He found work for all these people, mainly in helping out the start-ups. But they were skilled professionals and he was paying them market-rate salaries, and most of them weren’t really needed for Blade’s incubating functions. And yet Paul kept on hiring. Another UI designer, an office manager, a data scientist. What was he up to? In retrospect, he thought he’d been reacting to a growing disquiet with Blade’s business plan. “Hiring is my comfort food. When I don’t feel good, I hire people.”
And then one day he had all of Blade’s personnel present themselves to the board. One member was a professor at Harvard Business School. After the presentations, she told Paul that she liked the start-ups but doubted he would ever find a group to nurture that was as skilled and versatile as that in-house team of his. Why not have them create some companies of their own?
It was as if she had described what Paul hadn’t known he planned to do. “Let’s build something,” he said to Billo and Schwenk and the rest of the team. They had plenty of ideas. One of these came from Billo and Paul. They had both looked into using “virtual assistants,” people who do office work remotely for a client, over the Internet and telephone. The assistant works from home, usually for several different steady clients. The client employs the same assistant but only when needed, saving the various costs of a full-time employee. The idea intrigued Billo and Paul, especially its combination of the human and technological. There were a number of online sites offering the services of virtual assistants. Billo and Paul tried out the best-known of these and concluded that they could do better.
So Paul put an intern to work on a prototype app. He liked the early results well enough to call Joel Cutler at General Catalyst. Paul told him they were going to build the best app around for a virtual-assistant business. As Paul remembered, Cutler said, “Good idea. But do it for travel.”
Once again Paul felt, with slight chagrin, Why didn’t I think of that?
Ever since he’d agreed to put $10 million into Blade, Cutler had been lobbying Paul to start and run his own company again. Cutler and another senior partner at GC had dreamed up this idea: Get Paul to build a novel sort of online travel agency, an anti-Kayak that would employ real travel agents.
The idea grew on Paul quickly—as ideas usually had to grow on him if they were going to grow at all. Online travel had been Paul’s motherlode, and this would be a very different approach to it. Paul was, after all, the inventor of Gethuman, the online service meant to let the customers of giant corporations deal with people instead of robots. Here was another chance to create a company that modeled great customer service, commercial and public-spirited both, a red phone of a company. He even had a ready-made name for it: Lola. Short for “longitude-latitude.” It was a resonant name for Paul, one of the names that he and Steve Hafner had considered for Kayak. Easy to spell, easy to remember, two syllables that rolled off the tongue, as in the old lyric, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”
No robots booking travel this time. Human travel agents would be the essence of the company. “These are modern travel agents,” Paul said. He imagined them with much the same ardor he had first imagined Blade’s office: “We might not even call them travel agents when we launch the company. These are like phenomenal customer service people. Really high energy, they love their job, they’re happy, they make you feel good working with them. They type fast, they’re very responsive.” The plan ran counter to the contemporary trend to turn as many employees as possible into contract laborers. All of Lola, including its agents, would be regular employees with salaries and a full range of benefits, including 401(k) pension plans and stock options.
Most of Lola’s agents would work from home, using the latest in travel search technology. Customers would reach them on their smartphones and notebooks through a mobile app—to be downloaded at lolatravel.com—and they would converse via a technology called “augmented chat,” or simply by telephone. Maybe the first paying customers would be people with complex travel plans and people who found it tiresome or difficult to book their trips on computers and notepads and smartphones. And, in Paul’s vision, those first customers would keep coming back and tell their friends about the company, because they’d find the service it offered so pleasant and efficient. Also comprehensive. Some airlines and other travel companies blocked online agencies from accessing their information. “But you know what technology they can’t block?” Paul said. “Humans. And Lola.”
The principal investors in Blade were pleased. Indeed, both General Catalyst and Accel were wrangling with Paul to let them buy a larger share of Lola. American Express was also interested in acquiring a piece. Paul named himself and Billo co-founders, the CEO and CTO respectively, and Schwenk vice president of operations. There were delicious prospects: recruitings and hirings; meetings in front of the whiteboard in the Fenway conference room, he and Billo trading ideas, rapid-fire, about the design of Lola’s app.
On a chill December afternoon, everything seemed much the same outside the old Blade office. You still approached it as if on one of the tours Paul used to give—down the stairs from Summer Street, along the narrow wooden boardwalk that fronted the wintry waters of Fort Point Channel, and around the corner into what Paul used to call “the sketchy-looking alley.” The funky green metal door was still there, still the office’s main entrance.
