Now I'm wondering whether Lenny is the corporate type, just younger than Dick and not yet so polished and accomplished.
Connie leaned over the register as she handed me my chai.
“Your friend want another cup of coffee?” she asked.
“I don't know. Sure. You know what he takes?”
“You bet. French roast, black.” She whispered, “He's had five cups in the last hour. I'm surprised he can sit still at all. I hope you're wearing your surge protector today.” With her sleeves rolled up to handle the morning onslaught, Connie still had time to offer some neighborly advice.
When I rejoined him at his table, Lenny glanced at the coffee I put in front of him and laid a black three-ring notebook in front of me. “Thanks” was obviously not in the script.
“I usually make the presentation on a computer, you know, throw it up on a screen, if I can. That's how Frank saw it. But I checked it out earlier. Too much glare in here. So we'll use the dead tree version.”
Here it comes. The pitch. People present ideas for new businesses to me two or three times a week. If I chose to, I could hear a pitch every day—all day, every day. Just as everyone in L.A. has a screenplay, everyone in Silicon Valley has a business plan — most of them nowadays for Internet businesses. I've been around Silicon Valley and involved with young companies since the early ‘80s — startups, spinouts, spin-ins, what have you. I'm not in the phone book or listed in any professional directory. If you don't know someone I know, you can't find me.
I wonder what Frank had in mind when he set me up with Lenny. I prefer to riff on ideas, brainstorm, prod and provoke, have some constructive give-and-take around a business concept. It didn't feel like there was going to be much of that with Lenny. I gazed out the picture window at the bright California day, the eucalyptus trees rustling in the breeze.
“Before you get started, Lenny, tell me how you know Frank,” I said.
“He's, uh, a friend of a friend. We presented to him Monday, and he sounded interested. He wanted us to meet with you right away.”
Sounds like the early bird special, a quick chat before Frank and his partners hold their weekly gathering to talk shop and audition new deals. Obviously Lenny didn't know Frank at all. Thanks, Frank. You owe me.
Frank is a headliner in the VC world, whom I've known since I raised money for GO. His firm is “top tier,” a term reserved for firms with such a long wake of winners that the mere mention of their names imparts instant credibility and a whiff of inevitability to a startup. We stay in touch. A few days ago he'd called to say he was sending me a prospect. “Intense guy,” he confided, “unusual idea but may be ‘interesting’. If you like it perhaps we can work together on this one.”
“What do you do, Lenny?”
“I sell group life insurance to companies, part of the employee benefit package. National accounts. So I'm out to the West Coast every two or three weeks. I'm the company leader in new sales the last two years. Millions of dollars in value.”
Lenny paused a split second and slid some kind of legal document across the table.
“I brought along an NDA. Could you please sign it before I go on.” For a second his supreme confidence faltered.
Without a glance, I pushed it back at Lenny.
“I see dozens of companies each month, Lenny. I can't sign a confidentiality agreement. It exposes me to inadvertent liability. My integrity is my stock in trade. If Frank referred you, he can vouch for me. If you're uncomfortable with that, don't tell me anything you think is a trade secret. Frank didn't sign your NDA, did he?”
“Ah, no. I just thought …” Lenny said, skidding for a split second. “OK. Let me start.”
He flipped open the binder. It was a professional presentation, the kind you see in boardrooms all the time. From his pocket he extracted an extendable pointer. He pulled it out a few inches and tapped at the title page.
“We want to call this business ‘Funerals.com,’ but some undertaker in Oklahoma already has the URL,” he said. “When we get funding we'll buy the rights to the name.”
Funerals.com. Oh, brother. What next?
“I understand,” I said. Below the title were the date and the words “Presentation to Randy Komisar.” He would probably read aloud all the words to me.
“Presentation to Randy Komisar.”
“You don't need to read it to me, Lenny,” I said. “Just tell me about it.”
“Sure, if that's what you'd prefer.” He flipped to a page that proclaimed, in a blaze of black type: “The Amazon.com of the Funeral Goods Business.”
Now that's a new one.
“This window of opportunity is going to close soon, but if we act now, we can make this the Amazon of the funeral business,” Lenny began. “It's going to be big. The world is moving to the Internet—I'll explain that in a minute —and these products will move there too. The Internet's changing the way we live, and it will change the way people die. Someone's going to ride this opportunity all the way to the bank”—or the pearly gates, I said to myself— “and we think we should be the ones.”
Next page: “Projected Revenues.”
“In the first full year after we're up and running, we expect $10 million in revenue. Fifty million the second year. The third year we really hit our stride — 100 million.” Lenny paused for effect. “Exciting, right? It's big.” He waited for my response, then leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “Most people don't like to talk about this. Death, dying. Loved ones passing on. But that's part of the opportunity. You understand that, right? It's a competitive barrier, a hurdle to entry. Most people won't want to do this. Would you?” He looked at me but didn't wait for an honest response. “I wouldn't, if I weren't so damn excited about it.”
Until this last line, Lenny's pitch sounded like dozens of others I've heard. Everyone's going to be the Amazon, or the Yahoo!, or the eBay of the you-fill-in-the-blank business. Manifest destiny. Millions — billions even—of dollars overnight. Then sell out, or do an IPO and cash out.
“You know what makes this business so exciting?” he asked.
I waited. The warm spring air wafted through the open doors of the Konditorei.
“People are dying, that's what. It's inevitable. Death and taxes, right? Doesn't matter, rich or poor, what you believe, where you live, how you live, what you think. In the end, everybody has to die sometime, and we're going to be there, ready to provide the goods that people have to buy. They must buy! That's the point. You understand? This isn't about eyeballs visiting your site. These aren't eyeballs. These are people who need what Funerals.com has, because everybody dies. And when somebody dies, there has to be one final shopping day to assuage a life of guilt. To buy all these things, expensive things, high-margin things”—he thumped the table and stressed “things” every time he said it—“all these things, expensive things. And there's no getting around it. These are necessities aimed at the biggest aggregate market in the world—biggest because it includes everyone. Everyone.” He paused again for effect. “That's the business, and it's a dream business, because you don't have to convince anybody they need what you have. They know it, brother, they know it. We sell the solution everyone ultimately wants. No demand creation, just redirect it, to us.”
I looked around the coffee shop sheepishly. Lenny should have asked everyone in the Konditorei to sign nondisclosure agreements. Sure, he might never see these people again, but these are my homies. Connie rolled her eyes. Having overheard so many pitches herself, she knew the drill cold.
Next page: A shaded graph probably sold ready-made in any office superstore in the country. The shameless “Projected Growth” chart inevitably traces the outline of a hockey stick and assumes that a short period of investment will be obliterated by years of exponential increases in whatever— revenues, net income, profits, customers, corpses. Lenny's chart was all about revenues, certainly not profits, because this was, after all, an Internet business.