A Truck Full of Money (16 page)

The Intuit negotiator was a woman. Paul liked her. He considered her a formidable adversary. He thought of her as “cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, tough.” As Paul remembered, she said, “Are you fucking
kidding
me? Forty million for that piece of shit?” She hung up on him.

Paul called her back.

“Forty, that's crazy,” she said.

He said, “I agree. I'm probably worth a hundred thousand, but the market thinks I'm worth more, and I'm negotiating right now with four other companies.”

Karl was working at home when he received not an email but an actual phone call from Paul. This meant something important was up, or anyway something Paul thought was important. “You ought to come in to work today,” Paul said.

“Why?” asked Karl.

“Just come,” Paul said, and when Karl arrived, Paul told him, “We're going for a drive.” A drive to nowhere, so Paul could talk out of earshot of the other employees. “Intuit's agreed to acquire us for thirty-three and a half million dollars,” said Paul.

“Well,” said Karl. “What does this mean? What happens next?”

Paul said they'd have a company meeting and announce the sale, but right now he and Karl had to figure out who should get bonuses. In the car, Paul started naming the employees, beginning with Billo, whose share of the stock was tiny compared to Paul's, compared to Karl's. Paul said it wasn't enough. Karl agreed emphatically. They went through the list. “This is weird,” Karl said. “Why don't we give everybody a bonus?”

“Great idea. Let's do it!” said Paul.

They decided to cut their own shares in half—Paul's $16 million reduced to $8 million, Karl's $8 million to $4 million—and spread that money around among the others. When they announced this at the office, one of the beneficiaries asked, “And you're doing this why? Because you're communists or something?”

“Right,” said Paul, and Karl felt like applauding.

Paul's next stop was Hull. His family had moved down there for the summer, and so had his parents, with their toaster. They were visiting at Paul's house when Paul arrived. It was evening, and his father was sitting on the porch, taking in the sea air, facing out across the water toward Boston. He was an old man now, white-haired and, quite unlike his once forceful self, a bit fearful of the world. Paul had always felt wary of seeming boastful around him, but he simply had to tell him what he'd done. “I sold my company, Dad.”

His father smiled. But when Paul told him the price—“Thirty-three and a half million, Dad”—the old man's smile vanished. He glanced quickly from side to side. This was the man who once prided himself on never seeming fazed.
It's like he thinks the FBI is going to show up any minute,
Paul thought.

“Who negotiated for you?” his father asked.

“I did,” said Paul.

“You didn't have a lawyer do it?”

“No.”

“How do
you
know about negotiating?” his father said.

“Dad, it's exactly what I saw you do at yard sales.”

Paul started out with the title “director of Intuit small business Internet,” which meant he was in charge of packaging Intuit's most lucrative product into a website—its small-business accounting software, called QuickBooks. A year or so later, he was knighted vice president of technology and product development, a role that obliged him to travel regularly between New England and California.

He maintained an odd suburban father's normalcy. He insisted on driving his daughter to school. Afterward, on a number of occasions, he'd drive to Logan airport, catch a midmorning plane to California, attend an afternoon's worth of meetings at Intuit headquarters in Mountain View, and fly back to Boston on a red-eye, arriving in time the next morning to drive his daughter to school again.

He could take naps on the plane if he felt like napping, or snooze in the waiting areas of airports, but not if he ran into someone he thought was worth recruiting. He had asked Karl to automate his email so that every message ended “Intuit is hiring in Boston!” Paul was always recruiting, everywhere he went, talking in rapid-fire hyperbole to every possible candidate. Software companies were always on the lookout for talent, but recruiting seemed to fill a need in Paul—for family improvement, he believed. After a while, when he arrived at Intuit headquarters, someone was bound to ask him, “Who'd you hire on the airplane today?”

He was moving fast. He worked long hours on Intuit business and also made time for projects on the side. He was financing a website for rating businesses, which he called Mancala. He was helping his brother Ed get a new company up and running—Intermute, which would develop antispam products. And he was trying to do something with the Worldwide Xiangqi League.

