I made him an equity partner almost five years ago, a supreme supervisor of all my supervisors. He was an outright icon in the firm, a self-styled Victorian. The women revered his chivalrous charm and the young upstarts lapped up his frothy tales, as he was prone to vague and sententious proclamations, such as that his father invented Earth Day. He could, if asked, unhesitatingly spew the names of the four presidents who preceded Theodore Roosevelt, knew all the good Cantonese restaurants in Hong Kong that served bird’s nest soup, said pamplemousse when he meant anything Sunkist orange, had master sommeliers who would offer him samples of the Grand Premier Crus stashed in any city with a direct flight from London. He liked his dirty martinis so dirty that they arrived the squalid opacity of soapy bath water; he deployed spectacle as a device in his own personal myth-making. One Halloween he hosted a Hawaiian-themed party for the office—all the staff’s kids came; he had carved floral patterns into his pumpkins, but they ended up profane—a dozen candlelit Georgia O’Keefe vaginas glowing on his porch, which, to everyone’s amusement, coaxed grimaces from the prim chaperones of the little trick-or-treaters. For me—apart from being a confidante of sorts—he was, professionally-speaking, an indispensable wind-up aristocrat, a dervish to unleash on new clients; invariably, after their first exposure to his lightning knowledge of the world, they would emerge a touch giddy, desperate for more interactions with the man who governed, but never managed, over twenty million dollars of my business. He was leagues more complex than he seemed, knew instinctively how to sell things, anything, to anybody, whether they had the resources or not. This once got us into some trouble with Raphael Correa’s Ecuador: They agreed to pay us $2.5 million to eradicate a tariff on their apparel exports, but, conveniently, stopped paying three months into the engagement—that’s what we called them, engagements. It was something Hawthorne and I had contrived to put a bit of polish on a dull metal: all clients were engagements, of course, but most of our competitors in town referred to their clients as clients, which to us both, sounded unnecessarily quaint. I knew that Alan would enjoy Hawthorne, and I was already thinking up ways to introduce them to each other.
“We like our cryptic reputation very much,” Alan had said on the phone, and I imagined him running the tip of his index finger around the rim of a porcelain teacup as he said this, gazing across Central Park. “We are the white blood cells of capitalism. We buy distressed things, refurbish them back to health and release them, reinvigorated, back into the economy. The banks are closed. We speculate and rain money into ventures where banks would give sterile funding. I am calling about something different. One of our bets has veered off course.”
“Who referred us?” I said, interrupting his monologue—another copyrighted skill co-forged with Hawthorne, a very necessary intervention that curtailed the confessional meanderings of prospects, kept things at a crisp clip, which is where I liked things in general.
I had the previous night’s hockey game scores up on my computer screen.
“I’d like to send over a non-disclosure agreement before we proceed any further. I have asked Manuel to email it over just now. Sign it. Send it back. Then we can keep going. Generally speaking, we stand to lose quite a lot of money if things aren’t put back in place.”
When the document arrived, Margaret swept in with a pen and, after I signed it, whisked the sheet away wordlessly, without eye contact, leaving in her wake a fresh espresso with a lemon rind beside the dainty spoon on the saucer. She was always doing things like this, unsolicited gestures meant to bring me comfort, restore my chi, as she called it.
With the NDA signed, Alan began to recount the story of one of their most recent investments, a startup selling a technology that translated Mandarin into English, vice versa, and could be embedded into smartphones.
“Chinese is just the gateway, the base code for what we can eventually use to translate other major languages. There would be no need to learn another language besides your own, which, if you are an American today, is quite important.”
He explained how it would not take much to envision how this technology could spring to life with a clever companion app, translating live, spoken languages into reconfigured sound waves, streaming into the ear, meaning fed direct to the brain, like sound through a pipe, nanoseconds of translation, languages without borders.
“This sounds familiar. I suspect there is competing technology in the market—or soon to be?” I had the ball ready to go.
“Kleiner Perkins pumped $65 million of Series A money into something similar three years ago. That is probably what you are recollecting. It was a small-minded venture that sought to put English into other languages, starting with Spanish. That had no potential. Who in the English-speaking world needs to speak Spanish today? Nobody. We came upon something last April. We found out about it from a hacker. We own an exceedingly large sum of bitcoin and, in one of our transactions, we encountered a glitch. Bitcoin is code after all. The code we purchased, in essence, was broken, some obviously corrupted code from a Silk Road reprobate masquerading as a legit seller. We fired the guy internally when it happened. It never should have happened. We didn’t want it to come out that we bought bitcoin from an online hit man—or God knows who. So we searched for the most sublimely gifted hacker we could hire. We got to Lars VandenBruck. We hired him to fix the code, redeem our purchase for our investors. He was in Amsterdam but he performed his work with amazing swiftness, but the point is that we learned during the engagement that Lars was working on something special—OneSpeak—which is what we sunk our money into.”
I had the phone on mute and was typing an email to Colin’s hockey coach about a missing elbow pad. I did not feel the need to speak. I tried not to talk much in meetings either. I knew that by saying very little, others would ascribe to you a vast, unwarranted intelligence.
“Someone from Google had flown them all in for the party. Wait…let me back up. Lars is dating Fung. The two had met at a hackathon in Big Sur six months ago. At a silent rave, I believe, somewhere amidst the Redwoods.”
“Hold on—these are the people—bald guy and the Chinese girl, from the photo in the Times two weeks ago? The wireless headphones—the Serbian DJ?”
“Bosnian, yes. And, yes, Vanity Fair covered the party as part of a series on young entrepreneurs. Google underwrote the hackathon because Yahoo! was planning to do it, and, as a middle finger to Yahoo!, some witty Google C-Suiter hired the Bosnian DJ known for mixing Rachmaninov with German techno.”
“Right, those kids in the photo with the Ewok Village trees—and that blonde actress who divorced her British rock band husband?”
“Gwyneth Paltrow, yes, the Ewok Village trees, yes, a little campfire in the clear, then a little weed, then a little other stuff and then a tweet, and now an investigation by the state attorney general for possible statutory rape of Fung by Lars and distribution of methamphetamine to a minor. That is not public yet. It will be in about three days.”