If At First You Don't Succeed

Don Burke, then an 18-year-old high school grad who had been driving a cab and studying photography, was one of the company's first employees. "The atmosphere at Symmetry was busy and alien," Burke told me recently. "Morgan was buzzing around in the background, waving his hands. With all the money being spent there, I was expecting more of a well-oiled machine. But here instead were all these goofy people."

During those brief New York years, my dad popped in and out of Portland. On one visit, he drove a Ferrari 275 GTB longnose, a silver car that was as close to a spaceship as you could buy at the time. My brother Din and I started attending private school. I was seven years old.

Then, as suddenly as it had all happened, the whole operation went south, mismanaged into the ground. Din and I went back to public school, while Morgan, divorced, came limping back to Portland, moving into a small, dank basement apartment. I saw my dad's world shift: One day he was high and confident and driving a Ferrari, and the next he was grinning like a skeleton and living in a cellar. But I didn't question the brilliance of his mind or the greatness of his inventions. In that cellar were wall-sized drawings of incredible machines meant to transport us through the next century and beyond.

The words "paper millionaire" stick in my mind from that period, irreverent and jocular like the title of a bittersweet song. It was how my father described what had happened -- or rather, what had not happened -- to himself and to us.

"My dad's world shifted: one day he was driving a Ferrari, the next, living in a cellar."

He wasn't in Portland for long. An artist friend tipped him off to a job that required a degree in fine art, research skills, and management experience, but it was in Denver. He was hired by the Western States Arts Foundation to head up a study on its artists in the schools program. Living in Denver and working 9 to 5, Morgan became the proverbial basement inventor, a guy who tinkered in his spare time on various pie-in-the-sky projects: a device for moving oil drums around loading platforms, a hyper-legible typeface for backlit signage, a modular construction system for low-cost housing. While working on one of these projects, he discovered he needed a particular kind of circuit board. When told he couldn't buy one, he immediately set about designing his own.

On a holiday visit to Denver when I was 12, I began to experience the first twinges of anxiety and doubt. The fantastic universe I'd always known my dad to inhabit was nowhere to be seen. Denver was the blandest city imaginable. And there was my father smack in the middle of it, as disembodied as Schmidt: He lived in a nondescript condo complex, drove a Honda, ate roast beef and macaroni at Furr's Cafeteria, and was married to Carol, a psychotherapist. Their dark chocolate wedding cake was essentially black, which I took to be a bad sign. It was. The problem was that Carol was a stable person, with a healthy concern for financial security, a woman whose idea of the American dream included things like home ownership and retirement planning. Morgan, to put it mildly, is not the kind of person who makes decisions about his employment status based on the availability of a 401(k). To him, money is a useful tool that humans will discard along the way, like the adz or the sword. After all, no one on the bridge of the starship Enterprise carried a wallet in those tight pants, did they?

In 1983, when I came back from my junior year abroad, I got off the plane in Denver and discovered that my father no longer lived there. Carol picked me up from the airport and explained that he had moved to Silicon Valley and started a technology company with funding from Crosspoint Venture Partners. She was soon set to follow him. The story of Morgan's first meeting with Crosspoint is now family lore. "Without patents, a business plan, or even a team, I was given a million dollars within 20 minutes of walking in the door," he says, an event so unusual even then that it was reported in the San Jose Mercury News.

While I was conjugating verbs in Avignon, my dad had gone from working for an arts foundation in Colorado to marketing a revolutionary way to create laser-programmable multilevel printed circuit boards and semi-custom chips in Silicon Valley -- the very circuit board he designed in his basement in Denver. The new company, called Laserpath (my father was founder and chief scientist; my mom designed their logo), aimed to provide manufacturers with prototype chips in five business days, instead of the industry standard turn-around of 12 weeks.

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