Jess nodded, suppressing laughter. There were many evangelicals in Berkeley. Moonies and druggies, hairless Hare Krishnas chanting in their flowing robes. Men in suits distributing little green Gospels. Prophets in sandwich boards preaching the end of days. Jess had seen all these, but she had never spoken at length to a religious guru, and despite Theresa’s warnings, she enjoyed it.
“Let me explain,” said Rabbi Helfgott. “After Torah, computers are my first love. Even in yeshiva as a boy, I wanted only to learn about these machines. Why? Because I loved the thought of them. Because of their power to change the world. Because of their memory. They take drudgery and make mincemeat of the most tiresome tasks. Some young boys in Brooklyn love baseball and some love candy. I personally loved to learn computer manuals and programming languages. Naturally this was only my hobby. When I grew older, I created the first Bialystok Web page, and I have continued as the webmaster ever since. When it was time for me to become an emissary, I asked the Rebbe, ‘Please, send me to San Jose to be the shaliach there. This is the center for computers. This is where the lights of truth and learning will transmit instantly to all the nations.’
“The Rebbe said, ‘Nachum, I am not sending you to San Jose. I am sending Mindel there instead.’”
Mindel? I thought. He knows nothing about computers. He does not care at all about technology. But I did not argue with my Rebbe. He knew more than I did.
“‘For you,’ said the Rebbe, ‘I am sending you to Berkeley.’ The Rebbe knew me better than I knew myself. When Mrs. Gibbs came to tell me about you and your investment, I understood.” Rabbi Helfgott opened his desk drawer and took out a long checkbook.
Was this a mistake? Jess thought. Probably. The office door was open. She could walk away, but she did not.
“Eighteen hundred dollars,” said Rabbi Helfgott, writing carefully. “This is a very special number. Each Hebrew letter corresponds to a number. Ten is yud, eight is chet. Together those letters make the word chai: life. Eighteen hundred is one hundred times chai. A very nice number which is also a round number.”
Jess watched, fascinated, as Helfgott ripped the check out of his checkbook.
“I follow the market each day,” the rabbi said. “I myself even trade a little in shares. I have some Apple. I have some Cisco. I bought Crossroads Systems at nineteen. I know from technology stocks. Veritech is the one that everybody wants.”
Jess started back, surprised. “You want me to give you some of my shares?”
“No, no, no.” The Rabbi raised his hands. “The loan is free. Just return the eighteen hundred after the IPO. If you want to give me anything more, then you decide however to repay me. Give to tzedakah—a gift to charity. Give to the Bialystok Center. Or give nothing. This is an investment. You are investing in Veritech. And I am investing in you.”
5
Everyone expected Emily to take care and take charge. It had always been this way. When her mother was sick, she’d filled out her own permission slips for school. When Jess signed up to bring home the kindergarten rabbit for the weekend, Emily took care of it. Look at Emily taking care of her sister, her New Jersey aunts said to one another after the memorial service. There were no relatives from England. Her English grandparents had died before Emily was born, but the New Jersey aunts were full of admiration. What an angel. Look how good she is, her father’s sisters said. Emily knew she was not an angel, but the more she doubted, the better she behaved.
At work she was the peacemaker. She wasn’t just the chief executive officer of the company; she was the adult when her partners behaved like children. Admittedly her colleagues were young. Alex Zaslovsky, Veritech’s chief technology officer, was just twenty-two. He had come to America at fifteen, and still spoke with a slight Russian accent. He’d been a math prodigy and skipped several years of school. He’d also been late to grow, so that even now he had a slight frame. He had black eyes, long lashes, a thatch of thick brown hair. He’d heard a secretary whispering about him at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “How old is that one? Twelve?” He turned on her and gave her the finger right before his presentation to the board.
