A Truck Full of Money (19 page)

It was a consultant who had come up with
KAYAK
. An imperfect name, Paul told students when lecturing on “branding,” because most Americans probably didn't know how to spell it. He remembered the day when that issue became moot, when he learned that merely typing “K” into Google brought up Kayak as the first option. “We own a letter!” he had shouted to his team. An odd name for a travel company, a kayak being one of the slowest forms of travel known, but the marketing consultant had pointed out that the palindromic Ks were memorable, and a kayak was, as she put it, “a vessel that allows an individual to easily navigate turbulent waters.” You might see the name and subconsciously imagine that even your airplane ride would be scenic, quiet, healthful.

BLADE
was his favorite name, also one of his oldest, registered by Karl on November 22, 1998. Paul had applied it to several enterprises, most recently the little group working on Road Wars. But he had always felt that
BLADE
was meant for something big. It fit most of his criteria for excellence in an online business name: short (no more than three syllables long), easy to spell, discernible even if spoken over a cellphone with a bad connection. And it had the advantage that outside of cutlery it didn't really denote anything, and could therefore be applied to almost any kind of enterprise and make it sound shiny, up-to-date, maybe a little dangerous.

In his mind the new Blade was looking more and more like a potpourri. It would provide “foster care” to “baby start-ups,” all based on “big ideas.”
QSHOP
, from the days of Boston Light, might assemble online the inventories and branding power of ten of America's most popular retailers and do battle with the likes of Amazon.com. Maybe another Blade company would create an online bank to rival the giant Fidelity. He hadn't named that concept yet. For the moment he called it “a Fidelity-killer.”

Kayak, his big score, had been built on an idea that came from other people. There was no shame in this for him. As he would say, ideas are cheap, and worthless without execution. Yet ideas kept coming, as if Paul were channeling the ice baron as he slept in his house beside Spy Pond. The mind, after all, is an incubator. Blade was meant to be a dreamer of dreams, an idea of ideas, Paul's mind made incarnate.

Jack Green had died ten years ago, and Paul had been looking for a replacement ever since. His search continued as, on one spring morning, he pulled up in front of a house on a quiet residential street. There were buds on the trees. He got out and smiled toward the house of his latest psychologist. “All right. I'll be all fixed in an hour.”

Now it was May, and the grass that sloped down to Spy Pond was green and growing, and the geese were back and shitting on it. When he'd moved into his house, Paul had told his neighbors he would put a stop to this, and they had smiled knowingly, and he'd set out to show them: fox urine sprayed on the grass, a light that came on automatically after sunset and mimicked a fox's eyes, a device that broadcast the calls of hawks. Maybe this summer those interventions would work.

Change was in the air. In the third week of May, Kayak's sale became official at last. Stock options could be cashed in. Schwenk had stopped coming to work two weeks before. Paul had asked him to do this, figuring that so long as Schwenk was around, everyone with a problem would keep asking him to fix it, and no one or no group of people would begin to learn his roles.

Billo waited until late May to depart. He announced his resignation in an email:

Hey KAYAK,

All good things must come to an end, and after over 3,400 days, 6,600 checkins, and 626,324 lines of code, so must our time together…

KAYAK has been by far the most fun I've ever had at work, and you are the best team I've known. I hope you are all as proud as I am of what we made together, and I hope you continue to make it a little better every day…

Love, Billo

On his final day, Billo gave a talk about the technical history of Kayak and told a few stories from the early days. Almost everyone in the Concord office attended, and when Billo was done, the engineering team stood and applauded, a rare event in the annals of an unsentimental trade.

As for Paul, he couldn't in good conscience yet say a formal goodbye. He had to coach a new CTO and oversee the transition.

Around the time the sale closed, Paul recorded a long weekend of internal turbulence—two days reminiscent of the nights when he lay on the floor waiting for dawn and then, on the third day, the opposite:

I had an awful weekend home alone. And today I am super manic. My body is screaming with energy. Mind rushing. Hard to type. I'm seeking help. And going to stop drinking at least for the week until I stabilize.