For a time, Paul paid a programmer to manage the Xiangqi site, but he liked the young man so much that he poached him from himself and sent him to work for Ed at Intermute. He did much the same thing at Intuit, sending the 10X coder Jeff Rago to Intuit's California headquarters, in order to “infect the culture there.” Several times he asked Karl if he would take over the maintenance of the Xiangqi system. Karl told him, “I don't think so. Not anymore.”

Hypothetically, the Xiangqi site could have kept on running by itself. But like gardens, websites die if left untended. All sorts of things can go wrong. Changes in technology can cause glitches in the system. Even a temporary power outage at a data center can bring down a site for good, if no one stands ready to reboot the software properly. Paul wrote Karl asking how many people were still playing at Club Xiangqi. “Oh, ten to twenty,” Karl wrote back. When Karl looked again, a few years later, the imaginary palace had disappeared. It had died the little death of software. Karl didn't feel particularly nostalgic about it. For one thing, he had never played the game. Later he wrote that there were plenty of ghosts haunting the Web. He added this epitaph: “mice eating the last copy of a book in a library, a cuneiform tablet sinking into the Nile…”

Karl stayed on with Paul's Intuit team, taking care of the server computers that lay behind QuickBooks online, and working on special jobs for Paul, usually the automation of some dull administrative task.

After taxes, Karl's share from the sale of Boston Light amounted to about three million dollars. Paul urged him to invest some of his winnings in his start-up Mancala. Karl thought,
Who am I to say no?
That company failed, a fact Paul brought up for years afterward, in the spirit of a monk studying a skull. Paul lost two million dollars. Karl lost a hundred thousand. But then, not long afterward, Paul told Karl he should invest another hundred thousand in Intermute, and when that company was sold, Karl's investment turned into a million. He was amazed and a little dismayed. He told the accountant he shared with Paul, “There's something wrong here. I didn't do anything. I wrote a check. This system is not sustainable.”

“That's capitalism,” the accountant replied.

For a few early spring months, Karl lived in Paul's summer house in Hull. Karl and his girlfriend of fourteen years had broken up, and Paul told him to use the house on the ocean as if it were his own. Karl bought Paul a new piano to thank him for the stock in Boston Light—and for everything else. Karl had also begun to give away a large part of his winnings to help the family of a newfound friend, a woman he had encountered on the Internet. In December 1999, he and Paul exchanged these emails:

karl: I have news: I've unexpectedly met the love of my life and am moving to Oregon early next year…Do you still want to employ me?

pme: You're kidding.

That's amazing.

I'm dying to hear the details.

Yes, I want you to work for us no matter where you are!

Ok?

Two days later, Paul wrote again, on the same subject:

pme: I've been thinking a *lot* about your situation over the past week.

I have a lot of different emotions about your life right now, e.g.,

—I'm jumping for joy about your new love, and your optimism about it. :-)

—I'm very sad to have you leave Boston, for lots of different reasons. You are one of my closest friends, my family loves you, and especially over the past two years, you have become an important part of my own self identity. I'm scared to have you leave. :)

(I'm of course *not* suggesting you not leave, but I'm just telling you about my sadness.)

—To be honest, I'm a little scared with your reckless abandon with your newfound wealth. :( E.g., I'd like to manage $1MM of your BLS earnings for you :) so I can both help it grow and protect it from you. :)

Paul needn't have worried.

karl [many years later]: I kept plenty, enough so I wouldn't have to work again barring catastrophe (in which case we'll probably all starve to death anyway, so who cares)…At some pretty early point in the millions, except for people who use money to keep score (if any such actually exist in real life, I'm not sure), it's just a number.

By the time he wrote this, Karl had been living for a decade in a house on a remote shore of the Pacific, reading and listening to music and writing free software. He was also a leader of the group that maintained Knuth's T
E
X—an “exquisitely-cut diamond” thirty years old by then, an antique that had to be made to fit a constantly changing setting. Karl worked on these projects gratis, aware of the irony that work he had done on commercial software was paying his way.

The bitter end of the dot-com bubble came in the middle of 2001, when the NASDAQ index reached its nadir, falling from around 5,000 at its height to around 1,100, a decline of about 78 percent in the value of the listed stocks. Paul's timing had been, as he put it, “
obscenely
lucky.”

