TO: lenny@alchemy.net
FROM: randy@virtual.net
SUBJECT: Re: Thank You
I appreciated hearing about Funerals.com this morning. I've passed on my thoughts to Frank, as I said I would. You're right. Someone will figure out the on-line market for funeral goods.
Thanks for your interest in my working with you, but as I said at the Konditorei, I can't get excited about a business whose biggest idea is making money. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not where I want to invest my time. That's a personal choice, not a judgment.
Good luck.
best
r
I finished off the remaining three e-mails and thought, finally, I was done for the day. Then a ping—a reply from Lenny. I looked at my watch. It was almost 3:00 A.M. in Boston. The guy must not sleep.
TO: randy@virtual.net
FROM: lenny@alchemy.net
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Thank You
Randy,
Thanks for your quick reply. I'm disappointed but understand, I think.
If you don't like Funerals.com, that's fair, but I have to confess I left our meeting feeling I had somehow misled you. Your reply makes me sure of it.
All you know about me is Funerals.com, and I wouldn't want you to believe that's all I'm about. While I think of myself as a hard-nosed businessman, and Funerals.com is meant to be a business, I'd be upset if I left you with the impression that I'm merely a greedy opportunist. You saw only my business side. There's more to me than that, and I'll get to it after Funerals.com is a great success.
I hope you'll check out my site--URL below. It should give you a little more insight into me.
I still look forward to a chance to meet again. If you have any further thoughts, I'm all ears.
Lenny
I had indeed pegged Lenny as a greedy opportunist, but I hadn't expected, in the heat of all his bluster, that he was astute enough to register my impatience. Curiosity overpowered sleepiness. What the heck—I checked out his URL.
Adorned with digitized Polaroids of parents and siblings, Lenny's Web site took me back to the early days and all the commotion over the vast and messy democratizing eloquence of the Net. Every voice and community would have a place in cyberspace. The Web would foster paeans to the special talents of the family hamster, hipper-than-thou e-zines run by semiotics students, and gritty neighborhood joints for all manner of hobbyist. Shoot the middleman, free the masses.
All these highly charged, highly personal sites left you feeling a little strange at first, as though you were picking through the effects of another's life, peeking at someone's diary. I felt the same way looking at Lenny's site, even though he had invited me.
Lenny had quite a family—three brothers and a sister— each lovingly accounted for with pictures commemorating major life events: grammar school with its annual, grainy head shots; Scouts; the goofy haircuts of the seventies; high school proms; weddings; cheery toddlers with arms outstretched toward the camera. Nothing special here—just another family with its intimate history frozen in an uncomfortably public way.
About to call it a night, I noticed another picture. The characteristic black hair gave away the man's identity-Lenny's father, Jack Dolan.
Clicking on the photo opened a memorial site for Lenny's father, who had died almost eight months earlier. I recalled what Lenny had told me in the Konditorei. There were more family photos—Jack with each of his children and his wife—some pages of text, and, under the heading “At Play,” a group of pictures showing Jack Dolan working in a garden that was a riot of color. One photo showed him standing by a stretch of forsythia. Another showed him with spade and hoe, crouched over a flower bed, planting seeds in this suburban Eden. He was always smiling, hands working the earth in front of a small, one-family Cape Cod. Every corner and window was festooned with flowers like some intricately designed English garden. This house must have been the neighborhood attraction. Under the heading — “Taking Care of Business” — I came across a few more photos: Jack Dolan posed soberly behind a tidy desk or engaged in serious-looking work, his dark jacket framing a white shirt and a quiet tie. He was described variously as a “dedicated public servant” and a “faithful friend of the Commonwealth”—by the Governor, no less—and commended for more than forty years of service on his retirement, which the dates showed came less than a year before his death.
Connie's prescience scored again: she had rightly guessed that someone's death had given birth to Funerals.com. Jack's demise, so soon after retirement, and Lenny's decision to break out of his nine-to-five and go for the pot of gold at the end of the startup were probably not unrelated. Whatever Jack's true interests, it was clear from Lenny's site that he saw his father as a frustrated gardener, not a happy bureaucrat.
You only saw my business side. There's more to me than that, and I'll get to that after Funerals.com is a great success.
No question: Lenny was his father's son, taking care of business first. In what I presumed was Lenny's wish to avoid his father's fate, he had subjected himself to the same unforgiving compromise. There's no official name for it, but given his background in insurance, Lenny might call it the “Deferred Life Plan.” For the promise of full coverage under the plan, you must divide your life into two distinct parts:
Step one: Do what you have to do.
Then, eventually—
Step two: Do what you want to do.
We hear variations on this theme from childhood on: Walk before you run. No peas, no pie. Pay your dues. Or, perhaps in the case of Jack Dolan, as Lenny saw him, work, then retire —assuming you live long enough to retire — and then devote your time to your passion.
The Deferred Life Plan certainly dominates Silicon Valley. Most people think getting rich fast provides the quickest way to get past the first step — and where can you get rich faster than Silicon Valley? The problem is that, despite the undisguised affluence, the verdant hills, and media-generated mythos, the vast majority of people in Silicon Valley will not get rich. Most business ideas do not find funding. Even the majority of those that are funded—that is, vetted by very smart people who think enough of the ideas to invest in them — ultimately fail. And the lucky winners may get to step two only to find themselves aimless, directionless. Either they never knew what they “really” wanted to do or they've spent so much time in the first step and invested so much psychic capital that they're completely lost without it.
A friend of mine recently unloaded his company for a prodigious pile of cash. His share was more than $50 million. Celebrating with him in Saba, a knobby rock in the Caribbean once owned by the Dutch and now a mecca for divers, we toyed with the question of what he should do next. The only idea to consider, he insisted, was to start another business. What business? He had no clue and didn't seem to care, so long as it allowed him to measure his success by tallying the numbers. Free forever from financial worries, he could think of nothing better to do than to amass more money. This from an exceptionally bright and decent man. If, after careful consideration, he were to pursue a business he truly cared about—well, that would have been understandable—but reflexively hopping back on the carousel seemed like a waste. I could only hope that with a little more time, he would rethink things.