Microserfs (16 page)

9) Young VC guy, who would be the same age as Rosemary's Baby:

"You'll need more than lots of pearl divers . . ." (smug titters) "You need focus groups. People surprise you. They tell you that what you thought was worth $99 is only worth $29."

10) Barry:

Sugarishly: "We have to function as parents to new companies who are in the process of growing up."

11) Hermes tie:

more silence

12) Ethan:

"That's where I come in." (give prisoner last cigarette)

13) Ethan:

(now on a roll)

"VC was in a lull until spring of 1992, and then came" [awed pause] "convergence. Unless there's a breakthrough hit, by 1997, multimedia is going to be a leper industry. We have the missing killer app right here."

14) Barbra:

"Yes, but as a VC firm we like to feel we're beyond 'the hit thing' now. In general, we don't like small, technology-oriented companies. There's nothing the world wants as little as a new technology company. If you give a company $2 million, they'll spend it all and never ship a profitable product."

15) Hermes tie:

noise of his silence equals noise of his tie

16) Rosemary's Baby:

"With a round-one seed, all of the risk is ahead of you."

17) Barry:

"Frankly, we're not totally convinced you have a crew that can market your product, that is, should it even make it past beta."

18) Me:

(Detached metaphysical perspective: as we speak, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a quarter of a mile south, running underneath the Mensa Freeway, is quietly blowing up atoms into quarks and bosons and leptons and Fruity Pebbles.)

"Hmmm."

19) Ethan:

"Frankly," (Oooh - everybody's trying to compete with each other through overuse of the word frank) "I have brought four products to market myself. Four very successful products. (Unspoken sentiment hangs in the air like dying fart: "Yeah, but your companies all tanked within a year.") "Our staff is so dedicated to the project they are working without pay until an alpha version is ready."

20) Me:

(Inside thought balloon above my head as Ethan looks at me with this big You're-fucked-and-you-have-no-choice'' in front of all these suits):

"What do you mean working without pay?"

21) Me:

(Out loud)

"We have to have a product that works first, and we can take care of the business side, with your help . . ." (The one thing I say and it's obsequious and stupid. Q: Do I feel like a liability? A: Yes.)

22) Hermes Tie:

"We'd like to help you . . . mwah mwah mwah (Charlie Brown's Teacher noise) . . . no infrastructure . . . mwah mwah mwah . . . no corporate plan for growth . . . mwah mwah mwah. . . ." (Pull trap door)

23) Rosemary's Baby:

(Parting shot to me, in confidence, after the others have left - like he's really helping us out as he discreetly escorts me toward the Mission oak doorway): "You probably wouldn't want to work for a VC-funded firm because in the end they'll just crack the whip and force you to ship, even if it's not entirely full-featured."

24) Suits:

(I paraphrase)

"Please fuck off and die."

25) Ethan:

"Dinner, dance, and a kiss at the door. So much for meeting number 216. Well, pal, there's a saying down in these parts: twenty-four hours heals all wounds.

26) FIN

I asked Ethan in the Ferrari on the way back to the office, "What do you mean we're working without pay?" and he said, "Well, technically, yes."

I flipped out: "Yes ?!"

Then he said, "Well, technically, no."

"Ethan, what the fuck is going on?" I asked.

"Don't be so petty bourgeois, Dan. Look at the big picture."

The Ferrari passed about eight cars in one fell swoop. I didn't want to look petty. "I'm not petty, Ethan, " I said.

"And I am?''

"That's not the issue."

"Stop being so linear about money. Be horizontal. It's all cool."

I asked Mom what she thought of Karla and she said she thought she was "delightful." Sounded a bit forced.

No flu symptoms yet.

Lunch today.

Karla was draggy with the flu, but she forced herself to come. She, Mom, and I went to lunch at the Empire Grill and Tap Room. As we entered, there were two seeing-eye dogs and two blind masters standing near to each other. Within seconds, Mom was down on the floor chatting with the dogs. She then interrogated the dogs' owners: "Do you two hang around together a lot? Do your dogs get to visit each other? They would make good company for each other, you know." (My mother the matchmaker.)

