paul had hired him at Interleaf. Among other, more important roles, Karl acted as Paul's personal coder, automating many of Paul's administrative tasks.

Karl did his programming mainly at home. He didn't like meetings. He once said, “I don't want to talk to people. I want to email with them.” The arrangement suited Paul. His duties at Interleaf kept him very busy. Email was an efficient and relatively safe means for managing a relationship that mixed business and friendship. Their exchanges were often framed like conversations, between “pme” and “karl,” and came with graphic frowns and smiles:

:-( :-)

One day, in an email praising Karl—he was someone who “blindsides us with awesome/quick solutions” and who “also sends out sharp criticisms/suggestions”—Paul let something slip: “As long as I work here and that will still be a while more, I'll make sure to remove any/all admin/politics from you and to keep your work environment as pleasant as possible.” This exchange ensued:

karl: Uh oh. I know this was supposed to be reassuring, but it has the opposite effect on me! Does this mean the end is in sight?

pme: No, not in sight.

karl: I hope you'll take me with you, if possible. :-)

pme: I certainly will, whenever that is…

Whenever came two months later.

pme: Call me at work today or at home tonight. I need to speak with you.

Around 1994, Paul and Bill O'Donnell came up with an idea for a utility that would let Interleaf customers create their own webpages. Billo designed and wrote the software. It won a prize, but when he and Paul presented it to Interleaf's sales force, they were all but laughed out of the room. One of the salesmen said, “Boeing's not going to use the
Web.
People have pictures of their cats on the Web.”

The sales force wasn't wrong. Only eight million Americans were connected to the Internet at the time, and most of them used it just for email. And the Web was all but brand-new, its content very thin. But the technology represented a vast improvement in the distribution of electronic documents and thus, potentially, a great enhancement of the Internet. Paul saw unbounded promise in it and in the growing host of new online technologies. So he was disposed to listen when, in 1995, the founder of a local Internet-related start-up began recruiting him.

This was the fledgling company NetCentric. The founder pitched it as a twenty-first-century phone company, its first product facilities for faxing over the Internet. Businesses and law firms all relied on faxing for the rapid exchange of documents, but they were obliged to use telephone lines, and the rates, especially for long-distance transmission, were still high. In principle, NetCentric could offer them a much better deal, because faxes could travel over the Internet for free. Two reputable venture capital firms in Boston had already bet five million on the new company. Paul was offered the job of running engineering, in return for a substantial share of the company's stock.

Only half of his Interleaf stock options had vested. Quitting Interleaf now meant leaving a million dollars behind. He didn't care. The move looked like a sensible step into the future. Once he had made it, it seemed only obvious to ask Billo and Schwenk and a few others to follow him. He soon went to work on Karl as well.

Paul felt strongly about Karl, not just as a friend but as a skilled and trustworthy coder. “Some programmers, if you put them in a room and say, ‘Take things coming in the left window and have them go out the right window,' they'll say, ‘Sure. But what if I add more windows?' or ‘What if there's a dragon that melts the windows?' Karl, if you ask him to do something, he does it.”

pme: Any way we could get you to do a 1-2 (or 3?) week fulltime contract for us?

karl: I would commit suicide if I tried to do this. Sorry.

pme: Well, that would certainly defeat the purpose. :-)

Karl did agree to work part-time for Paul, and from home. Paul offered to get him a NetCentric business card.

karl: I don't want a business card :-).

pme: So like, do you have a home page yet? You should.

karl: No. I hate the idea. HTML is too limiting; everybody's home page looks like everyone else's, and I refuse to cooperate :-).

pme: You don't have to cooperate—plenty of room for creativity…I think you should at least create an anti-karl home page, one depicting the not-you, e.g., “I love driving my BMW through city traffic…” :-)

Paul thought NetCentric was bound to make a fortune, and he wanted Karl to get a share. Did Karl want to buy some of the stock that Paul owned? Karl replied, “Yes, I guess so. Although I've never ventured into such things before.”

