Category: 1. The Draft

Please Call

January 2020

Until the “please call,” Matt Kenny was having one of those special Oregon mornings he dearly loved. Up early, close to dawn. Quiet house. Janet sound asleep for another hour or so, to be wakened up when one or another of their daughters would probably call. His Mini-Cooper, iPod playing slow sixties folk rock, radar detector on, quietly urging him to enjoy the empty streets (hence the radar detector) with a sharp turn, a quick burst of gas. The landscape in shades of gray and dark green typical of cool and cloudy mornings in Eugene.  Layers of clouds settled into the forested hill like fingers. Ground fog clung to the flat meadow of Amazon Park two feet over the ground, five feet high, like some kind of ethereal blanket. In the distance, a small break in the clouds lightened Spencer’s Butte, speckled with off-angle sun. He stopped on the way, as always, at the coffee cart where they knew him and his daily order, and kept his signature on file, so he could skip the clipboard step. He kept quarters in the side of the door, one per day, as a tip. Life was good.

He loved his office in the early mornings, before the others arrived, before the phone calls. Just him, the keyboard, the computer, his coffee, and his “mellow morning” playlist loud, no need to plug in the damn earphones. Folk, folk rock, blues. Emmy Lou Harris singing Boulder to Birmingham. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee singing Bring it on Home to Me. Another new day. New emails. Blog posts. His metrics too, blog subscribers, Twitter followers, the brave new world of constant scorekeeping.

But this morning it didn’t last. His phone showed a text from Maura Benson:

“Please call as soon as you can. Deal’s dead.”

Damn. He’d heard a beep from his phone while driving, then forgot it as he parked and set up in the office

There was no ducking Maura. She was totally 2020. Maura, communicator par excellence, techie, social media maven, and thorough. Matt, however, had a whole lot of the 80s and 90s still in him. And he wasn’t always quick to answer.

Still, he didn’t call immediately. He first sat back, sipped his coffee, focused on the pine tree a few feet outside his second-floor window, and watched the cars starting to show up, just one at a time, on the corner of 11th and Ferry, below his office. He closed his eyes, took a long deliberate slow breath, and exhaled. He listened to another slow country rock song. He got ready to call about bad news.

He didn’t believe the deal was really done. He expected to convince her that she was over reacting. She’d already had two fabulous sessions with the angel investors. And, more important than just the sessions, she had a real business started. There was real need, a real market, great potential. Her team seemed strong. Matt thought hers was one of the strongest deals they’d seen in years. Great product-market fit, huge potential market, scalable, defensible, and a great team.

He’d learned the pause first from of decades of “please call” messages from Janet, his wife. They’d reach him in hotels during his too-frequent business trips when the kids were young. The calls back followed a pattern. Matt, exhausted by clients, tension, taxis, airports, and hotels, would call Janet, exhausted by kids, lunches, homework, bedtimes, messes, dishes, cooking, shopping, overwhelmed, waiting for him to call, anxious to share some disaster. He’d think he was thousands of miles away, also exhausted, having nothing but work stress. She’d think he was done with his day and alone in a hotel. He’d often say one wrong thing or another, going defensive. Then he’d feel like a five-year-old kid with lunch all over his ill-fitting shirt as Janet hung up angry. That would kill the good feelings he’d get during lonely travel by dreaming of Janet naked and happy. Those were not the best times between Janet and him. Work, stress, sleep deprivation, and distance do not make couples’ hearts grow fonder.

After he settled himself, Matt called Maura.

It Can’t Be That

Matt’s return call caught Maura driving, in traffic on the beltline, with Jack in the back seat. She’d wanted to talk to Matt all night, but she rejected the call quickly, almost automatically. Why? Her finger was faster than her head, leaving her with a lingering question, which she felt but didn’t voice, not even silently to herself, in her head. Why not? She needed to talk to him. He would help her track down the problem with the deal. Why not answer?