It was when you got inside that you began to see the changes. The stage and DJ booth were gone. That once-essential equipment had been packed up and locked away in a storage room out back. In its place were desks, many more desks than before. Only a few months ago, the office had seemed spacious, if anything too sparsely populated for a going concern. Now it seemed almost crowded, full of unfamiliar faces staring at computer screens—a place both busy and quiet, like a slice of Kayak’s engineering office, though peopled by a much larger percentage of women.
Thirty-one new people had been hired for Lola in the past few months, Paul’s assistant said, and four more just today. And the little teams that Blade had been trying to incubate into companies? They were gone. Two had died, and the other two had their own offices now. The last of the fledglings, Drafted, had left yesterday, she said. And there was more momentous news. They were running out of room for Lola’s people. The amigos were looking for a larger space, and when they found it the Blade office would be sublet.
For more than two years Paul had dreamed about all the wondrous things that would happen in this place. The big-bet companies that would flourish here. The soirees and parties that the nightclub would host—some of them had happened. The Blade Truck and the floating Collaboration Fountain, neither of which had materialized, except as phantasms of the fire. One remembered the tours Paul had conducted when the place was a construction site and all its insanely interactive features were still phantasms, too. The Blade wristbands, which had in fact directed the fine, expensive sound system to play snatches of the favorite songs of guests as they arrived at parties. The Blade bar’s hockey puck, which actually had lit up guests’ favorite drinks. The stage and DJ booth that had made the nightclub rock.
Paul’s assistant looked across the office toward the glass walls of the Fenway conference room, where Paul was just now meeting with his board of directors and Lola’s executives. “Paul was unhappy when the DJ booth was removed,” his assistant said. He was even more unhappy, she added, about the prospect of subletting this place. But, he had told her, he hoped to make a deal with the tenant so that he could hold a party here from time to time.
In fact, Paul wasn’t very unhappy. And he was not embarrassed, or remorseful. He was merely wistful about leaving Blade behind, less the company than the place. The name Blade would be retired, but saved, of course, for future use.
“Fail fast and pivot.” In the parlance of the age of high-tech entrepreneurship, this was a meme, a mantra of the New Economy. As a guiding principle, it was vague enough to serve as a license both for acting irresponsibly with other people’s money, and also for invention. Of cou
rse, failing with one project and turning to another wasn’t practicable for most people, financially or psychologically. But even before Paul had the cushion of great success, and before he’d found the solace of Buddhist practice, there had been many times when he’d refused the temptation to cower or give up. The time, for instance, when he programmed his way out of depression with the Xiangqi website, or the time when he maxed out all his credit creating Boston Light and, refusing to feel desperate, managed to drive a hard bargain and sell out for a fortune.
The people who had invested in Paul expected his twists and turns, both his failures and, as the meme would have it, his pivots. Great success was what his investors were after, and great success is hard to prefabricate. In the part of the economy where Paul operated, an investor wanted to place some bets on a person with ability and boldness, with the tendency to turn a job into an obsession and the knack for tossing an obsession away when a better-looking one comes along.
Paul was a creature of the New Economy, but he was also an old American. He was a carrier of a strain in the American character that refuses to be encumbered by the past. It’s an ethos that says you don’t have to do what your father did, that indeed you don’t have to do what you yourself were doing six months ago—or even yesterday. Consistency doesn’t matter. Only invention matters.
Brenda was his foundation, his rock, Paul said. Ever since she’d returned for keeps, he had stuck with his antimania drug. After nearly three decades of struggle, the fire was contained. His native enthusiasm, though, was far from exhausted. In an email about Lola, he wrote:
I was born to make this company. :)
Rage against the machine.
He and Brenda planned to marry—privately, but Paul imagined a Shake-the-Lake-size party to follow. They still had the house in Arlington, but had moved downtown to an apartment on the waterfront. One early winter evening there, Paul asked her, “Do you mind if I go out and do Uber for a while?”
“Oh no,” Brenda said. Her smile was droll. “I have no problem with the fact that you find strangers more interesting than me.”
Paul had become a registered Uber driver. He’d done this for research. One plan for Lola was to have its customers rate the services of the travel agents, as passengers rate Uber drivers. Paul thought he ought to find out how it felt to be rated by customers.
Uber drivers use their own cars. Paul had enlisted as a driver for Uber X—the less expensive service; its customers expect to get picked up in a clean but relatively inexpensive midsize car, a Toyota Camry, a Honda Accord. Many of Paul’s passengers were surprised to find themselves in the latest model all-electric Tesla with its 17-inch interactive screen in the console, and being chatted up by the driver, who was apt to make the most improbable claims.