“Alex!” Emily whispered, and Milton Leong, the company’s twenty-five-year-old CFO, turned red with suppressed laughter. She appreciated Alex’s mind, and Milton’s sense of humor—his jovial personality set the tone for a company profiled in the San Jose Mercury News as “the most happy start-up.” But there were times when the two of them tried her patience. In a young industry, Alex and Milton acted their age.
This was the story they told about Veritech’s beginnings: Once upon a time, back in ’96 when Alex and Milton were grad students, they stayed up late finishing a paper, and they decided to order takeout. They started shuffling menus, and just as they settled on Thai food and began debating between Shrimp Delight and Shrimp in Love, a new paradigm for large-scale data storage and retrieval came to them. Each cache of data should have a take-out menu.
“Very funny,” Milton said, but Alex wasn’t joking. They met Emily, who saw the potential of a new data-storage paradigm, which was ingenious and elegant, and she drafted a business plan. Within months, Alex developed V.0, Milton found the first clients, and Emily organized the company.
The true story of Veritech’s beginnings was complex and technical, and had more to do with the paper Alex and Milton had been writing than the collection of take-out menus. They had not debated which sort of shrimp to order, because Alex was allergic to shellfish. Nor had they simply met up with Emily. She had come to them looking for an infrastructure project. But it was the business with the take-out menus that reporters fixed on. A take-out menu with numbered specials was something every interviewer could visualize, an endearing symbol for a couple of brilliant students brainstorming late at night. Veritech’s goal was to become the biggest Web-based data-storage company in the world, but its origin myth was all fun and games, as if once upon a time some guys got together and said, “We’ve got enough talent here. Let’s put on a show!”
There had been freedom in the early days, a sense of unlimited possibility, but with each new round of funding, Alex and Milton and Emily felt more constrained. They had to answer to VCs on their board, particularly to the forty-one-year-old Bruno, with his fair hair and sunburned brow. Bruno was Swiss, and he had worked at Xerox and at Apple before moving to Sirius Venture Partners. He cycled competitively, stayed late, and woke early to shoot out e-mails to everyone, “trying,” as Milton put it, “to give us marching orders for the day.” As they filed for their blockbuster IPO, Bruno’s pronouncements and e-mail warnings intensified. “Sensitive time! Remember, we are making an important transition which requires the utmost care. There will be many visitors in the building. Please be discreet in elevators and public spaces.”
Of course everyone down to the secretaries knew that this was a sensitive time. Emily had braced herself for arrogance and gloating, a sense of entitlement at the company, but in fact, the ethos was the opposite—one of indebtedness to investors, to underwriters, to the world. With floodgates of cash about to open, everyone felt enormous pressure to produce the next new thing. Veritech stored data for more than one hundred corporate clients, ranging from monumental Microsoft to newcomers like Bluefly, but on the eve of the IPO, Emily began to understand what no one wanted to admit: at the moment, Veritech’s real customers were their underwriters, their true audience the analysts poised to examine the company from head to toe, and ultimately Veritech’s true product had nothing to do with data storage. What Veritech offered the public was its stupendous expectations.
“We need a new idea every week,” Alex complained.
And Emily said, “Well, yes.” And then, more thoughtfully, “A new idea is practically built into our share price.”
Alex did not enjoy this comment, but he was willing to hear it from Emily. He respected her more than anyone. He was also in love with her. He stammered when he spoke to her. At times he couldn’t even look at her. This was aw
kward, given the amount of time they spent working together, and the tension they both felt. The public offering weighed heavily on Alex, even as he conceived one new idea after another—his latest, the prototype for an electronic-surveillance service.
He presented the concept at an early breakfast in Veritech’s rooftop lunchroom, a place with a stainless steel outdoor kitchen and round tables shaded by market umbrellas. Charlie, the tall blond company chef from L.A., was whipping up omelets for Emily, Alex, Milton, and Bruno when Alex announced, “I have a plan for something called electronic fingerprinting. This will track every time someone touches data and record who touches it, as well as when and where. The records will be kept in a log for every data-store….”