She would have loved to talk the night before, after Jack was asleep; but couldn’t talk in the middle of the morning rush, getting seven-year-old Jack to school.

All night she replayed that last meeting with the due diligence team. She was in shock. Before that, she and her startup were the darlings of the season, shoe-ins for the half million dollars the SWAG angel group was getting ready to invest. What happened? Sabotage? Bad faith? Could she prove her software was really hers? Didn’t she develop it as an employee at TK? And why was she hiding her legal problems?

Would Matt know anything? He might. He knew most of the SWAG investors. He was pretty much tapped in. But he’d never let on about any worries, had never seemed concerned. And she couldn’t call him yesterday early enough to really talk. She had to pick up Jack, then dinner, and bedtime for him, and then it was too late.

But when Matt’s call call rang in over the bluetooth in the car, she didn’t realize at first that she didn’t actually want to talk to Matt; at least, not yet. She was anxious to talk about the deal problem when it first came up. But in the meantime she’d grappled with what she feared was the real problem. One she didn’t want to mention.

First thought: Problems. Bad news. There’s traffic, I’m distracted, and I’ll take it later.  Too much going on. Am I afraid of bad news?

Second thought: Jack was in the back seat. Car calls were speaker calls. But he was plugged into his Kindle fire. She often took calls like that.

Realization – or was it worry: Donald. That recurring image of Donald promising revenge, the night she moved out. Standing, arms folded, filled with ice-cold resolve. Not sadness, not regret, not even anger. Empty but for desire to punish. And bone cold.

She’d spent all night stewing, avoiding voicing that worry even to herself in the middle of the night. This was angel investment, Syphon, a new startup, nothing to do with Donald. New life. And the investors loved it. Didn’t they?

Maura, going on four years now since the divorce, never ever talked about divorce or Donald to anybody but family and closest friends. She hated the thought that she’d look predictable, like the stereotypical divorced mom blaming things on her ex. That wasn’t her.

Besides, she’d told herself, repeatedly, nobody who didn’t know Donald well would believe her stories. Far fetched. A divorced woman blaming her ex. So predictable. Trite. She was better than that. She never shared stories. When asked, she was deadpan. Yes, divorced. Yes, a seven-year-old son. Single mom. Change the subject. She hated talking to outsiders about Donald.  And who would believe her anyhow?

She wanted to think she was just being paranoid, which is what she told herself, as Jack fiddled with the playlist on her phone, not talking, leaving her to her thoughts. Why take it back to Donald? It was business.

She tried not to, but kept going back to the memory of Donald, three years earlier.

“You will regret this for the rest of your life,” he told her. “I will make your life miserable.”

He stood at the top of a small flight of stairs, a few steps between different levels in his (it was never really theirs, always his) trophy house. She carried a box of essentials she’d need to stay with her parents. He watched carefully, silent, arms folded, like a parent watching a disobedient child, or homeowner watching a household servant suspected of pilfering silverware. He was tall, wore glasses, had wavy brown hair over a high forehead. By then she had long forgotten his original air of the stereotype nerd, the brilliant computer geek, the successful entrepreneur. He’d taken on a new cloak, his fictional version of the stern all-powerful, all-knowing, higher being.

She knew, without question, from her bones outward, that Donald’s promise was not an empty threat; it was simple hard truth. Donald wasn’t angry, at least not the way normal people are angry. This wasn’t going to go away like it would have with nine out of 10 fathers angered by the mother splitting up with them. This was Maura blowing up Donald’s carefully constructed fiction in which he was the Internet millionaire, she the beautiful blonde, the parents of Jack, the happy couple.

So she let the call go. Not now. Not in traffic. Not with Jack in the car, she thought. I’ll collect myself first, then talk.

