“Have gun, will travel, reads the card of a man.” Ajax was dressing in the Y locker room when he heard the refrain. It trailed off, repeated, circled back on itself: “...soldier of fortune... hmm hmm, man called Paladin.”
Paladin? A memory jogged his circuits, a show from his parents’ days. He pulled on his jeans, trying to keep the frayed bottoms from catching on something and further unraveling. “... his fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind.” He pulled his dulled purple tee shirt over his head. Looked around. Against the back wall, where the lockers were a darker beige, the singer, an older man with the compression under his rib cage that showed he was fighting love handles below, was slowly dressing, halting with each new burst of lyrics, as if the act of singing them subsumed lesser tasks. He was oblivious.
“... a knight without armor in a savage land.”’ Ajax put his workout shorts and bleach-spotted brown tee shirt into the red bag that was a giveaway at a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah. Pulled on his now gray canvas sneakers, noticing the heels peeling off, but still with some life in them. “...where do you roam?” Tossed his towel in the bin, from twelve feet, swish! “Soldier of fortune... far far from home.”
The subway noise seemed to accentuate the rhythm. That intrigued Ajax, how the mind organized information. On his way downtown, he thought of a composite structure that would introduce a data stream and then incrementally -- to the human, subtly -- reinforce it. Cool. “...where do you roam?”
Cabalistics was housed in anonymous office space downtown, near the stock exchange. High contrast to high tech, but cheap. Ajax was the IA, the Information Architect, establishing the structures within which Cabalistics presented its products. He existed sideways to the engineers and developers, who implemented his visions; he was a necessary stepping stone for the marketing people, master of the build, valve on the pipeline, driver of the roadmap. And he owned 5.62% of the Company. Post dilution. His friend Jay, whom he’d worked with at Jay’s last startup, asked him to help create this new one. Eleven million dollars had been invested in Cabalistics, and he owned 5.62% of it.
Virtuous, man, totally virtuous.
* * *
“They passed?” Jay squirmed for the first time in the process.
“Weren’t convinced of scalability,” Nick said, “didn’t think enough people would be interested to go huge. Said we were a feature masquerading as a system, should try to exit now to a big player.” The people at Martins Gehring Capital were his contacts from when he was an SVP at Atari. After several meetings and conference calls, he had thought they were going to close a funding round with them.
Jay, the Founder, had raised the first two rounds for Cabalistics, four million and seven million. But late in the burn through of the seven million the investors finally became troubled by too many months of missed targets, a burn rate that was eating over $400k a month and revenues that were barely a blip. Investors don’t have much middle ground, the pendulum swung all the way over. Jay, who first walked on water couldn’t get out of the mud. The investors brought in Nick to bump Jay as CEO, who then convinced them to keep him on as VP Biz Dev where he could use the visionspeak he’d articulated to lever all that cash to try to enter into strategic partnerships and customer acquisition deals.
A Founder often has to step aside. Jay accepted it -- since they were ready to dump him, VP BizDev was the better choice. He and Nick developed an acceptable relationship, blotted only when Nick erupted over the intransigent costly infrastructure Jay had put in place. And the lack of revenues to offset it.
“But we’re so close, ready to launch the premium version, now’s not the time...”
Jay had a way of talking, fast, flat-toned and sounding like he was on top of it all, there was no comeback to it, until later, when reflection pierced the wall of words with reality. Nick had bought into Jay’s articulations, which had stayed his hand every time he wanted to let go of a developer, a programmer, a QA reviewer, a Ruby on Rails specialist. He was never quite sure why they needed both an Information Architect and a VP of Engineering. Since Cabalistics was founded three other companies had hit it big with variations on the interactive media creation space. Six had died; Cabalistics had even bought one of those, just by assuming their credit card debt. It made for a good press release. Jay’s original premise was that they’d go heavily viral, like YouTube, with strong ad revenues; with that not working, he’d switched to pitching a freemium model, offering a downscaled free version to attract people who would then buy a Premium version of the product. The current version of the premise of the 2000 Internet bubble: if you build it they will come. The VC’s congratulated themselves on all they’d learned from ten years ago. And invested, again.
