Just curious.
best
r
I had no idea how Frank would respond, but if he passed on this deal, I wanted to make sure he was rejecting the big idea lurking beneath the surface of Funerals.com, and not Lenny's superficial version of it.
Both Debra and I were home for dinner for once. As she sorted through the mail, I rallied every pan in the house. With a bottle of Napa Valley sauvignon blanc, we ate outside as the sun set without a fuss.
Later that evening, still digesting, I sank into my leather chair with a book by the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, my quiet house open to the light breeze stealing in off the hills. The low timpani of snoring dogs signaled that the world was just fine.
Dogen's brain-numbing insights eluded me. I couldn't get past his notion of time: “Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time.” Another monk's riddle — I needed something a lot less challenging tonight.
There is always e-mail.
I trod lightly so as not to disturb the hounds. But who was I kidding? They were dead to the world, expecting me to take the first watch. The old PowerBook took a few extra minutes to fire up. My Mac was not long for this world.
Just a few messages, including a response from Frank, had dropped in since I had last checked a couple of hours earlier.
TO: randy@virtual.net
FROM: frank@vcfirm.com
SUBJECT: Re: A Second Life
Randy,
Interesting. The content and community aspects are appealing—playing to the Internet's strengths. Incorporating the local services also sounds good. I can definitely see some network effect here. Makes a win-win and a more defensible referral channel. Obviously has to be fleshed out, but more intriguing.
Unfortunately, it's not the Funerals.com Lenny presented. Is it yours or Lenny's? Lenny seems stuck on the casket business. Who will lead this?
Frank
Who will lead this?
Good question. I knew Lenny's answer based on the org chart in his plan, but Lenny had not yet demonstrated that he had the right stuff. He was trying to reduce the challenge of starting Funerals.com to rote execution, and he was focusing on managing the process. But this was a startup. It would take an inspirational leader to rally a team and supporters to build something worthwhile. So far, Lenny had failed to inspire any of us.
Management and leadership are related but not identical. Lenny's vantage point from the bowels of the Borg, though, had never given him an appreciation for the difference. Management is a methodical process; its purpose is to produce the desired results on time and on budget. It complements and supports but cannot do without leadership, in which character and vision combine to empower someone to venture into uncertainty. Leaders must suspend the disbelief of their constituents and move ahead even with very incomplete information.
From the start, Lenny had set out to manage Funerals.com; he assumed that management ability was what Frank and I wanted most to see in him. He aggressively pared back the early vision that had brought Allison and him to the business in the first place, in order to make it more manageable. His business had become so focused that when he couldn't anticipate how something would be managed, he excluded it from the plan and the business altogether. The result? Funerals.com was a laser beam pointed at a very narrow, easily defined e-tailer idea. And it failed to excite Allison, or me, or Frank and his partners. Truth be told, it didn't excite Lenny either, except for the prospect of that pot of gold.
Like Lenny, I had, early in my career, failed to appreciate the crucial distinction between leadership and management. Luckily I had the good fortune to work with Bill Campbell long enough to learn the difference.
After Apple reabsorbed Claris, Bill became the CEO of GO Corporation, the pioneer in what was hailed as the next megabillion dollar industry, pen computing. Bill asked me to join him as CFO and VP of Business Operations. As Bill's inside guy, I kept everything tuned: creating the plan, raising the money, doing the deals, and running the numbers. In short, I executed.
GO was formed to create a new and more intuitive way for people to operate computers, using a pen for input and navigation instead of a keyboard and a mouse. GO's vision spawned a mad rush to this seductive new interface. Before long AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and many others had joined the fray. In the two years I was there, GO grew significantly, burning more than $2 million a month. Before it was over, we had raised over $75 million—a phenomenal sum for that time. The vision was brilliant, but the technology for handwriting recognition wasn't up to the task. We were dancing as fast as we could, but it became clear to many of us that GO was unlikely to succeed. Yet Bill's leadership was so powerful that no one from the management team bailed out. This was a group of talented people, most of whom went on to leadership roles at other companies, including their own successful startups. But because of Bill, no one pulled the cord. Everyone rode that plane all the way down to a belly landing.
When I finally did leave GO in 1993, it wasn't clear what I wanted to do next. In the years we worked together, Campbell had periodically suggested that I consider becoming a CEO. He had encouraged me to prepare for the role by giving me projects and responsibilities that would help me run a business at some point. Perhaps misery loves company, but for Bill, being a CEO was one of the most fun and satisfying roles he'd ever played. I was flattered by his suggestion, but I was hardly your prototypical M.B.A. with an unquenchable drive to prove myself as a captain of industry.
I wanted a role full of creativity, where inspiration was more valued than perspiration. I was intrigued by the digital “content” business, the emerging idea that computers could deliver useful information and engaging entertainment, not just applications. Sniffing around, I realized that digital content would be the next big door to open in the marketplace. I bought some PC games and CD-ROMs, which were just becoming popular as founts of rich content, and discovered some fascinating experiments in interactivity. Games were the first incarnation of this new medium, but I saw an opportunity to create many other strains of interactive, digital content.
Out of the blue, a headhunter called looking for a CEO for a game company called LucasArts Entertainment, located in Marin county, just north of San Francisco. This was the electronic games division of George Lucas's entertainment business. The headhunter was desperate because LucasArts had rejected all his usual suspects. I was his long shot. I couldn't understand why the company would have any interest in me, but he persisted. So, in one of my only remaining suits from my lawyer days, now ill-fitting and out of fashion, I met with the LucasArts hiring committee. As its members described the company, the mystery of their interest in me only deepened. The job description unequivocally excluded me. I didn't have the experience they wanted, and I wasn't a gamer. Still, they asked to meet again. The headhunter suggested I lose the suit.
Concerned about the apparent mismatch between the position and me, I discussed the pros and cons with a close friend from GO, Debbie Biondolillo. A wonderful woman with a wealth of common sense, she had been in charge of HR at GO, and before that was an HR vice president at Apple. I gave her the spiel I intended to deliver to the hiring committee. It focused on the underpinnings of the LucasArts business model, product strategy, and distribution arrangements.