The two owners laughed and said, "I should think so - we're married."

Mom exclaimed, "Oh - how wonderful - they can discuss their jobs with each other!" (Mom's a true Silicon Valley girl - she grew up here, down in Sunnyvale.) "Oh my, you must meet Misty -" and she raced out to the car to fetch Misty, and the three dogs were soon sniffing each other.

I was aching to get to lunch, but Mom and the two blind people were deep in DogTalk. I went out to Mac's and bought a copy of the San Jose Mercury News. When I returned they were still there, laughing. They exchanged cards, and afterward I asked Mom what they were laughing about, and she said, "We tried to think of the worst seeing-eye breed imaginable and we came up with the idea of the 'seeing-eye whippet,' prancing into traffic . . . isn't that a riot? Perhaps you could make a video game out of it, like that Pong game that was so much fun that Christmas years ago."

Mom, like most people her age, will know Pong as their sole video game experience. It's tragic.

At lunch, Mom preempted all other conversation starts by discussing Michael. "Sometimes I think that Michael is ummm - autistic." She blushed. "Oh, of course, what I mean to say is -well - have you noticed?"

"Michael's not like other people," I said. "He goes off into his own

world - for days at a time sometime. A few months ago he locked himself into his office and we had to slide food under his door. And so he stopped eating any food that couldn't be slipped underneath a door."

"Oh, so that explains the Kraft cheese slices. Carton-loads."

Karla, still low energy from the flu, broke in: "You know, Mrs. Underwood, I think all tech people are slightly autistic. Have you ever heard about dyspraxia? Michael is an elective mute."

"No."

"Dyspraxia's like this: say I asked you to give me that newspaper. There's no reason on earth why you couldn't. But if you had dyspraxia, then you'd be blocked and you'd just sit there frozen. Dyspraxia is the condition where you become incapable of initiating an action."

"Then everybody is dyspraxic, dear. It's called procrastination."

"Exactly. It's just that geeks are slightly more so than most people. Autism's a good way of focusing out the world to exclude everything but the work at hand."

I added that Michael was also the opposite of a dyspraxic, too. "If he has an idea, he acts on it. But he has to put the idea into action immediately - like this company - or with an elegant strip of code. He's a blend of the two extremes."

Karla added, "The doors in Michael's brain are wide open to certain things, while simultaneously nailed shut to all others. And we must admit, he does get things done. He has no brakes on certain topics. He's a true techie geek."

Mom looked askance.

I said, "You can say geeks now, Mom."

"Yes, well, you geeks are an odd blend of doors and brakes."

The discussion changed to the (groan) information superhighway. "Do you think libraries are going to become obsolete?" she said stirring her coffee and fearing for her job. "Books?"

Karla lapsed into a discussion of the Dewey decimal system and the Library of Congress cataloging system, which was numbing to say the least. Mom found herself begrudgingly getting very into the discussion of cataloging. Librarians love order, logic, and linearity.

In the end lunch was like a balloon with not enough helium in it to

float - not enough helium in it to even puff it up, really. I think the dynamic of Mom and Karla's relationship has been set. At least they don't hate each other. Truthfully, I'm a little worried . . . why is Mom being like this?

Later on, I found myself being the only person working in the office. It was so strange, and I can't remember the last time this happened. Actually, I wasn't totally alone: Look and Feel were scurrying about inside their Habitrail. But other than that, I was alone. It was odd to be the only person in the office. I wished I could go to Kinko's and photocopy myself . . . be more productive.

Karla found this allergy medicine I've been taking and said, "This is what's been causing your nightmares." She could be right - I hope she is. I'm going to stop as of today.

No nightmares last night.

Again, no nightmares. Problem solved?

Misty came into our work space and barked at Look and Feel. Gerbils really stink. I'll be glad if we ever get out of this space.