Now Nick was just growing tired of all the words, quick and clever as they were; tired, and fearful. To get Nick to come over, Dreadnaught Capital , the lead investor, having taken control of the company in the Series B round, committed to a bridge loan of six hundred fifty thousand dollars, as a line of credit that Cabalistics could draw down from as needed. That, they avowed, would give Nick ample runway, enough time to raise additional funds before they hit the dry well date. They gave him a serious equity package to come on board, options for eight percent of the issued and outstanding shares, which seemed great when the Preferred was priced at fifty-seven cents a share and even a modest tick would net him millions. But now.
“Still have two firms we’re in the running with.”
Jay thought he would have done a better job presenting the Company than Nick, since he’d raised all the earlier money. Nick knew better, it now needed more than fast brilliant talk. Jay disassociated himself from the Company’s current issues, as if they had been created by someone else. He took pot shots at the marketing team he’d hired, forgot the eighteen fruitless months the former VP of product development had wasted until he finally, under pressure from the Board, fired her. He thought his staying with the Company vindicated him, didn’t get how exasperated he had driven the Board, and Nick. But they were both working all their contacts, as were the Series A and B investors.
It was down to two live ones.
* * *
It was beautiful. Just beautiful. There, on the screen, the culmination of months of work. A perfect blue sky.
Not just a sky, not a mere everyday simply real sky. It was a six layer deep canvas that would enable users to build a pastiche of images, picture, videos, sounds, drawings into their own multi-parallel non-linear sequencing hi def super resolution 3D full screen creations. Ajax roosted in a corner of the office, barely visible, surrounded by a high wall of large computer monitors, which he played like a keyboard, each with a different layer of the image. He stared at the sky, could see it populated with the imagery of the world, one at a time, each unique, an irresistible expression of the creator’s will and imagination, with an extensibility that was new in the universe. His. Beautiful, and virtuous. Every soul a creator.
But it had to be easy to use, easier than it was now. Which was why it hadn’t been released seven months ago as originally scheduled. His architecture was awesome, huge, but cumbersome. Internet users expected something to be easy, quick and responsive. Or they walked away, on to the next site. But they were the customers of their collective future. He got impatient with the unwillingness of users to put some effort into learning. Netulance, he called it, the petulance of the easily distracted, volatile walkabout online audience. Netulant to a fault, netuland the place he had to occupy.
* * *
He was drying off after the steam bath when he noticed the guy against the far wall, naked except for his shoes and socks. Long dark blue socks, wide, drudgy cordovan shoes. Ajax tried not to peer -- it was a Y locker room, after all, for all the upscale trappings. Populated by old men with wrinkled skin hanging from their arms in search of tauter days, endlessly talking baseball, next to super buffed black guys with arms as thick as his legs. He twisted around so his normal line of sight kept the guy in view. Wondering how it would play out.
The guy was on the downside of his fifties, tall, rounded but not flabby. He put on his striped brown shirt, then pulled his plaid boxer shorts over his feet, one at a time. But the pants, Ajax wondered. How would he deal with them? Ajax slowed his pace, extra drying, a search through his bag to check his cell phone, slowly put on his clothes, barefoot, watching.
The guy sat down on an old wooden stool; Ajax shunned them in favor of the green plastic ones, no grain to house the germs. He held gray slacks, normal looking. The prospective topology fascinated Ajax. The guy rolled up the right leg into a short stack, then carefully started dragging it past the sole of his shoe, inching and scraping it over the heel, nibbling up the back, edging it, pulling it ring by ring until he got the whole shortened leg over the shoe, and unfurled it to his waist. Ajax caught himself staring, but the guy was far too intense to notice, his choices dictated his focus. Why? Ajax wondered. Maybe he was deathly afraid of athlete’s foot? Ajax couldn’t figure out individuals, only the statistical behavior of populations. As Ajax slipped on his faded burgundy tee, the guy started on the left leg, which seemed to give him a bit more trouble rounding the heel. Ajax walked out; both towels in the bin from sixteen feet. Virtuous.
