“He wants to go back to where you picked him up,” Mr. Wizdom offers with a shrug.
“But you said this is where I take him,” I call out.
“Yes, but he wants to go back. Now. Can you take him?” Mr. Wizdom comes forward, a monkey squealing behind him. For his part, the young monk reaches for my backpack, readying himself for another journey.
“But he just got here. I drove him all afternoon. It's nearly sunset. Now he wants to go back? What's the point?”
Bemused, Mr. Wizdom shrugs his shoulders again and turns back toward the temple. “I cannot easily answer that question. But let me give you a riddle to solve.” Pausing, he exchanges a smile with the young monk, and turns back to me. I'm wondering how I ended up in a script with a monk named Mr. Wizdom and a magic riddle. “Don't try to answer it now. You must sit with the riddle a while, and the answer will simply come to you.”
The truth is I don't much like such games, but the monk doesn't give me a choice in the matter.
“Imagine I have an egg” —Mr. Wizdom cups an imaginary egg in his hand—“and I want to drop this egg three feet without breaking it. How do I do that?”
The monk seems pleased with himself, having mustered enough English to perplex a simple American traveler. My mind flips fast through the forgotten pages of elementary science texts. I am tempted to blurt out answers, for if I solve Mr. Wizdom's riddle, perhaps he will explain what's going on. Instead, I take his instructions to heart and let it go. For now.
With a final nod, Mr. Wizdom retreats, leaving the question with me as a souvenir of Mount Popa. We're back on the motorcycle, me and my wayward monk. This time, the monk leads me to gas. Forget gas stations in rural Burma; instead, dusty bottles lined up at infrequent intervals along the side of the road, each with an old rag stuffed in the mouth like a wick. When you stop to fill up, local merchants mysteriously materialize to take your money.
On we go, yo-yoing silently across the desert. As we approach Bagan, gorgeous brick and stone temples rise up everywhere—some reaching toward the sky, some so tiny you cannot enter without evicting the Buddha in residence. This intricately variegated line of pinnacles and spires is backlit by the fiery red sun dropping into the desert, the Aye Yarwaddy ablaze from the sun's torch.
We keep driving, looking for the old town and my hotel. It has been an exhausting, dusty, hot day on the road, but suddenly I am delighted to be here, at sunset cruising the wonders of Bagan on a motorcycle, a monk on my back. When we first left Mount Popa, I wanted nothing more than to get to my destination, but now I don't have the slightest desire for this trip to end.
The answer comes to me.
Chapter One
THE
PITCH
“WE'RE GOING to put the fun back into funerals.”
With that declaration, the meeting began. It was a curious elevator pitch.
“The fun back into funerals?” I asked.
“Absolutely. We're going to make it easy to make choices when someone dies. You know, the casket, the liner, flowers, that kind of thing.”
“Fun?”
“Sure. All those decisions. It's not easy. So why not use the Internet?”
“But fun? Why fun?”
“Come on. Catchy marketing. You know, a play on words.”
“Ah, the fun in fun-erals.”
“Right. That's it. How many hits do you think you get now if you put the words ‘fun’ and ‘funeral’ into Yahoo!? Hundreds? I doubt it. You'll get one, just one. Us.”
Giving the pitch is a fellow named Lenny. Something about using the Internet to sell items most people buy at a funeral home when someone dies, items that arouse as many varied and complex feelings as sex toys.
We are seated in the Konditorei, a comfy coffee shop nestled in bucolic Portola Valley. With the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and Palo Alto and Route 280 to the east, we are but one exit away from Sand Hill Road, the famous home to Silicon Valley venture capital. The Konditorei is where I meet people like Lenny, the pitchmen of the Internet era. Here, or in a couple of restaurants in the same rustic strip mall. This is my office. (Forget Buck's Restaurant in next-door Woodside. That's where venture capitalists prefer to meet supplicants and huddle around deals under a giant painting of Roy Rogers on Trigger rampant. If you sit in the corner of Buck's all morning, starting with the power breakfast crowd, you can quietly observe who is funding whom. It's a voyeur's embarrassment.)
Every morning a stream of humanity stops at the Konditorei for coffee — joggers fueling up, businesspeople in a rush, Stanford students on their way to class, and a handful of deal makers en route from hillside homes to Sand Hill castles. It's also, ironically, a stop for the parade of incoming workers who saw, mow, paint, rake, and hammer away busily at the homes of the Valley shakers. Porsches, Mercedes, and BMW's queue up to enter the freeway, indifferent to the oncoming line of pickup trucks that replace them each morning.
I had arrived a few minutes earlier, and Lenny was waiting for me.
“You're Randy,” he began. “I'm Lenny. Frank said you'd be easy to spot.”
Shaved head, cowboy boots, jeans, motorcycle jacket—I seldom get mistaken at these blind dates.
With a solid grip, he shook my hand; then, his left hand on my elbow like a politician, he guided me to the table where he'd already set up shop. I could tell by his amped up confidence that he was probably not an engineer. Too outgoing. Too well dressed. So it's not a technology pitch, I said to myself.
I looked at my watch on the arm he didn't have in a power lock. Nine o'clock exactly.
“I hope I didn't keep you waiting,” I said. “I had this down for nine.”
“Nine is right. Come on,” he commanded. “I'll get you some coffee. My treat. You take cream, sugar?”
“Thanks. I don't know what I'll have. Why don't you sit down while I decide.”
He started to resist, but I retrieved my arm and walked to the counter. He took one step to follow but then turned and sat down. I let out the breath I'd been holding since he grabbed my arm.
I watched him askance as I waited for my low-fat chai latte, putting his age at twenty-eight. I took stock of his thick, blue-black hair and his pale and drawn face. He looked like he'd been pulling some all-nighters, and by noon he would need another shave. Beneath two smudges of eyebrows, his dark eyes gripped his target like his double-lock handshake—no gazing off and gathering his thoughts. He sat with his body coiled, tense, ready to spring. At me.
Lenny's standard-issue corporate uniform — navy blue suit, crisp white shirt, tie a rich mosaic of reds and yellows— pegged him as not from the Valley: sales guy, I'd guess. The only one in the Konditorei wearing a suit and tie. Personally I hadn't worn a suit in years. When I was at GO Corporation a few years ago, spending several months negotiating an investment in the company by IBM, my opposite number was one of their seasoned negotiators, Dick Seymour. He was a classic IBM fixer. The equivalent of Foreign Service diplomats, these fixers knew how to manage both the internal IBM organization — all the different inside stakeholders whose interests could often be at odds—and the outside oddballs like us at GO. Seymour was probably in his fifties, fit, highly articulate, utterly professional, and impeccably dressed in a blue suit and crisp white shirt. There I was, in my thirties, in my jeans and T-shirt and florid socks and skateboard shoes, going nose to nose on complicated deal points. Dick treated me like a professional through all our wrangling, not as if I were a creature from a valley of lunatics. GO accepted some tough terms to get IBM's support, but I came away with nothing but admiration for Dick. He had class. He was the consummate deal guy. For all his professional savvy and maturity, though, I couldn't ever imagine a guy like Dick founding a startup.