Of the Internet companies spawned in the era, more than half failed—many because they could no longer find investors to finance their losses after stock prices crashed. This might well have been the fate of Boston Light. But Paul just happened to sell near the top of the market, and when the crash came, he and his team were safely in the harbor of Intuit.

Paul's greatest luck, his purest, in which he had no hand at all, came on September 11, 2001. He and some colleagues had booked the doomed flight from Boston to Los Angeles, but at the last minute they switched to a less expensive itinerary. Paul was sitting on the cheaper flight, the plane still on the ground at Logan airport, when his wife called in tears and told him the news. Paul stood up and said to the cabin in general, “This plane's not going anywhere.” Then he walked off, probably the last time one could exit an airplane without permission. He stopped to watch TV at an airport bar just long enough to see the video of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center. Then he drove home. It was hard to stop wondering about the stranger who might have taken his seat on the plane. He rarely told the story to anyone outside his family.

Paul left Intuit after only three and a half years. The company had paid him well in cash and stock, and he still had most of his money from the sale of Boston Light. He could afford not to work for a while, and he had a compelling reason. His father was suffering from Alzheimer's dementia, and, Paul told himself, he wanted to take care of him.

It was his mother's last wish that Paul do this. In the early spring of 2001, she gave Paul a journal that recorded his father's increasingly erratic behavior. Paul was astonished. His father's familiar gestures—rapping his knuckles on a table to emphasize a point, for instance—were all intact. But these were only camouflage, obscuring gathering dementia. The evidence was undeniable once Paul started looking for it.

His mother died three weeks later, and with a flourish. She asked that all her children gather in her room at New England Baptist Hospital. As always there were seven views of the scene, and also as usual, Paul's and his brother Tim's were the most nearly alike, and the darkest. Their father sat in a chair beside the bed where their mother lay propped up, her seven children ranged before her. To Paul and Tim, their father looked forlorn and confused, and the confusion was probably a blessing, if Paul's memory of his mother's speech was accurate: “I have felt for a long time that my marrying your father was a mistake, but looking at each of you, I see what you got from him, what you got from me, and only now I realize it was a success.”

Then, according to Tim, she said, “Jesus is waiting for me, and this is my last day.” She asked her children to say goodbye individually, and they went up one by one, in birth order, and hugged her.

Of the seven, Tim seemed to have, or at least was willing to express, the most objective feelings about his childhood. He said of his mother, “I wanted her to be my mommy, and there were too many kids to share her with.” He also said, “Mom's lack of emotional warmth was hard. I always thought of her as cold, not mean-cold, detached. I kept looking for my mom to be warm, but I think I was near fifty before I figured out it wasn't going to happen.” When his turn came, Tim went to her bedside and hugged her. He was crying. “Mom, Mom.”

She didn't let this go on long. “Come on, now,” she said. “There's others waiting.”

Tim couldn't help but feel amused, her words expressed his problem so succinctly. “I could make a lot out of this,” he told himself as he retreated.

When Paul's turn came, the next to last, he did as the others had done. He went to her bedside and gave her a hug. She didn't say goodbye, though. She gave him instructions. “Keep up the good work,” she said. She added, “And take care of your father.”

Paul was thirty-seven. He had earned a master's degree in computer science, he had been a senior vice president of three different software companies. He had created several enterprises of his own and sold one of them for millions.
Keep up the good work
. Most people would not have heard what Paul did in those familiar words. He thought his mother was saying he hadn't yet done enough to win her approval. Now he never would, but at least he could try to take care of his father.

There were bound to be difficult moments between a son and a fading father. Paul would take him out for short road trips, and every time the old man got settled in the passenger seat he would rediscover the navigation device, the GPS. He would stare at it and say to Paul, “What's that?” And Paul would explain, and his father would say, “Could
you
build one of those?” And Paul would say yes, and his father would smile. It gave Paul a wonderful feeling to see that smile. But then one day he took his father out in a different car. “Where's your other car?” Paul's father asked.

