In 1982 he helped launch a start-up that would eventually be called Proxima Corp. (one of the businesses his father helped put together) as its sales manager. Fifteen months later he was the CEO of the still-small company. In 1985 Proxima began developing its first line of computer-data projection equipment, which became the company's meal ticket.
For the next nine years -- until the spring of 1994 -- Proxima was more or less Eichen's life. The company grew from $10 million in 1985 to $130 million in 1994. It was a mad gallop through distribution wars and desperation-fueled innovation. "We'd pour our life force into a product," says Eichen, "and the day we'd introduce it, we knew it was obsolete. That chews up your energy." Not that he saw another choice at the time. This was the world of the Southern California tech boom, of global opportunity if you were fast enough, of overnight industrial parks and titanium-lined glass and the low-decibel hum of a thousand colorless clean rooms. It was awful. It was a rush.
For Eichen, however, it was not a landscape of unbroken success. When Proxima hit a cash-flow ditch in 1989, its board of directors, including Eichen himself as well as his father, decided the company needed more experienced leadership. It named a new CEO, demoting Eichen to the #2 spot. The company regained its footing, and Eichen soldiered on. In 1993, Proxima went public. Shortly afterward, Eichen personally piloted the development of a breakthrough desktop projector that, after it began shipping, in 1994, sent revenues from $60 million to more than $100 million -- and hauled the stock price uphill behind it. Eichen and his family had always lived modestly, but now, he remembers, "life became unexpectedly lucrative." By the time Eichen left Proxima for good, in 1995, he had enough money that "if we didn't scale up our lifestyle, I could have retired."
Trouble was, who was "we" exactly? Indeed, who was he? Eichen was no longer sure.
The man who'd once been a wiry young rock climber was now so fat he couldn't take an evening stroll without stopping. By each weekend he was "cooked," couch-bound, a troll. The man who'd abandoned college to build a family now had one, but he barely ever bumped into its members. "I was up at 5:30 and out before anyone was awake," he says. He lunched at his desk, getting someone to fetch him a sandwich. He sometimes got home so late that his children -- he and Amy now also had a daughter, Rachel -- were asleep when he returned. "They didn't know their father while he was at Proxima," Amy says. "Instead, they had this image of what a dad was" -- Alan Spaulding on Guiding Light, a manipulative, workaholic family-business owner who rarely spent time with his kids.
"I had been living in an unhealthy way for a long time," Eichen says now. "And I was tired. I didn't have the capacity to do what needed to be done." And here was Amy telling him, "Paul, your kids are growing up, and if you want to get to know them, it's now or never." Not to mention that he and Amy weren't solid, either. "When you belong to your company," she says, "everybody else better be able to take care of themselves."
So in 1993 and 1994 Eichen found himself in a place he'd never foreseen and didn't know how he'd reached. He'd tried so hard, hadn't he? What had happened?
"It was no one thing," he knew. It was everything. Everything adding up.
And, oh man, isn't that always the way? "How did you go bankrupt?" a Hemingway character is asked in The Sun Also Rises. "Two ways," comes the answer. "Gradually and then suddenly." So it was with Eichen's bankruptcy of spirit.
On March 31, 1994, Eichen quit Proxima. As agreed upon earlier, he gave his boss and the board a year's notice. But the meaningful part of quitting took effect much faster than that. He had a plan. A possible salvation.
He would start a toy company.
A toy company? said Amy. There were private schools committed to, a house halfway built and eating cash. She'd been running this family, raising these kids, and now -- just when all their collective sacrifice was about to deliver them to safety -- the high-tech executive wanted a toy company?
"Our executives have chosen quality of life over the seductiveness of instant wealth."
Well, sort of. What Eichen wanted was a better life. And he'd begun to see a way to get it.
"I think people tend to know what they need to do in their lives, and they can either ignore it or get on with it," he says. "There were two things I hadn't accomplished." Critical things. "I hadn't created the best relationship with my wife and family. And I hadn't figured out how to best use my creative energy in my work." What he knew, he says, was that "I needed to do my own company. And I knew what it was." The boy who'd loved contraband LEGOs and model kits and machines had the idea for a business. More important, he had the idea for a style of business. A style that just maybe would make for a different kind of life. A true second act.
He had the idea for his experiment.
What would a company look like, Eichen wondered, if its only aim was to foster a good life? What if every company-defining choice you made -- nature of product, type of industry, the location, what you'd wear, the hours, the people you'd work with and the kind of customers you'd have, the space you'd work in, the investors, everything -- what if you made all those choices based on the way they'd make your work feel? On the way they'd make your work and life feel knitted together?