Never Ever Weather

Matt and Janet had been together so long they’d argue about the weather, or what was normal. They had a classic mismatch of approaches. Janet always summarized towards the dramatic, like “it’s never this hot.” Matt was the king of the counter example, of when it had been. “Oh, come on, there are always two or three days in May … ”

Janet would quickly settle into an assumed expertise. “Don’t go to Spain in April. It’s still too cold.” Matt would immediately envision the counter examples, southern Spain vs. northern Spain. The weather is variable in April. They have hot days too.

And then there was data. Matt was always able to find data to counter prove Janet. But never before she had moved on to another subject and lost interest.

Periférico

Damn. Stuck in traffic again. Celia hated the traffic in Mexico City. She sat stopped dead on the Periférico, which had been built as a high-rise freeway connecting the north and south of the city along its west side, but had been a glorified parking lot for years.

She tried to just breathe, inhale and exhale, and wait. But there was a special claustrophobia to traffic jams. Would she be stuck for hours between exits? It happened to her a few times a year. Just a couple of months earlier she left Carlos’s office at McKinsey in Las Lomas, just a few hundred meters from the Periférico entrance, at 3; and was stuck between exits on the Periférico for almost four hours. Celia believed in the soft voice of Gil Fronsdale from the Zencast podcasts, the calm, just breathing, peace. But damn! Not when stuck in traffic. Not with the fear of sitting there. And would she have to pee? Could she hold it? Try meditating that, she told herself.

She also told herself she should have just stayed in her apartment and dealt with Maura’s puzzling message. Why risk the traffic? She liked her office better than home mostly for bandwidth, and her main computer, plus the camaraderie.  She worked better there than in the cramped apartment down in Santa Teresa. But damn.

She did have decent cellphone bars, at least. She rechecked Maura’s message in Whatsapp:

“We need to Skype. The deal is in trouble.”

She did call in Skype, immediately, but Maura didn’t answer. She guessed (correctly) that she was taking her kid to school. She knew she was a single mom. So she decided to take off for the office in the meantime. Damn. Bad guess. Bad traffic.

Mexico City. Her home. Her birthplace. Where her mom, her sisters, and their kids lived. She loved them, loved the memories, but hated the city now. Maybe the world’s largest city, but who could count. The largest is either this one, Shanghai, or San Paulo. She’d been to San Paulo once, found it like Mexico, sprawling, ugly, smoggy, livable only for people like her mom and sisters, rooted there. Shanghai looked pretty in pictures – mainly at night, with all the lights. She’d seen scary pictures of Shanghai’s smog during the day.

Traffic remained still. Parking lot. You could literally get pizza delivered while stuck in traffic. They used motorcycles. She remembered the TV skit, people selling their car stuck in traffic to buy one that was stuck closer to their destination. Being caught again put a lump in her throat. Worry about Maura’s crisis. She couldn’t lose Maura, it was the best job she’d had in years, and they connected so well. And there was hope of getting back to the U.S. if Syphon took off.

What could Maura be worried about? She’d seemed very optimistic, almost euphoric,

She flashed back, often, to that time in the plane, just a year earlier, sitting with Carlos of course, both of them recently graduated from Stanford, her with the CS degree and Carlos the MBA. They were both from Mexico City, but they’d met at Stanford. They were married, basking in family, back home over the previous summer. But they’d lived on campus at Stanford. Which was paradise compared to Mexico City.

That memory wouldn’t clear. As the plane took off from San Francisco, they held hands.

“Oh no,” Celia said, softly. “Are we really going back?” She felt mostly dread. She wanted Carlos to cheer her up, remind her, his job was great, they’d be rich, they’d live close to the office, in Las Lomas, tree lined, nice apartment, close to work, immune by being walking distance from all the commuting. But Celia couldn’t help it. After four years at Stanford, it was like going from a bright well-lit place, sunshine on the mostly brown hills, bicycles on wide campus paths, to a dark dystopia, smog and traffic.