He called his psychiatrist, who prescribed an antipsychotic called Seroquel, used among other things for acute cases of depression and mania. It was a drug Paul had tried and rejected a few years before because it had left him feeling groggy for about two weeks. Following the doctor's orders now, he took 50 milligrams. Soon afterward he called his doctor and said, “I'm feeling weird.” His doctor said, “Triple the dose.” Paul slept for eighteen hours. He felt restored when he woke up. He stopped taking the drug, and soon he was heading full speed in several directions again. Blade was foremost.

“This summer I'm not even doing a financing plan for Blade, I'm just designing a great office,” he said. It was enough to keep him busy. He had decisions to make about power and heat and bathroom fixtures, about how to secure gigabit Internet access, still hard to obtain in Boston. No detail was too small to be examined, not even the Blade business card, even though he hadn't used one for years. He had research to conduct at nightclubs, taking photos of features he thought he might borrow. There were new neighbors to meet at local art galleries and shows.

Fort Point, the site of Blade's incipient office, was an old industrial neighborhood and for many years home to a community of artists now at risk of being displaced by rising rents and law firms. A website advertising loft rentals in Fort Point described it as a place where one could “live inspired.” You could walk through Blade's immediate precincts in perfect safety and find a bistro, but the old brick buildings remained, with faded advertisements, the pentimento of commerce past, painted on their walls. The flourishes around windows and cornices suggested old-time masons with the freedom to invent. You could wander down the oddly sloping sidewalk on Summer Street on June evenings and imagine this was still an old and moody half-abandoned neighborhood.

The Blade office looked less inviting. It remained much as Paul had found it, a dank, dark concrete chamber like a dungeon, with tangles of pipes and wires in the ceiling. Paul went there nearly every day now, to confer with his architect and various contractors, and also to administer the Blade tour for invited guests—friends from the varied parts of his life, sound engineers, potential investors, fellow entrepreneurs. He would say he was trying to stir up interest, but the tours seemed like a source of pure pleasure for him, and any audience would do.

If guests came down the stairs from the building's front entrance, Paul would insist on leading them back outside so they could have the full experience. He'd take them out to the short alley that ran along one side of the building and, talking fast, he'd lead them to a somewhat battered green metal door.

So imagine that it's Blade-by-night and you are coming to one of my monthly, or maybe bimonthly, Blade events. You're walking down this sketchy-looking alley toward this funky green metal door where a six-foot-eight-inch Haitian bouncer stands guard. As you come inside, the lights begin to pulse, you open the black curtain that will be hanging here at the top of what will be a short flight of stairs, and suddenly you see your face and a sequence of your favorite photos all displayed on Blade's many screens, while the ubiquitous speakers play your favorite song.

Paul, in jeans and boots, smiling, takes his guests out onto the barren, dusty concrete floor, under the tangle of pipes and wires, and, still talking fast, describes the furnishings to come.
Thirty desks are spread across the open floor. Each desk rests on wheels, which are easily unlocked, and then the desks are rolled into a storage room that will be built over there, out back, so that in no time at all the office is transformed into a nightclub, which has a stage and DJ platform and a kick-ass sound and video system distributed among the four conference rooms
(named Fenway, Lizard, Toad, and Wally, in honor of the ballpark and three favorite clubs).
The place is insanely interactive, each desk containing integrated industrial power circuits. And there are sensors everywhere in here, and actuators opening and closing switches that control light, color, vibration, heat. And the interactive system connects wirelessly to the Blade wristbands, which friends and artists and technologists and some lucky investors will receive.

Say it's Blade-by-day time, and the central software learns from the GPS on Billo's phone that Billo is half an hour away. Light strips on the floor beside his desk begin pulsing a light yellow. And if it's a nice day, mine will be blue, to say I'm taking my boat out, anyone want to come?
(The boat was a thirty-foot motorboat with “the sickest sound system in Boston Harbor.”)