“Cool,” said Milton.
“Cool?”
“What did you want me to say?”
“Something better,” Alex said.
Picky, picky, thought Charlie behind the stove as he flipped Alex’s omelet—plain with no cheese, no sautéed mushrooms, no roasted peppers.
“Okay, how would this be different from tools we already have?” asked Milton. “We can do all that when we collaborate on projects.”
“This tool is not for collaborators,” Alex said.
“Who is it for then?” asked Emily.
“People who want to check security. For example, managers who want to check on their employees.”
“So managers could use fingerprinting without employees’ knowledge?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you see a problem with this?” Bruno asked.
“No.”
“When it comes to privacy and human rights?” Bruno prompted.
“No.”
“Born in the USSR,” Milton teased.
“Meaning?” Alex demanded.
“This is like a Soviet-style app you’re coming up with here.”
Alex took his finished omelet to the table.
“Seriously,” Milton said, following him, “this kind of surveillance idea sounds kind of Cold War, don’t you think?”
The four settled at a round table shaded by a green umbrella, and Charlie cleaned his griddle and thought about his future restaurant.
“A surveillance idea is therefore … out of date?” Alex challenged Milton.
“Well, yeah,” Milton said, “since the Cold War ended, like, ten years ago.”
“And what makes you think it ended?”
“You guys,” Bruno said. “We are in storage, not security. Are you suggesting that we expand into an entirely new area?”
“Let me show you what electronic fingerprinting can do,” Alex said.
“I’m not interested in what it does in general. I’m interested in what it can do for us.”
This was the kind of thinking that enraged Alex. “He doesn’t get it,” Alex fumed to Emily, right in front of Bruno. “He doesn’t have the capability to understand.”
“My capabilities are fine,” snapped Bruno. “But let’s pretend that I’m the rest of the world and I have no use for what you’re selling me.”
“I’m not selling anything. I’m inventing. You don’t know the difference.” Alex spoke louder than he had intended, and Miguel, the cleanup engineer, as he was called, looked up, even as he kept wiping tables.
“Alex,” said Emily.
He glared at her, as if to say, Don’t you Alex me. “I’m going to work.” He marched down the stairs.
“No, wait.” Emily hurried after him into the top-floor lounge they called the Playroom, a space furnished with sagging couches, Foosball, pool, and Ping-Pong tables. “Don’t go.”
“What do you mean, ‘Don’t go’? Am I a child for you to order me around?” Alex demanded.
“Oh, stop and listen to me,” said Emily. “You have got to get hold of yourself. Don’t let other people get under your skin like that. You’re so smart. Be smart about people too. Be generous when you come to the table with something new.”
“I’m not interested in speaking to Bruno about this,” said Alex.
“But you’ve got to. You’ve got to speak to all three of us. That’s how it works,” said Emily. “Go back up there and start over.”
“No. He should apologize to me.”
“Look, there’s only one way to get things done, which is to stop taking offense and explain yourself.” She was determined to get through to him, her difficult, prodigious CTO. “I won’t let them interrupt.”
“No one can stop Bruno and his twenty-million-dollar financing from interrupting me.”
“I can,” Emily promised.
“I told you, I’m not interested.”
“Just tell me. Come on.” She knew he wanted to explain his idea. She sensed his excitement, along with his pride. In fact, her voice charmed him, as much as her earnest advice.
He picked up a paddle and began bouncing a Ping-Pong ball up and down on its flat surface. Tap-tapping over and over, he explained a plan for data monitoring so audacious and innovative that Emily knew if Veritech did not pursue it, others would.
“There are still ethical questions,” she pointed out. “And strategic questions. Bruno’s right to ask if we want to go into the security business right now.”
Alex kept his eye on the ball. “Storage and security go hand in hand.”
“This would be a different kind of security,” Emily mused. “Almost forensic.”
“Exactly.”
“Almost like spying,” she said. “We’d have to think hard about that.”