Other emails on this subject followed:

karl: I'm thinking $10K (remember, I'm poor :-).

pme: How about $5K for now, possibly more later? I think you'll get an unbelievable return on investment, but there is of course the chance that we could fall on our faces and you'd lose all of your money (and me tons more due to huge investments I've made :-).

karl: So this is like gambling. :-)

Karl bought $5,000 worth of Paul's stock, and Paul kept coaxing him to work full-time at NetCentric.

pme: You'd fit fine. People love you here…

karl: They do? It never seems like it.

pme: They do. Really.

karl: I suppose I should at least pretend to care about money :-)…

pme: Don't do it for money. Money is a yucky reason to switch jobs. Decide what is best for your lifestyle and goals right now. I think we'd probably offer a more stimulating environment, brighter/passionate people, also more upbeat. Also (if you care), you could have a chance to work on leading edge technology that *will* have a big impact on millions of people and the net.

About two months later Paul was out of a job.

He got in a fight with NetCentric's boss—over pay for engineers. The boss later insisted that Paul had quit. But Paul felt he had been fired, and he took it very hard.

He emailed Karl the news but none of the details. In all innocence, Karl wrote:

karl: BTW, not that I'm in any rush about it, but I presume the $5K you let me buy of your stock will be coming back to me now with some minimal interest…

pme: I thought about that last night. I feel awkward and am not sure what's the best thing to do…I'd *certainly* be happy to do as you suggest, say, send you $6K instead of the $5K you invested. Would that be ok with you? Do you think I'd be being fair? I want to do whatever is the right thing…No matter how we decide to resolve this one, I desperately want to work with you again.

The stock Paul owned in NetCentric had no present cash value—and would have no value at all within a few years, when NetCentric went out of business. He had made a lot of money at Interleaf, though, and had saved enough to live on for a year or two at least. What he lacked was a purpose. By now he had traded in his first house in Arlington for a much larger one. He had made an office in a corner of its attic, stuffy with the scent of old unpainted wood. The only natural light came from a pair of small windows under the eaves. He had a chair, a couple of tables, computing equipment. He spent a lot of time up there in the days after he left NetCentric, voyaging out into the land of the Internet while seated under the rafters, and writing cheerful-seeming emails to Karl about possible new enterprises.

It wasn't hard to put on a brave face for Karl. They met almost exclusively by computer, after all. In fact, Paul was in a bad way. He had talked Billo and Schwenk and Karl and others into following him to NetCentric, and he had let them down. He had reason to feel depressed, in the ordinary sense of the word. But this was something different. This was the other side of mania, despair out of all proportion to whatever brought it on, to any apparent cause. It didn't allow him to feel that he'd simply had a setback. It insisted on his worst fears.
Maybe I'm not supposed to be a VP of engineering. Maybe I'm just incompetent.

The undercurrent of such thoughts was composed of gloom and lassitude and fearfulness, at times panic, and it felt like something deep and wide moving inside him, like a chemical flood. He tried to hide his distress from his family, but of course there was no hiding it from his wife. She did all she could to help him. She was always sympathetic, struggling to comfort him. But he felt sick beyond all help, a state of mind that all but guaranteed the fact.

He wasn't taking lithium, nor did he go back on it again. Many nights he couldn't sleep for more than a few hours. During some he couldn't lie in bed. A bed seemed too insubstantial. While his family slept, he would climb out and crawl across the floor toward a window, crawling because he felt the need for something solid under him. He'd lie there for hours, watching for the sun to appear above the sill. Afterward, he would remember telling himself,
This cloud's going to lift sooner or later. It may take a year, but it will lift.
The sun was the evidence he counted on. Even though on some nights the wait seemed perpetual, one knew after all that the sun would rise and then there would be forward movement in the world, promising relief.

