Can you build a company whose first aim is to make life good? It's beginning to seem so. Can a company like that turn a plummeting life around? To look at Eichen, you begin to imagine it can. You see the reenergized body, the recovered relationships with his kids, the business that looks very much like the mirage he'd crawled toward after so long in the desert. Like more than the mirage, even. Better. Here Eichen is, biking to work in the sun.
But there have been so many stumbles. In February, Paul and Amy decided mutually that "after many years of trying to put things back together," their marriage had failed. He won't say why exactly. Neither will she. But Paul Eichen understands that along with the sad human fallout from the breakup will come fresh skepticism about this experiment of his, this attempt to make work so good that life would be, too. I hadn't created the best relationship with my wife and family, remember? And so he built this company with its different priorities, its devotion to family and play, and in the end he still hasn't created that relationship -- at least not with his wife. So much for Eichen in the groove.
The seductions of glamour, the craving for heart
So how was your day?
Was work good, were the ideas exciting? Did the job you have foster the life you want? Is work working for you?
Is life working?
Paul Eichen is on the phone, listening to the questions, for the last time taking stock. He understands that what people want to know is whether the experiment has worked, whether he got what he wanted. And it's complicated, isn't it? There are his kids, his company, his health, his divorce. There is his head. There is his heart.
He did not save his marriage after all. Is Rokenbok's appeal an illusion?
"No, no, no," he says. "The things I didn't do that I needed to do -- to get to know my wife and what she needed -- I didn't do while I was at Proxima for 13 years and before that. I was driven to succeed. I didn't see what I was missing at home.
"I'm not blaming that completely on the work environment. I'm blaming it on me and Amy not understanding what was needed to make a strong marriage. But working like I did didn't help."
He pauses.
"You've gotta understand," he says. "Amy and I are not fighting. There are no attorneys, no CPAs, no private investigators, no arguments. About custody, about property. We've resolved it all on our own." And how often does that happen?
"Without Rokenbok, it wouldn't have worked that way," Paul says. "The energy and flexibility it brought to my life has allowed Amy and me to work through all this really hard stuff, this transition. We talk every day. We raise the kids together. And it's peaceful." (It's true, Amy Eichen says. "And the kids are good, which is what we both care about most.")
Look, he's saying, life gets messy. Do not kid yourself that even the most balanced workplace can prevent that. It can help, God knows. But the world will not be managed. The world is too big.
And yet, in some sadly ironic way, the manner in which a marriage was ended between two people whom Amy Eichen calls "really good friends with a good family" turns out to be another proof, Paul believes, that the experiment has worked. "My health and well-being today is as good as it's been in the past 25 years," he says. "I'm stronger, I rest better, eat better. I have all the intellectual stimulation of a challenging job that an active mind likes to have, and all the contact with bright, intelligent people, and yet I don't have the stresses of a day-to-day environment that most businesspeople have to deal with."
He has taken the right path, he believes -- no matter how far he is from the take-no-prisoners, have-no-life swashbuckling of the business elite. From places like Broadcom, a company his own father helps direct. Broadcom with its $518 million in revenues, its price/earnings multiple of 370, its CEO worth $5.5 billion. Once, Eichen was on that path, just with fewer zeros. At Proxima that was his life -- that mania -- a life spent running that fast. But he's over it now. A soul and health, or glamour and spoils? He's made his choice. "If someone said to me, 'Paul, would you come run this dot-com?' I'd say, 'No, I'm running my toy company.' And it feels great," he says. The experiment, he says, is working. And for all the complications, you believe him.
In the end here is what's remarkable about Paul Eichen's journey: that he did it at all. That for all the imperfections and blowups and ongoing struggles, for all the groping, he made the life he sought. He's doing the work he wanted to do, the way he wanted to do it, in the place he wanted to do it.
What's remarkable is that he did it at a time when it could not have been harder, because here comes the world, after all, this new world in which the money for a half-decent IPO is insanely greater than ever and the time it takes to get that money dizzyingly shorter than before. And the seduction is new, because sometimes it's not even about money anymore. It's about how the players in the big game are suddenly who people want to be. When Bill Gates was becoming the richest man in the world, people wanted what he had -- his money, his influence, his fame maybe, possibly even his brain -- but they didn't want to be him. Whatever else he was, he was not cool. He was the classic entrepreneur, the old model, the misfit a few degrees out of mainstream sync. And now the new entrepreneurs aren't misfits anymore. Now, suddenly, they're hip. Where once entrepreneurs were respected for what they could get done, now they're celebrated for their glamour. And everybody knows that if you're anybody in business, then this is where you'll be: working round the clock at the wired-up center of the speeding world, dancing with all the other people who matter.