He headed uptown today, not down. It was all going so well. Nick and Jay were out raising more money, like they always did, so they could complete the top routes of the roadmap, enough to bring it to market, just a few more months. It would be irresistible, totally virtuous, it would go viral, huge. Internet lightning, destined to strike.
He’d never been in Tiffany’s before. But when he put out the query, all the Social Networks indicated it was the place, Facebook, Twitter, even Devo-lution, for developers only. He and Cyrena had been sitting in her doctor’s office together; she was going through the pages of one of those ultra thick women’s magazines he didn’t actually understand, when she gave a little gasp. He looked over her shoulder, and saw a string of pearls, but they weren’t white. They were a deep gray, almost black, and even in the picture the light’s tiny round circle in each of them seemed deeper than the pearl itself.
He looked at her. “Black pearls,” she said. “So beautiful.” Women knew things Ajax wasn’t even aware existed. Maybe because she was part Asian helped. With soft contours in contrast to his sharp angles.
“Black pearls,” he said to the guy behind the counter. Stephane. Stephane was taut and snazzy, a tight-fitting lustrous blue suit with embedded lines in it, crisp white shirt, the kind of red tie worn by politicians for debates.
“Black pearls, sir?”
“Yes, I’m interested in getting some for my girlfriend.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place.” A few years ago Stephane would have given Ajax the once-over -- jeans shredded at the bottom, a faded purplish T-shirt with some white spots on it, an ancient scuffed gray backpack, deep dark rings under the pale skin around his eyes -- and tried to move him out of the store. Those trappings would be okay at Brooks, which had a history of taking slumming preppie kids, but that was just for the price of a suit. But now, who knew what dot.com wealth had miraculously landed in that stuffed backpack.
“Our pearls are all certified genuine, cultured South Seas or Tahitian. Nothing from China or Japan, or colored in any way.”
“Cultured?”
“Well yes, only white South Sea pearls are diver harvested now,” Stephane dripped. He couldn’t help himself. They walk into Tiffany’s and think they know anything. Because luck had descended on them in preposterous proportion.
“Great, great,” said Ajax. “Let’s look at some.”
Stephane walked Ajax over to another counter, went behind it, reached down and pulled out a case with several strings on it.
First hand, they weren’t quite as dramatic, but had even more shades and depth. He picked up a medium length string.
“This is extraordinary, a very important piece,” Stephane said. He cradled it, letting it run like a snake around his palm, sparkling and smooth.
“Most virtuous,” Ajax said. “Can I ask...”
“One hundred seventeen thousand five hundred. A very fine price, would have been more a year ago, and they hold value very well.”
Ajax was the unflappable go-to guy at Cabalistics, and he had it in hand. He just smiled, maybe a bit more broadly. “Maybe something...”
“I understand,” said Stephane. Happily.
He ended up with a pair of earrings, each cool to the touch, slightly irregular and striated, lustrous, with a tiny diamond above it. At five thousand five hundred, it was five thousand four hundred fifty more than Ajax had ever spent on anything other than a piece of technology, including the tiny gold circle in his own left ear. He clutched the small light blue box, stuffed it in an inner compartment of his backpack, declined the bag. It was Cyrena’s birthday next week, he owned 5.62% of the Company, and this was his time.
* * *
“You’re reneging?” Nick’s voice rose.
“No, we’re not reneging, we’re just not proceeding with the funding,” Shana said. She was a junior partner at Dreadnaught, sat on Cabalistics board.
“But, you made a commitment, signed the papers, it’s not conditional, or we couldn’t have used it to--“
“Nick, you know we just did that to cover the StratusWear covenant.”