A high school student from China and her mother and aunt climb in the backseat. The mother and aunt speak no English. After a while Paul asks the girl if she wants to go to college here in Boston. To MIT, perhaps? She says it is her dream. Paul says, “I teach at MIT.” Does he really? she asks. “I teach entrepreneurship,” he says. “I teach people how to start companies.” He adds, “And I’m driving Uber just for fun.” Who knew what the girl made of this. Such an interesting country, America.
Being a driver was fun. “Kind of putting lots of pieces of my life together,” Paul said. “Cars. Serving people. Talking with people. Learning new technology.” What he liked best was having a stranger in his car, all to himself, for ten to twenty minutes—people who didn’t work in technology, people he would never meet otherwise. He was keeping a notebook in which he listed at least one thing each passenger told him. He was doing well as an Uber driver. After forty-nine rides, customers had given him a nearly perfect rating, an average of 4.97 out of a possible 5 stars. Some nights he made as much as fifty dollars.
For Jandi Kidder and Gene Bukhman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to all the people who let me sit in on meetings, or spoke with me directly, or helped me find my way around the several worlds frequented by Paul English:
Jeremy Allaire, Christian Allen, Suzanne Amato, Bill Aulet, Ko Baryiames, Ben Berman, Mike Bernardo, Tim Berners-Lee, Firdaus Bhathena, Dr. Michael Biber, Robert Birge, Young Chun Blom, Ralf Boeck, Larry Bohn, Kate Brigham, Alix Cantave, Ed Cardoza, Craig Carlson, Mike Chambers, Walter Chick, Cassandra Chipps, Marie Flore Chipps, Jack Connors, Scott Cook, Carol Costello, Joel Cutler, Ophelia Dahl, Bob Davis, Drew Devlin, Marie DiCalogero, Esther Doggett, Dennis Doughty, Sam Dunn, Zach Dunn, Gayle Evans, David Fialkow, Ben Fischman, Melissa Fredette, Sameer Ghandi, Giuliano Giacaglia, Jim Giza, Robyn Glaser, Paul Graham, Steve Hafner, Kristen Harkness, Bill Helman, Reid Hoffman, Zach Iscol, Jonathan Jackson, Lincoln Jackson, Steven Ji, Bill Kaiser, Dr. Andres Kanner, Ben Kaplan, Petr Kaplunovich, Kosmas Karadimitriou, Scott Kirsner, Donald Knuth, Rakshit Kumar, Nicholas Lambrou, Bill Law, Bonnie Levin, Tom Madigan, Joe Mahoney, Jennifer Marotta, Amy Marshall, John Maynard, Todd McCormack, Julie Melbin, Brian Michon, Sidra Michon, Hugh Molotsi, Michael Moritz, Bob Morris, Harry Nelis, Dan Nye, Dr. Jim O’Connell, Rose O’Donnell, Steve Pelletier, Jeff Rago, Bob Rainis, Vinayak Ranade, Steve Revilak, Michael Saunders, Oren Sherman, Gene Shkolnik, Nancy Smith, Raman Tenneti, Adam Valkin, Loune Viaud, Dave Walden, Bill Warner, David Weinberger, Rebecca Weintraub, Michael White, Thomas W. White (architect), Derek Young, Giorgos Zacharia, and Snejina Zacharia.
Special thanks for putting me up in their homes, to Rustin and Randall Levenson, and to Katherine Ellsworth and Pete Petronzio—and also to Alex Attia and Sonia Miranda of the Charles Hotel. Thanks also to my family and for various kinds of assistance to my friends Richard Brown, Stuart Dybek, Ed Etheredge, Miriam Feurele, John Graiff, Jonathan Harr, Pacifique Irankunda, Hanno Muellner, and Kristin Nelson.
I am especially indebted to Karl Berry, Bill O’Donnell, Paul Schwenk, and Brenda White, and also to Paul English’s siblings: Ed, Eileen, Tim, Nancy, Dan, and Barbara. I am grateful to Chris Jerome for all her help and counsel, and to Evan Camfield and Derrill Hagood, and I am more grateful than I can say to my editors, Kate Medina and Richard Todd, for what I now realize has been an extraordinary run of generous help and encouragement. Paul English was invariably courteous and forthcoming. I am grateful to him, of course, and also to his hero—and, as he likes to say, chief adviser though deceased—Thomas J. White.
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