In early May, I checked back in with Fusco. He seemed more on edge than at any previous point in the year. He still had not talked to Heyman about whether he intended to return to the company. He talked at length about intending to do so and expressed concern about what sort of compensation package Heyman might be willing to offer should Fusco wind up running the company on a permanent basis. "It's a day-to-day thing," said Fusco of his mood. "Some days I am feeling optimistic, and other days I'm worried about the future. There is a lot of uncertainty about what is going on in Jared's head. I'll see a tweet come up on my LinkedIn page on how he is chewing on coca plants or tromping through the Andes. I really don't know what his intentions are. Part of me thinks he has moved beyond his need to be running Infosurv, and he'll move on to something else. And then part of me wonders if he has the expectation that he'll come back and it will be the same as it was before.
"Things are about to come to a head," Fusco said. But they weren't, at least not on his schedule. Just before Memorial Day, Fusco told me that he was considering sending an e-mail asking Heyman to call in so that the two of them could discuss the future. In the end, he decided not to send the note.
The end of the drama came a few weeks later, late on a Sunday night. Fusco knew Heyman was back in the United States to attend a wedding—he hadn't been in touch, but his employees were in the habit of following his Twitter postings. At a quarter to 11, as he went through his Infosurv e-mail while lying in bed, Fusco found a note from Heyman, saying he had decided not to return to Infosurv. He wanted to keep the existing management structure intact. And he wanted to come to the office to talk about it.
Fusco suggested the following Tuesday, and at 10 o'clock that morning, Heyman appeared in the office for the first time in 11 months. It was an informal and slightly odd reunion. For starters, after nearly a year of traveling abroad in the most exotic of locales, Heyman showed up bearing only a pound of Starbucks coffee that he picked up on the way in. More to the point, as the staff ate pizza and chatted with Heyman, "He was detached. It was as if he wasn't there," Barrett later recalled. "I would have asked the staff what they had done, what was going on with their lives. But it was all about Jared and the trip. What the hell? Look, none of us survive if the staff isn't doing a good job. It's actually all about them. You want to take good care of them."
Things returned quickly to normal after Heyman's visit. Fusco, however, was disappointed with how Heyman showed his appreciation for the work he had done. Fusco had been looking for a big raise and perhaps ownership in the company. He got more money, but not as much as he thought he deserved, and there was no equity.
"It's not what I had hoped," Fusco told me. He felt he had improved the company dramatically. True, Infosurv had not hit its financial goals—both revenue and profit were essentially flat for the year. But Fusco felt he had made big strides, including revamping the company's IT system. And iCE, which the team had improved and refined in Heyman's absence, was picking up steam. "We have signed three big [iCE] projects in the last six weeks," Fusco said in July. Most satisfying for him personally, Fusco felt he had fired up the troops and had won their respect.
Heyman was nowhere near ready to end his endless summer. After the Atlanta visit, he spent the next two months energetically traveling and tweeting his way through Colombia and Ecuador before moving on to Hawaii with a stop in Florida. I caught up with him on the beach in Miami, just about one year after our first meeting in California. He was noticeably thinner, which he attributed to the fact that he hadn't been lifting weights. When we got around to talking business, Heyman gave Fusco solid, if not superhigh, marks. He acknowledged that the financial target he had set for the year was aggressive—and in a tough economy was difficult, if not impossible, to reach. And he recognized that Fusco and the team had decided to invest in the company's future rather than focus only on hitting a number. "I was satisfied with the performance—but not delighted," he said.
I asked what he had learned in his peripatetic year abroad, and he said the most important thing was that he was a start-up guy and not suited to be a hands-on manager. "I don't think I suck as a manager," he said. "But I'm a better leader than a manager. I treat people the way I like to be treated. I give someone a task, and I say, 'Here is the result I want—accomplish it how you see fit. If you get stuck, come to me.' I don't roam the office and shoot the shit."
Did he care that people back in the office seem happier with him gone? "That would please me no end, that they were happier," he replied.
I asked Heyman if he was grateful for the work and long hours Fusco and the others put in while he was away. "I recognize I have enjoyed this wonderful lifestyle while they have been working hard," he said. "But I put a lot of work in from 1998 to 2010, and I assumed a lot of risk." Then he added, "I probably should show them more appreciation."
Heyman swears he will start a new business one day, once the wanderlust wears thin. When he does, don't look for him to stick around for another 12 years, as he did at Infosurv. He's a starter and a builder. He needs to keep moving. For now, though, that means traveling the world. His year off is stretching into two. His latest tweet could have been his very first: "Great couple of weeks in Hawaii. Ate sushi on Waikiki beach, kitesurfed Maui's north shore and saw the sunset in Lahaina. Tomorrow, Bangkok."