“No, I don’t know that.” Nick was still trying to wrap his mind around what they were saying.
Cabalistics had cut a deal to supply a version of its program to StratusWear, wrapping it in a co-branded skin, so each company’s logo and links appeared on the page, with a unique border to distinguish it. They used it to show what different clothing options would look like on a person; users uploaded their picture onto the site as a base layer to play with. Part of the deal was that StratusWear, understanding the ways of startups and the risk of building a key component of their site around the program, demanded a covenant in the contract that they be notified if Cabalistics’ cash dropped below six months before they ran out. For a while they’d put off notifying by using Jay’s aggressive near term revenue rampup projections. When actual revenues came in a lot lower, Dreadnaught executed agreements to provide the six hundred fifty thousand dollar Line of Credit as a bridge. By treating the L.C. as cash, they forestalled having to notify StratusWear.
“Nick, we only made that commitment to push out the drop dead date, we figured you’d get in other financing and we’d never have to fund. Without other investment, we don’t want to be pushing more money down the hole. You haven’t gotten the burn rate down to anything close to sustainable.” Alan Courtle ran Dreadnaught, never attended Board meetings or got involved in the Company. Until now. The smile he now pasted on was more a sneer, Nick thought.
“Then we have to notify StratusWear immediately.”
“Fire some people,” Shana said.
Nick stared out the window of Dreadnaught’s new midtown offices, forty seven floors up with fantastic views of the Hudson River and the lands beyond. Shana had never worked in an actual operating company, she’d started as a junior analyst with another firm and moved to Dreadnaught eight years ago. Nick stifled the urge to tell her what she didn’t know and never would. Everybody who knew Nick liked him, spoke well of him, his fundamental decency. He worried that that was why he was not succeeding.
“If we do that, it will seriously slow down the build, delay the launch of the Premium product.” Nick heard himself echoing Jay. In truth he was never quite sure why it took so long to get anything out. Jay said it was Ajax’s proprietary architecture, built from the ground up so they could transcode in any format, which made them the tech leader. Nick didn’t think anybody would be buying because they were the king of transcoding, would have preferred something simpler, open source, that could be brought to market more quickly, and was more adroit to build on, instead of taking weeks just to change a web page. He now saw that they had small company resources but a big company’s ponderousness. A fatal mix. Jay and Ajax confounded his intentions, he’d thought he would cut sharply when he took over as CEO, but Jay convinced him he couldn’t. Now it was too late, cutting wouldn’t have much impact on when they ran out of money, not enough months left to make a difference, he was trapped in a quagmire. In these investor meetings he had to recycle Jay’s words, sounding hollow to himself.
“Fine, but that will only buy a few weeks at this point.”
“A few weeks is good,” said Alan. “A lot can happen.”
* * *
“Not good news from Cyprus Capital,” Nick said.
Jay looked stricken. “What?”
“They said we needed to demonstrate more traction with the user base.”
“But that’s the point of this round, get to the next build. And we have Stratus.“ It was the one biz dev deal Jay had closed.
“Problem is Stratus isn’t pushing it yet, it’s not high on their development cycle. So we’re not seeing good numbers. I told them that we’d launched -- finally -- the prosumer product, were attracting high end users who’ll pay more for cutting edge top quality functions. But they said that might just be a niche market of early adaptors, with no scalability to mass at a profitable customer acquisition cost point.”
“I really thought they were coming in, after the third meeting.”
“I think Danny would have done it, but when he presented to his partners, they shredded it.”
“Can we...”
“I already sent them a note, but it’s over. If this were a Series A or B, they would have come in. But for a third round, with nearly eleven million spent, they wanted to see more progress.”