“In the shop,” Paul said. “It needed a brake job.”

“You're too good to do your own brakes now?” his father said.

His dad's scorn was unmistakable. Paul wanted to lift his chin and say, “I could do my own brakes. I
choose
to do other things.” But it was far too late by then for Paul to declare himself, to say that he wasn't the same as everyone and didn't want to be.

Take care of your father.
It became the hardest job Paul had ever known. He had a lot of help from his siblings and especially his sister Nancy, but his father's condition claimed more and more of his time. And more and more, “caregiving” seemed like another name for defeat.

One day he took his father out to lunch at the usual place, Bertucci's, in West Roxbury. At the table, his father kept saying the same things over and over. This was nothing new. Maybe that was the problem. Paul began to imagine others listening in. He felt embarrassed—for his father, by his father—and ashamed for feeling that way. He ordered a drink. He felt better, looser inside. Lunch over, he helped his father out to the car and clipped the seatbelt around him. Paul had begun backing up when someone in a car behind them leaned on his horn. Paul threw open his door and strode back to the honking car. He could see that the driver was a big guy, and he was glad. After a brief conversation—“What the fuck are you honking about?” “Fuck you, asshole!”—Paul grabbed the door handle. He was going to pull the guy out and get him on the ground, but during one of those lucid moments in the midst of madness Paul saw revelation cross the man's face—
This guy is nuts!
—and before Paul could get the door open, the man had locked it and rolled up his window. Then, from behind the glass, he resumed yelling threats.

Paul's hands were still trembling when he got back into his car. Then he saw his father's frightened face and heard the old man saying, almost in singsong, “Paul, be careful. Paul, be careful.”

He read medical journals, researching his father's many illnesses—pituitary tumors and bladder cancer and late-onset diabetes and Alzheimer's dementia and the consequences of quadruple bypass surgery. He had long consultations with half a dozen specialists. His father was on twenty different medications when Paul got involved. He gradually reduced that number to eight. When necessary, he put diapers on his father.

Finally, Paul and his siblings agreed to put him in a nursing home. When his father took a fall there and hit his head and never woke up, Paul felt he'd killed him. He was an engineer, after all. He knew about the connectedness of things. If he had studied his father's condition more diligently, he would have realized that Alzheimer's robs its victims of their motor skills, that his father was at risk for falling, and that special steps had to be taken to keep him safe. Paul looked for ways to excuse himself. He had been worn-out, he hadn't hired enough help. But his mind was unconvinced.
I failed. My mom told me to take care of him, and I failed.

Paul descended into what he called “a dark place,” that familiar region of sleepless nights and nameless fear, of sitting by windows waiting for dawn. His marriage came undone. This was something he seldom talked about to anyone, though he would say he felt the fault was his. It was a source of lingering guilt. He moved out—his choice—and lived for a time that winter in the summer house in Hull. Joe Mahoney was still advising Intuit. Paul would meet him periodically for breakfast or drinks in Cambridge. “I just have a lot of anger issues,” Mahoney remembered Paul telling him. Paul would say, “I tend to anger, and I just don't deal with it very well.” Sometimes, at 4
A.M.
, Mahoney would awake to the ringing of his phone and hear Paul speaking to him half coherently. Mahoney was usually too groggy to make much sense of what Paul said, but the tenor of Paul's voice was unmistakable. “Total panic attack,” Mahoney called it.

In his office at home, Paul kept a photograph of the psychiatrist he shared with Tom White. In the picture, the doctor—Jack Green—is a small man with liver spots on the backs of his hands, deep-creased cheeks and forehead, a ropy neck, salt-and-pepper hair, and he wears a comforting smile. One's eye is drawn to the array of things around him: trays full of papers, bookcases filled with books and looseleaf binders, photographs, containers holding items such as greeting cards and scribbled notes, a box of staples, a jar of pens, a few pill bottles. For all its clutter, the corner of the doctor's office seems not orderly, but not random, either. One imagines that the things around him are arrayed in odd, complex streams of association, like the memories within a mind that has taken in a lot and has sorted it out well enough for periodic use, like a rendering of what Proust calls “the vast structure of recollection.”