Paul points to the far side of the chamber. Eyes by now adjusted to the half-light, a guest can make out an imposing wall made of huge, dark blocks of granite. Somewhere near it, the Blade bar will be constructed.
You'll see it from the doorway. In Blade-by-day it's hidden by pull-down screens. Montages of photos and videos are playing on them, the creations of local artists maybe, but really crazy artistic stuff. And then, in Blade-by-night, those screens roll up, and there's the bar. Behind it stands a
Maxim
magazine hottest-bartender-in-the-U.S. runner-up, already signed up for the job. Embedded in the bar there's a sensor, which looks like a hockey puck, with the Blade logo on its face. You place your Blade-banded hand on it and just like that, LEDs on the open shelves behind the bar light up your favorite beverages. So let's say your regular gin, Hendrick's, always lights up, but maybe you change your mind one night and you open the bar app on your phone and order a Dirty Black Russian, and when you get to the bar the LEDs will light up the Grey Goose vodka and the Kahlúa—and there might even be some sort of indicator to signify the splash of Coke that goes on top.

The Blade tours came in great sustained mouthfuls, Paul eliding words and phrases (as in “One interesting about it,” with “thing” left out). Each tour, it seemed, contained one or two new features, which you imagined he had dreamed up in the night or maybe was inventing as he spoke. The space was full of concrete columns, which couldn't be removed—they held up the century-old building above. This was a problem, but Paul had confronted it. “So what I'm gonna do is, I'm going to have color-changing LED fixtures at the top of each face of each column, so there'll be four fixtures each column, and they'll be DMX-controlled, and so now the DJ can control the colors of the columns. The columns are going to change to the music, and also we can do things like, let's say in one sequence all the columns are pink, but there's a woman in the club I would want to target, not target but make the focus of the club. Because everyone has to wear an ID tag in my club, I can say, ‘Feature her,' so wherever she walks, the columns turn red. So that's something you couldn't do if you didn't have columns. So I'm taking something that's a weakness and turning it into a strength.”

Some of Paul's friends told him they didn't think he was bipolar. Sure, he could be impulsive and extravagant in many ways, but that was just a normal part of him, just Paul being Paul. Of course, he knew that what the doctors called hypomania was for him a different state from what those friends had witnessed. He could feel “the fire” spreading through his body as well as his mind. But from the outside, the difference between the exuberant and the hypomanic Paul wasn't always obvious. For one thing, hypomania in him was not a constant state. You could imagine he was in it, and then feel certain he was not. For another, he made efforts not to let the fire show. He tried to soften his grand gestures by openly poking fun at them, and when he said something that might conceivably have been taken as conceited—such as “I think that my name has some value” or “I'm kind of known as a recruiter”—he was apt to pin his hands between his knees and pull his shoulders inward, as if to make his body small. When he said the NRA wasn't going to know what hit them, that he was a tiger who shouldn't be cornered, that he was going to hire the best people in New York for Blade and
hunt down
Fidelity—was that just Paul working himself up for a challenge, employing versions of his big-number strategy, or was it Paul overtaken by the fire?

If you spent some time with him, you began to think that you could sense when his inner state had changed. You were aware that his natural charm had been eclipsed—the quietness that he could summon, his sense of the moment and of the needs of others in a room. Sometimes you could even feel in yourself a rising agitation, a hurried air. A respected neurologist and psychiatrist named Andres Kanner put the matter this way: “One of the things that any psychiatrist has discovered when in the company of a hypomanic person, they notice that the symptoms of hypomania are contagious.”

Paul had long ago realized that hypomania was more exhilarating for him than for the people around him. “When I'm on fire, I only have ten seconds for a conversation, and I just blow by people,” he once said. “Can I get away with it? I think most people like me, but I know I make mistakes.” He could describe his bouts with the fire lucidly when it had abated, and once in a while even when it was taking hold of him—telling his assistant at Kayak, for instance, “I'm a little wired today. I just want to warn you, put on your fireproof suit.” But little by little as the summer of 2013 wore on, his ability to catch himself seemed dulled. He'd interrupt an ally of the AGL and he wouldn't seem to notice the man's jaw-hardened glare or to realize afterward that he'd done another blow-by.