Jay used to joke, when he started up his last company, that the easiest times to raise money were when you were just promising something, an idea, or when you had delivered and had customers and revenues. It was the in-between times that were the toughest. He was caught in the in-between time. He’d been okay when the investors brought Nick in; he still had 17.13% of the Company. Granted it was common stock, sitting behind eleven million dollars of preferred, the second tranche of which had a 3x participating preference, the investors in the Series B would get three times their money back before anybody else saw a dime, so that Cabalistics would have to sell for over nineteen million before he started seeing anything. But like he told Nick with the technology platform alone they could get close to that, and once they had a user base they could get up to over thirty. That would net him over four million, which was just fine with him, didn’t need to be Google or Facebook money, four million would let him do what he wanted, self-fund his next startup so he didn’t have to manage to investor expectations. He had 4.32 million shares; they just needed to raise this money, and even a modest price at the exit would set him up.
It was all fading away.
“ We should talk again with those guys Google bought last year, Movomatics,” Jay said. “They showed some interest for a while, then we got the L.C. and let that drop.” He was about to go on a roll, convinced of the irresolute logic of his assessment of others.
“About the L.C.,” Nick said.
* * *
Talk about getting blindsided, Ajax thought. He was in the steam room at the Y, relaxing it out. He sat against the back wall, put one stool in front of him and put his feet up on it. Felt the warmth soak in after his work out; it was all good.
A guy walked into the steam room, leaving the door open longer than necessary. Ajax was about to say something, about keeping the heat in, when he saw the guy was using a cane to walk, tapping the floor in front of him. Oops, keep that in, he thought.
The guy was walking straight towards him. “There’s an open stool to your left,” Ajax said. But the guy seemed on a track that ended with Ajax’s feet on the stool in front of him. He bumped into Ajax’s legs, so he pulled them down as the guy sat on the stool in front of him. Ajax laughed to himself, it was so ridiculous. Time to get out anyway. Not good to overheat.
* * *
“I told Shana not to reach out to them, but she insisted.” Nick and Jay were shaking their heads, still not believing it.
Beaumont Ventures was interested. They were dealing with a standup guy, a VC star, Mohav Ahdami, smart, solid, not like, say, Alan Courtle. Mohav had said they’d get a decision this Friday, which still left them some room to fund the next payroll, since Courtle had indeed pulled the L.C., despite having signed an irrevocable commitment to fund, and his promises to Nick, and the rep to StratusWear and... Nick stopped himself, he’d gone down this road so many times he couldn’t see over the ruts.
But Beaumont would have been perfect, six million in. It would have been a cramdown, Dreadnaught and the early investors would take a huge hit on the value of their investment, but it would keep the Company going with a chance to make some modest return. Jay didn’t care, because they’d worked out a management carveout that would give him, Nick and other key people a percentage of whatever they got on exit, from selling the company, as a priority payment before the investment started getting a return. It was no longer about how much of the Company he owned, but just the percentage of the carveout. Nick would also do okay, so would Ajax.
Yesterday Mohav said that his partners’ meeting had to be put off for two weeks, people were traveling, so they wouldn’t have a decision about the financing until the start of next month. Nick was fine with it, since all the feedback was so positive, it was a normal part of the process.
But Shana freaked out. Meaning that Courtle had slammed her. They couldn’t wait that long, it would mean that by the time they could make a decision to shut down, their would be an additional month of obligations to the employees and under various contracts that the investors would have to fund, as they were liable for them given their control of the Board.
“You can’t set other people’s agendas,” Nick repeated to her.
“It’s unacceptable,” she said. She had a slight lisp when she got agitated, her lips ran into each other as if they were trying to get somewhere else fast. Nick had once started telling her about a trek he’d done and she’d interrupted to go on at length about how she could never be away from a bar for that long a period of time, hah hah hah.
“That’s their timeline, there’s nothing--“
“You have to call them, tell them we need a decision this week.”
“Are you... Shana, how would you feel if you were told that by somebody looking for financing? You know you’d pass.” He tried to slow down, when he got stressed, he tended to stutter, his voice would rise in pitch and he seemed almost on the verge of tears.
“You have to call them, tell them.”
“If I do that--“
“Alan says we can’t wait that long, you have to call.”