She’d forced herself to go along with it. For Carlos. For more than a year, since they became a couple, they’d dreamed together about his MBA recruiting season. It was the ultimate happiness, like Samuel Johnson had said, which was the anticipation of happiness. Profs and counselors reinforced the dream. Recruiters confirmed it. They were going to be rich. When that turned out to be McKinsey Management Consulting in Mexico City, Carlos was so proud. He’d landed a prime job, a status job, better than all but a handful of his MBA classmates. McKinsey was the best. It meant salary, company car, even school tuition when kids came. And mobility. Carlos talked of levering the Mexico City Celia loved Carlos so much it hurt and she wasn’t going to

Carlos smiled ruefully, squeezed her hand, loved her soft touch and brilliant eyes. Loved her also when she was quiet, pensive, like she was right then.

Maura, Driving, Alone with Sadness

With Jack dropped off, Maura headed back towards downtown to meet with Matt for coffee. Alone, driving, she let herself fall into sadness. She felt the lump in her throat.

She’d fought that temptation most of her life. Then a friend – it might have been Janet – passed on a second-hand suggestion, something she’d heard in a zen podcast or maybe read in a blog post:

“We’re programmed to fight the sadness,” she said. “That doesn’t work. You have to have the emotion, acknowledge it, let it live there in you, and swim in it. Then it flows through you, and you go on.

So Maura did. Her eyes moistened, but she still changed lanes and made her exit. She remembered her illusions, in college, her early dating, the romantic comedies and love stories, the dreams and fantasies. She’d never had the schoolgirl moments, not even in the beginning. Dating, fiancé, bride, honeymoon, she’d waited for passion that never came. She had passed forty without ever coming really alive, not even for a few minutes, with that kind of love. Would that never happen?

But she had Jack. There would have been no Jack without Donald. And then she had to find a parking space and go find Matt in Café Sienna.

Maura Growing Up

Maura had nestled herself in the uncool in high school, not going through the effort of dating, not even fully bothering with high school friends. She had a nice group of girls she liked, and they were friends; but she was always a bit apart, like joining the sleepovers (which were as likely to be about studying for AP physics or watching an extra credit movie for history as for normal sleepovers with MTV and such) but quietly conspiring with her dad to have him call her at 10:30 and announce a reason to take her back home.

“When you call, I’ll argue,” she said, the first few times. “And I’ll complain. But don’t listen to me. Tell me you’re sorry but you have to pick me up.” She and her dad wondered together, later, whether her high school girl friends ever caught on.

Not that she didn’t grow out of that shell at Stanford. She did. She dated, even had a couple flings, and lived briefly with a boy friend a few weeks after graduation. She made life long friends. She grew up. But still, when Donald came along, she hadn’t had the life experience to anticipate who he really was. Her mom and dad had always loved each other. For the rest of her life she’d wonder whether she’d been caught in the web of Donald because her father was also long on intellect but a bit clumsy socially, awkwardly sincere at times. Her father, she worried, was tragically similar to the fictional character that Donald played, and caught her with, before they were married.

Maura Hatches A Business Concept

It was the middle of the night. Donald and Jack were upstairs asleep. Maura typed feverishly on her iMac, relishing the large screen and bright keyboard, the peace of an office setting, surrounded by dark. She kept the lights low. She could see herself from 10 feet away, sweat pants and T-shirt, mussed hair, an odd blue bath of computer light in the darkness, the woman, the screen, the keyboard. She had a sense of time being stolen, she should be asleep, Jack would be awake, she’d be tired tomorrow – but she fought that, pushed it away. Damn, she had anger, Donald, intractable Donald, his face like an iron mask, his bizarre cold determination locked inside of it … she pushed that away, like the worry, like the vision of herself, and consciously refocused, dived into the computer. The problem at hand.

