I hear from Margaret Heffernan, CEO of the Password, who wants to have lunch. The Password is a cross between a search engine and a magazine rack for the Web. The company sounded small in scope when Dave described it, but Margaret is no small thinker. She craves radical solutions. She believes the Web can become its own medium, not just another means of content delivery. Maybe this will work for both of us. She promises to think about how we can work together. I will, too. We agree to meet soon.
JUNE 18: Pooped soloist attains Everest!
Dead tired all day. Back from a speech in California. Too many time zones. Too many states of being. Met Margaret at the Gotham Bar and Grill to see if we should strike an agreement for me to serve on the company's board.
Margaret defines my role this way: "CEOs are lonely. They can't tell their people their outrageous ideas for the future without scaring them, without them saying, 'We've just jumped through this hoop, now you're thinking of something else?' I need to bounce ideas off someone smart. I need someone to tell me, candidly, if an idea is good or if it stinks. I need someone who can provide useful contacts if I want to investigate some new approach."
A board seat is a good way for a soloist to make money, especially if you get named to the board of an Internet company. You stand to profit when the company goes public. In the Password's case, no salaries are paid to board members. Margaret is offering me 25,000 shares. What is a share worth now? What could it be worth if the company were sold?
Looks like I've made it. Reach the top and what awaits you? No throne but a board seat!
JUNE 22: 1-800-Help-Me-I'm-Clueless
I call a friend to find out if the offer of 25,000 shares without salary is fair. He says it may be fair, but it's not great. He suggests a list of questions for me to ask Margaret. Among them:
How many shares are outstanding on a fully diluted basis? If there are 250,000 shares, my shares are valuable, but if there are 25 million shares, my shares are worth nothing.
What is the strike price of the options?
Over what period of time do the options vest? If it takes 10 years, this is not an attractive deal for me, because I need cash now, and a long vesting period would prevent me from getting it if the company is sold soon, which it could be.
I also check with a member of the Internet content community, who gives me an unbiased review of the company and its product. He says it's trying to be all things to all people, with lots of bargains but nothing edgy or cool to draw a person in. He confirms my instinct that the product needs celebrities and excitement to stir up interest. The great exchange here will be my insight into content for experience in the on-line world. Sounds like a good trade, as long as I am not disadvantaged in the financial deal.
Interesting how businesses embody our personal contradictions. Margaret is so adventurous, yet her site seems very safe. Wonder why there is that gap between leaders and the companies they create.
JUNE 24: This isn't the way we do things on the Planet Maturia
I learned yesterday that a board member should receive as compensation 1% or half of 1% of the company in stock. From Margaret's reply, I'm receiving a quarter of 1%, which is low. If the company wants me, why make this bottom-of-the-barrel offer? But I'll take it. I'm there to learn, to make a difference to the company, to help the CEO, whom I like and respect. It will be one of the few corporate boards of a media company where the majority of the members are women. Still, the offer rankles me. The big board seats go to people with contacts, not insight. What is insight compared with the ability to pick up the phone and get through?
JULY 7: You sure this is Sun Valley? It feels like the dark side of the moon
Avram and I arrived in Sun Valley, in Idaho, to attend the Herbert Allen media conference. This is our fourth straight year. We feel a little like graduating seniors: all-wise, all-knowing. Had breakfast with the Mondales and Bob Strauss, were introduced to Diane Sawyer, were greeted by George Fisher as if we were old friends. But this year is different from the others.
I sit with my feet up on the sofa in our bungalow; Avram is lying on the window seat. Everyone else is doing deals or enjoying themselves. I'm going to wait out the afternoon rain that looks like snow because of the milkweed blowing off the trees. I'm in a state of pissed-ness. Angry because I still haven't heard about the disability insurance, which makes me fear it won't be approved. Recalling how just a year ago Avram was chasing down deals for the distant future; now he's shadowed by the uncertainty of his health.
Last year the conference theme was globalism. Presenters described with military precision how they were freeing India and China to choose Coke over Pepsi, and Nike over Reebok. This year the mantras are "Internet" and "content." Not one self-respecting entertainment company is talking pipelines and distribution. The networks are even claiming they are makers of content. Being in the content business will transform them into being more imaginative and risky. They will start to think and act like storytellers.
I listen to the talks, but the script running through my head is, Please, God, don't take Avram from me. He is my Virgil, my guide, my teacher, my beloved, source of all highs and lows. The things I've accomplished over the last five years I've done to keep up with him and make him proud. We've never been able to live together, but we have no appetite for breaking apart. And now? When he sleeps, I am so alone. I feel I'm being poured out like the rain into the earth.
Avram's health makes me impatient to live, and business is often an obstacle to life . "I would live my life in nonchalance and insouciance," Ogden Nash once wrote, "if it were not for making a living, which is rather a nousiance." I can think this and in the same moment wonder, How does one get to be Diane Sawyer? By not caring about rejection. By being beautiful and flawless and unbruised by pain. That is what business has always wanted: either a burnt-toast Joan of Arc or a woman no one can touch. All this will change; we are wearing our vulnerabilities in public more and more. And being appreciated for it. A CEO who left his perch, having suffered a nervous breakdown, recently said to me, "I was afraid that when I left my company, no one would call me. Now more people than ever are calling. I'm more human in my vulnerabilities."