So Nick made the call, tracking down Mohav in London, who couldn’t quite believe the conversation, he’d known Nick for years. He said he’d contact the other partners and get back to him quickly, which he did. They passed. Sorry, just didn’t feel right. They looked at over two thousand deals a year, and the less plain vanilla one was, the less likely they were to fund. Nick knew that. Somewhere, Shana also knew.
“That leaves Movomatics,” Jay said. He’d kick started the conversation with them, and they were in fact interested. “Just them.”
* * *
When StatusWear got the news Cabalistics had less than two months runway, they were pissed, and Nick took the brunt of it. No way to explain how the four months covered in theory by the credit line had evaporated. So what if Nick had come on board in part because of Dreadnaught’s commitment? So what if Nick was more distressed about it than they were?
Sensing they were losing support for the Cabalistics platform, StatusWear started searching for a new provider. They reached out to Movomatics, who were very interested to hear about Cabalistics’ status.
* * *
Balthazar was the best place to give her the pearls. He’d checked around, cross-referenced Yelp, Urban Daddy, Zagats.com and Menu Pages, went through the Eater blogs. It was lively, fun, big but intimate, noisy in the right way, full of life. It was going to be great, she’d get up at some point, or he’d distract her -- check out the oyster bar, perfect! -- and he’d slip the little blue box on her plate. Beyond virtuous, man.
* * *
“Shutting down? What are you talking about?”
Nick and Jay had called Ajax into the front conference room.
“Jax, we have to do it now, for an orderly winddown, meet current legal obligations,” Jay said.
“You guys were going to raise money, we’re so close on the next build, to the release.”
“We couldn’t bring anything in,” Nick said. He didn’t see any reason to tell Ajax about the fuck-ups with Beaumont, and Movomatics, about no traction and questions of scalability. Ajax lived in his office corner nest, where all the monitors filtered the world.
“But,” he turned to Jay, “you’ve always raised the money before.”
Jay said, “I couldn’t do it this time.” Ajax turned to Nick.
“We ran out of time, if we’d gotten the release out when we said we would...” he trailed off. What was the use? Ajax glared at Nick; Jay had always raised the money, before. There’d be no next build. Ajax was still tinkering with the image capture infrastructure. No getting to market. No launch. No Internet lightning. No glorious exit.
* * *
“Hey big spender, what’s the occasion?”
All Ajax had told Cyrena yesterday was to meet him on the corner of Spring and Crosby, and now they were seated under the etched glass partition in a booth at Balthazar, bursting with energy and money.
“Just, we’re together, don’t need more than that.”
“Well aren’t you full of surprises.” Cyrena glowed in the light. Ajax fingered the tiny blue box in his pocket. All of his plans inside of it.
She looked around, at the far wall that was all bottles, at the bustle of so many waitresses in black, at the orange necks of so many bottles of Veuve Cliquot in glistening ice buckets next to so many tables, at the raw bar in the back, piled with so many oysters on so much crushed ice, kumamotos and peconics, blue points, fanny bays, wellfleets and yaquinas, malpeques and dabobs, while Latino men in white jackets behind the bar deftly opened them by the dozen.
“Oh, let’s get oysters,” Cyrena said. “Lots of oysters.”
He clutched the blue box in his pocket, as if he would find another solution. Let it go. Looked around the room, that he had almost joined.
“Maybe one of them will have a pearl in it,” she giggled, with the first sip of the champagne.
* * *
Nick just reported it. “So, Jax, Movomatics will acquire some of our assets, take over the Premium users, we’re giving them the patent rights, they’ll pay off the winddown costs.”
Ajax shrugged. “And they want to take you and two of your team with them. To support transferring our platform to their site, integrate the functions. Down the road, who knows, they’re really on the move.”
“Really? And you guys?”
“They don’t need us, just you and your team.”
The blue box was still in his backpack, he hadn’t returned it yet. He thought for a moment, lit up. “They’re going to need a proprietary architecture,” he said.