It was this focus on the problem at hand, and particularly the problem in the computer, that kept Maura whole. She’d been able to do it throughout her life. In fact, she loved it. From sounding out those letters for words, to math, science, eventually physics and literature at the same time, medals, awards, all those accolades. It was always just the sheer pleasure of losing herself in the problem, forgetting everything else. She’d sailed through childhood, sailed through school, glided over milestones achieved one by one, all according to her plan, a vision of dreams she’d adopted from her wildly emotional, funny, charismatic Mexican mom and her thoroughly American, leftist, intellectual, software-driving, quiet, loving dad. Who loved each other intensely most of the time (broken by dramatic, disturbing fights at irregular intervals, which Maura eventually wrote off as part of real relationships) and her, Maura, all the time. She grew up as the youngest of three, 1o years younger than her brother and 12 years younger than her older sister, the one who did everything right and happily kept her parents company as her older sibs grew up and left home for college and the rest of life. Maura was her dad’s treasure as a little girl, programming her own website in Cold Fusion, joining him Saturday mornings for treasure hunts to the local computer superstore, where, every Saturday, he would buy her another game to get her out of the store. She was only nine when her website won a national award. She and her dad watched every episode of West Wing. Then as she became a teenager the computer stores with her dad gave way to Old Navy and Forever 21 with her mom. And at night, after homework of course, the three of them would all watch whatever recorded television she wanted to watch. She’d been a very happy girl, techie to the ultimate, but happy to grow up gorgeous and indulge her mother in stores. Sad to leave home for Stanford, but so excited to move up, to meet other Stanford people, so excited with the campus, and the classes, and all of it, that she really never had time for sad. She sailed through Stanford as she had through childhood. Phi Beta Kappa even.

All went according to plan, almost exactly, until, after marrying Donald, she discovered, to her total shock, Donald. He’d been her dream date when they were dating, clearly brilliant, articulate, developer of deep system software, successful entrepreneur … somebody Maura could respect, and even – she thought – look up to. She took his physical shyness as endearing, a sign of the uncool nerd, making him one of her people. Or so she thought all through dating, courtship, the fiancé period, and marriage.

Maura had nestled herself in the uncool in high school, not going through the effort of dating, not even fully bothering with high school friends. She had a nice group of girls she liked, and they were friends; but she was always a bit apart, like joining the sleepovers (which were as likely to be about studying for AP physics or watching an extra credit movie for history as for normal sleepovers with MTV and such) but quietly conspiring with her dad to have him call her at 10:30 and announce a reason to take her back home.

“When you call, I’ll argue,” she said, the first few times. “And I’ll complain. But don’t listen to me. Tell me you’re sorry but you have to pick me up.” She and her dad wondered together, later, whether her high school girl friends ever caught on.

Not that she didn’t grow out of that shell at Stanford. She did. She dated, even had a couple flings, and lived briefly with a boy friend a few weeks after graduation. She made life long friends. She grew up. But still, when Donald came along, she hadn’t had the life experience to anticipate who he really was. Her mom and dad had always loved each other. For the rest of her life she’d wonder whether she’d been caught in the web of Donald because her father was also long on intellect but a bit clumsy socially, awkwardly sincere at times. Her father, she worried, was tragically similar to the fictional character that Donald played, and caught her with, before they were married.

That night she focused in on a computer problem in part to not think about Donald, her marriage, her son, and what to do about it. Computer problems were one place in which she felt comfortable.

The problem at hand – the computer problem, rooted in blogging and social media – didn’t just come up that one otherwise unpleasant night. It was one she’d been working on for months. She had been watching, in fact, for years as the web begat a new kind of marketing based on what they called content – blog posts and web articles, essentially, spiced with the occasional webinar, slide show, and white paper. Content was basically information. Beginning in the late 1990s, and on through the first decade of the 2000s, experts churned out information offerings that made people know them, like them, and trust them. As advertising began to lose its impact – marketing expert Seth Godin likened advertising to “shouting” and content to “conversation” and “engagement” – the web cut through the traditional system of editors and event managers as gatekeepers. Experts could find audiences on their own, on the web, on their own blogs and websites. As companies realized the flow of change, experts became for big-company marketing like the gunslingers of the old west, available to the highest bidder. And then, halfway through the decade of the ought’s, Facebook took off, LinkedIn suddenly discovered what it was intended to be, and then came Twitter, and the trends that freed up the experts suddenly made everybody experts, with social media, and something like amplified word of mouth, or word of mouth on steroids. With the onslaught of social media, marketing became something like crowd control, a giant worldwide cocktail party, in which the collective ruled. Marketers surrounded the ultimate power of the last word to their customers, a collective, the composite voice of everybody. Homemade videos or blog posts would go viral, and spread over the web from a few to millions, like wildfire. United Airlines suffered a painful black eye when somebody posted a video of how they broke his guitar, and it went viral. [clothing company] suffered a huge black eye when he posted “they are excited about our new spring line” on a picture of riots in Egypt. The power of social media leaders grew. The danger of social media mistakes grew with it.