Paul had long practiced his own form of adult education, partly trying to make up for his truancy at Boston Latin but mostly out of a curiosity that ranged from rap music to international medicine to fine arts. He had read about bipolar disorder ever since receiving his diagnosis, and he had determined that he wasn't one of those especially prone to suicide. He knew he'd never kill himself. In the past when he had lain awake like this, staring out windows, he had sometimes summoned up an image drawn from high school English class. He was Gulliver imprisoned by the tiny Lilliputians, laid out on his back, tied to the ground with a web of tiny ropes. In his mind, he would roll his shoulders from side to side, and eventually, after long exertions, one of the ropes would snap, then another and another.

One day up in the attic, memories of playing xiangqi, Chinese chess, floated into Paul's mind. The World Wide Web hadn't existed when he had first discovered the game at UMass. He looked to see if you could now play online and he found a xiangqi club, not a website, just a link to a program that would let two people play each other. It had been created by a couple of Chinese graduate students at Boston University.

He wrote to Karl, asking for help in setting up something much better. His emails were buoyant. “Xiang Qi (chinese chess) is the most popular game in the world, with an estimated 500,000,000 people who know how to play it,” he wrote. “I think there's a very good chance that with little work, we could setup the #1 web service for the #1 game in the world.” It would also provide a public service: “I'm eager to have westerners learn about this game—anything that can increase cultural exchange is a good thing.”

Karl's reply was guarded. What had happened to Paul's other ideas?

Paul replied, “I decided that I work too hard in general, and deserve a sabbatical before launching into something full force.” Setting up xiangqi for the Web would be “a lower impact effort,” and almost certainly turn out to be “a neat little profitable venture.”

All this sounded like the optimistic Paul, the only Paul Karl knew. While writing this way, Paul could believe he was on the verge of getting back in the game of software commerce. But inevitably such a cheery thought summoned up its opposite, and he would think of how far he had fallen—from executive suites and million-dollar stock options and hundreds of people reporting to him, to a lonely seat in an attic, chasing fantasies.

And yet this new adventure had intrinsic appeal. The xiangqi board and pieces had been for Paul an introduction to an ancient and artistic culture, and they still seemed wonderfully fanciful.

A river divides the two halves of the xiangqi board; crossing it, pawns acquire added powers. There are two kings, but the rules confine them and their counselors to their respective palaces, a section of squares marked off on opposite sides of the board. The horse, roughly equivalent to a knight, is said to be “hobbled” when certain configurations of adjacent pieces prevent it from moving. There are chariots and cannons—the Chinese name for the cannon sounds like “Pow,” which delighted Paul.

Xiangqi was like a magic carpet. While he rode it, the dreary attic disappeared. Long days and nights were shortened. Over the next two months, as New England's springtime arrived—invisible through the slits of windows under the eaves—details of the website assembled in his mind. It was like a place in a dream, like a vision he received, a little pleasure dome for modern lovers of xiangqi. In this vision, members of a Worldwide Xiangqi League would come from near and far to gather at Club Xiangqi. They would sign up, gratis, and choose their playing names, and then each would receive a password and a special league email address for staying in touch with members and administrators. Each would also get a special webpage. You could open yours and look at the list of all your past games and order up replays. Looking for a game? You'd enter the lobby and take a look at the names and ratings—from novice to expert—of other unpaired players, including “robots,” xiangqi-playing programs. When you found an opponent, you would order a game room, each equipped with the finest of boards, colorfully painted. On the screen, the pieces, disks three-dimensionally rendered with their Chinese characters painted in red, were going to be imbued with the vigor that players like his Vietnamese friends at UMass had given them. When you moved a piece, it would bounce to its new place, emitting the champagne-cork pop. When you took one of your opponent's pieces and removed it from the board, that slap-slap of wood on wood would resound as if to say, “Take that!” You could play unrecorded practice rounds, or, if you only wanted to watch, you could go into the lobby, consult the list of games in progress, then enter your chosen room. Trusted players, “coaches,” would have commands at their disposal for curbing bad behavior. A “Ban” command would allow them to expunge the chronically, egregiously obnoxious.