Karla and I were watching cartoons, and that old Warner Brothers cartoon came on with the frog that's buried in cement in the 1920s and comes alive and sings and dances, but only in front of one person. Karla looked at it and said, "That's me around your mother. I sit around and say 'ribbet' around her, but I'm the dancing, singing frog around you."

Everyone is getting a cold and sounds nasal and scary. Todd said, "Man, you don't want to see the stuff coming out of my nose into the Kleenex. Eggs Benedict."

Thanks, Todd.

Look and Feel had babies! We think there are five, pink and plump, so we're going to call them Lisa, Jazz, Classic, Point, and Click. We hope they don't get eaten by their parents. We put raw hamburger into the Habitrail tubes to keep Look and Feel away from "the kids." The Habitrail is actually rather like Lagan's Run. Imagine gerbils with little 1970s feathered hairdos!

I was up at Ethan's frighteningly chic house tonight (all those bank cameras) and told him about the other night, when I wished I could go to Kinko's and photocopy myself. He misunderstood me. I merely wanted to increase my productivity, but he thought I was getting all cosmic and wanted to discuss the universe, and this became a cue for Ethan to commandeer the conversation into his direction, as usual.

Ethan did the "Ethan Thing" and went off on a tangent about himself He said, "I've already photocopied myself!"

He explained: "People tend to assume that as we get older, years naturally start feeling shorter and shorter - that this is 'nature's way.' But this is crap. Maybe what's really happening is that we have increased the information density of our culture to the point where our perception of time has become all screwy.

"I began noticing long ago that years are beginning to shrink - that a year no longer felt like a year, and that one life was not one life anymore - that "life multiplication" was going to be necessary.

"You never heard about people 'not having lives' until about five years ago, just when all of the ' 80s technologies really penetrated our lives." He listed them off:

"VCRs

tape rentals

PCs

modems

answering machines

touch tone dialing

cellular phones

cordless phones

call screening

phone cards

ATMs

fax machines

Federal Express

bar coding

cable TV

satellite TV

CDs

calculators of almost other-worldly power that are so cheap that they practically come free with a tank of gas."

"In the information Dark Ages, before 1976, before all of this, relationships and television were the only forms of entertainment available. Now we have other things. Fortunately depression runs in my family."

"Fortunately ?" I asked.

"Absolutely, pal. I couldn't figure out a way of rigging my brain to work in parallel instead of linear mode - and then they invented Prozac and all the Prozac isomers and kablam! - my brain's been like an Oracle parallel processing server ever since."

"I'm not sure I get this, Ethan."

"Prozac is great - and I think it goes beyond seratonin and uptake receptors and that kind of thing. I think these chemicals physically rewire your brain to think in parallel. It literally converts your brain from Macintosh or IBM into a Cray C3 or a Thinking Machines CM5. Prozac-type chemicals don't suppress feelings - they break them down into smaller 'feeling units,' which are more quickly computationally processed by the new, parallel brain."

"I think I need a second to digest this, Eth-"

"I don't. Linear thinking is out. Parallel is in."

"Explain to me more clearly - how does whatever you take affect your time?"

"I remember once when I was majorly depressed for, like, six months. When it ended, I felt like I had to make up for those six 'lost' months. Man, depression sucks. So my logic is, as long as I'm not bummed, I'm not wasting time. So I make sure I'm never bummed." He seemed quite happy to be telling his theory.

"You know how when somebody says, 'Remember that party at the beach last year?' and you say, 'Oh God, was that last year? It feels like last month'? If I'm going to live a year, I want my whole year's worth of year. I don't want it feeling like only one month. Everything I do is an attempt to make time 'feel' like time again - to make It feel longer. I get my time in bulk."

I left Ethan's thoroughly depressed, and not sure whether I still disliked Ethan or just felt sorry for him. I e-mailed Abe with a synopsis of Ethan's time theory, and he was online and answered me right away:

>What would happen if TV caracters continued their theoretical lives in our linear time . . . Bob and Emily Hartley, in their early 70s now, would be living in their brown apartment, wrinkled and childless. Or Mary Tyler Moore, now 68 . . . surely bitter, alone, sterile . . .