By 2008, as Maura sat that night at her computer, her idea was close to obvious. It was simply a solution to a problem. She had come across the problem over time as part of her job with Donald’s company. How to know, in advance, who’s who in this new bewildering world of chaotic new networks of unpredictable new connections?  She wanted to reach the people who other people would watch, read, and listen to, but finding them in social media.

As of that point, it was a task that could be done manually only. If you wanted to find who’s who in small business networking, you’d go painstakingly through web searches, with keywords, finding, one by one, people blogging. Then you’d sort through their connections, their content, for compatibility or lack of it. You’d evaluate the quality of their opinions. You’d look for comments below, and – in Maura’s case at least – literally write down the names of authors and commenters, looking for patters. Then you’d go into Facebook, and search keywords again, search the names of those authors and commenters, to evaluate their participation, their connections, and their followings. Then repeat the process in LinkedIn and Twitter. Maura would end up with a list of people who had influence in the small business networking market, with names, emails, Facebook identities, LinkedIn profiles, and Twitter handles. It was a long painful process.

She’d been dealing with that problem off and on for years. What made that night in 2010 special was that night, at that moment, was the first time she articulated for herself the significance of that problem in business terms. There could be a way to automate those searches, with collection of keywords and names, using software process to find matches between topics and people, crawling through web, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, to generate actionable compiled lists of what marketers called influencers.

That moment, that night, sparked Syfon. She knew at that moment that she was going to create Syfon. She’d had a horrible night, again, with Donald and his obsession with controlling and possessing her and Jack. She knew she was going to have to end it, leave, and that Donald would fight it. And she knew she wanted to do Syfon next, separate from Donald, outside of WordPower.

That Honeymoon

He was sure they were lucky, he and Janet, with the way they’d loved each other, so long. Their bodies changed, their lives changed, but there was still the touch, the magic, even if it was worn down, ground smooth, wrinkly, older magic.

Too often, at times like those, as Matt would let his mind wander off to the memory of the two of them both young, the pleasant dreaming state would run aground, suddenly, with the jarring regret of their honeymoon.

He sorely wished he could redo that honeymoon. As he got older he’d occasionally let his mind wander back, with a certain luxurious relish, to remembering Janet as she was when they were first married. She was 22, with a deer-like figure, thin, graceful, a personality led by wide eyes full of excitement. She was so young, so beautiful, that just to touch her … that memory of then would occasionally power his thoughts now. It wasn’t deep regret about getting older, exactly, but a vague longing … if he could have just a few hours, maybe just once in a while, with a time machine. He’d love that.

He hated that honeymoon memory. It wasn’t that his parents ended up in the same place he and Janet were; it was that he acknowledged them, and let them into his mind when he should have been thinking of nothing but her. What an idiot he was, he’d tell himself. And he’d shudder at how young he’d been there, immature. And hope that Janet never remembered. He was always afraid to tell her how much he regretted that, because she had a way of accepting an apology with a fresh jolt of anger over the offense. The memory made him feel coarse, brutishly childlike, a kid in an oversized shirt who’d just said the wrong thing to a class full of other kids, and teacher, laughing at him.