“We can think while we build,” said Alex.
“No. Think first and then build,” Emily countered. “Is the prototype working yet?”
Ah, the fundamental question. “We broke it this morning,” Alex admitted. “But the idea is there.”
She nodded, half entranced with his scheme. Bold, broad-ranging, category-busting. “The idea is fantastic.”
Alex bounced the Ping-Pong ball too hard, and it popped off the edge of his paddle, but he was quick and made the save. “Work with me, then.”
She wanted to. She wanted to give him free rein, but prudence prevented her. Her instinct was to distrust his instincts.
“You need to present this idea formally to the Board.”
“We’ll see,” said Alex.
“Say you will, or I’ll do it for you.”
He bristled. “You aren’t presenting anything for me.”
She turned away, then, so he couldn’t see her smile. He was arrogant, but she’d manage him. His idea had so much potential!
As she took the stairs down to the third floor, her imagination leaped ahead. If Alex let go of his surveillance model, his techniques could be employed in new, more sensitive search engines. His idea of fingerprinting could have applications for passwords. What if Veritech went into password verification? Yes! She would name Alex’s new password authentication system Verify. Emily stopped on the stairs and almost laughed. Deliberate in everything she said and did in public, she had a passion for new schemes.
She hoped she could talk seriously to Alex that weekend. The day before the IPO, she was hosting Sunday brunch, an event that impressed Jess as very formal and old-school.
“You have such a sense of propriety!” said Jess, who’d come early to help shop and set up.
“It’s not propriety,” Emily replied, as they browsed the melons at the Farmers’ Market in Stanford Shopping Center. “It’s just …”
“What?”
“Doing the right thing at the right time.”
“There you go,” said Jess. “That’s what propriety is. You don’t even realize you’re doing it. You’re a throwback.”
“To what?”
Jess considered this. Hi-tech at work, Emily was paradoxically old-fashioned in her life. She didn’t even own a television. “The nineteenth century,” Jess concluded. “No. Eighteenth. You can be eighteenth. I’ll be nineteenth.”
“I never pictured you as a Victorian.”
“No, early nineteenth century,
” said Jess, who had always been a stickler when it came to imaginary games and books. The Blue Fairy, not Tinker Bell. Lucy, not Susan. Jo, not Amy. Austen, not the Brontës.
“Focus.” Emily considered the bins of cantaloupes and casabas.
“Let’s buy one of everything,” said Jess.
“That’s too much.”
“You can afford it! You’re going to be a millionaire tomorrow.”
“Shh. No, I’m not.” Still, Emily’s heart fluttered. Even with the six-month lockup, even with the volatile market, she had three million shares of Veritech.
Jess gazed at the apples arranged in all their colors: russet, blushing pink, freckled gold. She cast her eyes over heaps of pumpkins, bins of tomatoes cut from the vine, pale gooseberries with crumpled leaves. “You could buy a farm.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To be healthy,” said Jess.
Emily shook her head. “I don’t think I’d be a very good farmer.”
“You could have other people farm your farm for you,” said Jess. “And you could just eat all the good things.”
Emily laughed. “That’s what we’re doing here at the Farmers’ Market. We’re paying farmers to farm for us. You’ve just invented agriculture.”
“Yes, but you could have your own farm and go out there and breathe the fresh air and touch the fresh earth.”
“I think that’s called a vacation,” said Emily.
“Oh, you’re too boring to be rich,” Jess said. “And I would be so talented!”
“You took care of those Friends and Family forms, right?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Jess.
“And Dad was fine with the loan, wasn’t he?”
“I told you I took care of it,” Jess said airily.
Alex arrived first with sunflowers so big that Emily didn’t have a vase for them. “They’re beautiful,” she said as he thrust the huge paper-wrapped bouquet into her arms. “Hmm.” The blossoms were velvety black fringed with gold, their stems thick and rough, their leaves like little limbs. You couldn’t trim such flowers with a scissors.