On an occasional morning he looked haggard—unshaven, half circles like bruises under his eyes—but for the most part his problems with sleep didn't show. They were serious, however. On top of everything else, he suffered from sleep apnea, and he couldn't tolerate the standard remedy, a
CPAP
machine, which usually involved wearing a mask to bed. He'd been told his bouts of near mania robbed him of his sleep and that apnea degraded the quality of the little sleep he got. The prior spring, a neuropsychologist had told him that if he didn't fix his sleep problems, he'd probably have a stroke before he turned seventy. The warning had been hovering ever since, seizing him from time to time. He planned to design a better device for apnea, he said, but nothing material had come of this so far. And he also seemed to say he was going to take his hypomania in hand: “I slept two and a half hours last night. I feel great the next morning because I'm on fire. But I know it's not good.” And yet he clearly wasn't ready to act. One reason was obvious. “I'm having so much fun these days!” he said, leaving another meeting about Blade.

“So September I turn fifty,” Paul remarked one day that summer of 2013, his voice lifting as if to ask himself this question: “It's hard for me to believe, because I think I'm seventeen?” You might have wondered if his plans for Blade's office were merely reproductions of his adolescence, the creation of a venue for his idea of fun, but he had a commercial rationale for Blade-by-night, which he put in a document addressed to Blade.team—that is, to Billo and Schwenk:

Blade will run monthly meetup parties, invite-only, for selected members of Boston's innovation scene. Our goal is to make these parties one of the best places for engineers and designers and artists to meet. We want Blade to be a destination. Ultimate goal is to have every coder and designer (and VC) between the ages 21-35+ know about Blade, so when they are ready for their next startup, they think to contact us, to see if one of our portfolio companies has an opening, or to see if they themselves are a cofounder candidate.

Paul knew his intended audience. He was now a senior lecturer at MIT's School of Management and was helping to teach a course in which students divided themselves into teams and practiced at creating start-ups. One night a week, Paul coached them in product development and the crafts of branding, team formation, budgeting, fundraising. He taught for no pay except the pleasure of it, and of course the chance to meet coders and entrepreneurs whom he might someday want to hire. He had a special feeling for both the shy and the gregarious youths whose minds teemed, like his, with things to build in software. He sought them out, both at MIT and elsewhere, playing the role of informal and unpaid adviser to half a dozen small teams of young programmers and designers. One of his favorites was a group of four MIT computer science graduates who, though just in their midtwenties, had already created and sold a software company for $70 million. Paul had lunch with them one afternoon to catch up on their latest enterprise. First, though, he had to tell them his own news, his plans for the Blade office.

He was just getting started—“And it turns into a nightclub at night,” he was saying—when, in unison, all four young engineers burst out laughing.

“And you just unplug the desk from the wall. Probably in thirty minutes thirty desks will disappear.”

“That sounds
awesome
!” cried the young woman of the group.

“And when I put my hand on the puck, the Grey Goose and Kahlúa will light up…”

Softly, pensively, as if to himself, one of the young men said, “I want to hang out at this nightclub.”

Billo and Schwenk were turning out to be a harder sell. At one meeting, leaning over floor plans with them, Paul pointed to a corner of the office-to-be, saying he wanted a glass-block window there, to face the alleyway beside that old green metal door that he planned to use as Blade's main entrance. “I want to preserve that edgy look in the alley. I want there to be some mystery, like what's in
there
?”

Billo stared at him. “I'm not really down with the whole scary back door entrance. So I'd rather have a real window there.”

Schwenk for his part didn't think an office ought to have a disco ball hanging overhead, at least not during working hours.

In one morning's email to Blade.team, Paul sent Billo and Schwenk a document describing “BLADE.truck.” First a photo of a standard black pickup, followed by a photo of the same truck partially “pimped out” (wheels blackened, chrome dimmed). Then the details:

Use for furniture etc and for event equipment. And to have another fun toy to drive, tailgate, demo. We'll lease a nearby garage space 24x7, and let any of us borrow when needed.

Ford Configuration

—F-150 XL 4wd Supercab 6.5' bed EcoBoost 3.5L V6, black running boards, bed liner, black tonneau cover, trailer tow package

—leather seats? cameras? parking sensors?

—steering wheel volume controls? note we're going to rip out dash system and replace with an iPad

Customization

—BLADE graphics in dark grey (large but subtle)

—de-badge (or
BLACK
), and
HIDE
any chrome that sneaks into this (
SEE ALSO
)

—after-market black
WHEELS

—rip out the dash system and replace with an iPad, thus, we want minimal stuff ordered

—install Garmin
GTU
10
GPS
so we can all find it

Questions

—replace dash system with iPad—how can we get outside cameras displayable on the iPad?

—probably rip out the buggy Ford Sync shit [billo: note that the kenwood
satnav/stereo/bluetooth/whatever
that Safi put in my sprinter is the buggiest slowest piece of shit ever, way worse than any car thing I've seen. So maybe we go totally low end and do everything with iPad integration, but we have to choose carefully.]

—upgrade stereo, amps, sub

—iPhone proclip

—under-car purple lights for effect when parked in our alley at night, maybe color changing to the music :)

—upgrade/add some lighting (but not obnoxious)—note f150 already has an option for interior color changing

—possible extra cameras [billo: integrated camera is likely to be better than any aftermarket]

—USB power ports near tailgate for tailgating

—110 outlets somewhere in the back

—Audio ports to allow snap connect outdoor speakers in back for tailgating

—maybe
CUSTOM EXHAUST
? for
NICER SOUND
, but NOT too loud

—possible laser jammers (pme happy to pay for this)

—plate BLADE1

—BLADE Boston (or whatever) logo on side but not too loud

—commercial plates for more parking options? or firefighter or whale watch or fishing?

What else should we consider?

Schwenk wrote back that he didn't think Blade money should be spent on the truck, and certainly not $50,000, the sum Paul had mentioned. Musing over that email, Paul thought it was probably just as well that he hadn't told Schwenk about the likely costs of all the stuff he was planning for Blade's interior—the high-quality speakers and projectors and color-changing lights and all sorts of electronic devices and complex bundles of wiring, which would probably end up costing around half a million dollars.

Soon after Paul sent off his description of the truck, the three Blade founders had a meeting. They talked about various issues, including the desks for the office. Billo said he could get those built inexpensively. Then, just before they parted, Paul said, “Can we talk truck for a minute?”

“I don't think we should do it,” said Schwenk.

“Oh, come on, Schwenk!” cried Paul. “Billo just saved us forty grand on desks!” Less vehemently, Paul added, “I'll do it anyway, but I want the name Blade on it.”

“It seems crazy to spend fifty grand for a truck that has nothing to do with the business,” said Schwenk.

Billo wasn't a worrier, but as the summer wore on, Paul's public recitations about their new company began to trouble him. In an email, he told Paul, “I think it would be better if you backed off a lot on the Blade as music/art pitch. You tend to lead with it when introducing the company, when in reality it will be 5% of what Blade is (or should be).”

Paul sent a mild reply, but he was stung. “I've gotten to the age where I'm not gonna
not
do something I want to do just because someone doesn't like it. Fuck it, I'll do what I want to do,” he said one morning soon afterward, striding across the Summer Street bridge toward Blade.

Schwenk
was
a worrier, and Paul's enthusiasm for Blade-by-night had begun to cost him sleep. Schwenk remembered, from a decade ago, reading about a fire in a nightclub in Rhode Island set off by pyrotechnics meant to dramatize a band's performance. One hundred people had died. The band's manager and one of the nightclub's owners went to jail. What if one of Paul's parties got out of hand? By email Schwenk told Paul he didn't like his costly plans for the Blade bar and his talk about hosting parties of 250 people. “I don't want to be involved at my level as a partner if we're not having this be a normal business 95+ percent of the time. I'm also concerned about the risk to me as a partner in this venture if it really turns into your personal night club.”