The Weed Agency Read online

  She hoped invoking the name of Newt Gingrich would be her sword to cut the Gordian knot of red tape; apparently her sword smith was Nerf®. And now even that was being taken from her.

  He didn’t even make the announcement in person: “Today I have reached a difficult personal decision. The Republican conference needs to be unified, and it is time for me to move forward where I believe I still have a significant role to play for our country and our party.” Some rotund wrestling coach she had never heard of was the new Speaker.

  Ava was halfway through a thoroughly miserable day when she received an e-mail from an old college classmate—technically, an old fling—Raj Chattopadhyay.

  She hadn’t heard from him in about two years, but out of the blue he said he would be in Washington for a couple of days and wanted to grab dinner. His e-mail signature indicated he was now ‘director of management initiatives’ at some company called GlobeScape in Palo Alto, California.

  Booty call, Ava surmised.

  But he had recommended dinner at a new place, DC Coast, and she wondered what seven years of postcollegiate life had done to old Raj.

  His choice was one of the city’s newest and most popular K Street restaurants, a site that celebrated the power and luxury that now surged through the avenues of the once-sleepy city.

  A bronze-colored mermaid greeted patrons at the door, her breasts brazenly exposed. Giant oval mirrors sat on the walls above the tables, letting every status-minded diner know who else was there and who wasn’t, and who was sitting with whom. The cuisine cost quite a bit, but seemed worth it, at least to a palate like Ava’s, which had relied heavily on Pop-Tarts and bar chow.

  Raj arrived, impeccably dressed—his suit was Armani, and it probably cost one of Ava’s paychecks. His black, curly hair had grown a little longer, and he had a small, unobtrusive ponytail. His watch cost more than the suit.

  Ava found she didn’t feel hit-upon; she was pleasantly surprised to find Raj really wanted to reconnect with a long-lost friend.

  “So how’s life in Washington?” he asked after ordering appetizers. “You seemed very Manhattan, very NYU, so I was kind of surprised you moved here—but then I remembered you were going to save the world.”

  “Change the world,” she corrected. “And … Washington sucks. So four years ago—wait, five now, I guess—right after I started, I come up with this plan to get the agency on the Internet—beyond the embarrassing single page they had at the time. Huge. Elaborate, groundbreaking, exactly what the Internet would be if you took hold of all of its potential at once—this thing is beautiful. I’m still working on it. Five years, and it is bare bones—crashes all the time, the data is out of date, nobody listens, nobody pays attention …” she sighed. “I’m … I really need to get out of here. I’m growing old here.”

  Raj oddly smiled. “You are completely in the wrong place. Nobody goes to Washington to change the world anymore. Washington’s irrelevant. I mean, didn’t the president say in some press conference that he still matters? If you have to remind people of that, you don’t really matter. You want to know where the action is? Fifteen hundred square miles in California south of San Francisco.”

  He was beaming. Ava looked at him in a new light, admiringly, but she felt jealousy gurgling up from deep within her. She felt a need to puncture the air out of that ego.

  “I figured you were soulless enough to go work on Wall Street selling junk bonds or something,” she said with a raised eyebrow.

  “Ha!” Raj laughed. “I love where I work. It’s amazing how few people have heard of GlobeScape, because we really are the essence of what Silicon Valley is all about. And … we’re doing something that I think you would be very interested in.”

  Not a booty call after all, Ava realized.

  “Go on.”

  “In nine months, GlobeScape plans to launch EasyFed.com, a Web portal-platform designed to provide services to help people deal with the federal government.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we’re going to take the traffic from the government sites … instead of paying your taxes online, or applying for a grant, or complaining that your Social Security check didn’t arrive on time, you’ll go to our site, click on what you need, fill out the data, and BOOM. Done.”

  “Doesn’t that just create a middleman?”

  “Ava …” Raj scoffed. “You of all people know that dealing with any part of the federal government is a pain in the ass. The sites are slow, they’re down, they’re poorly laid out, they’re not intuitive. The beautiful thing is, once we get all of this set up, almost all of this can be automated. We just need people to build the site. Once it’s done and running, the thing will run itself! Set it and forget it.”

  She tried to picture in her head the whole system working. “So, once I’ve helped build the site, what will you need me for?”

  “Well, somebody needs to make sure it continues to run, and we can expand and develop it to work on new services—state governments, local governments, etcetera. This is a big project with lots of opportunities for expansion. We are talking about the largest customer base in America—everyone who has to interact with the government in any way: 270 million people.”

  She couldn’t help herself—she admired Raj, but he had the bad habit of believing his own bull. “You’re counting the kids. And you’re counting the people who aren’t on the Internet.”

  “Okay, fine. We’re only talking about everyone on the Internet who has to interact with the government in any way. The federal government has enormous brand leverage and market share for government services”—Ava resisted the urge to burst out laughing at the nonsensical marketing doublespeak—“and so our aim with EasyFed is to take that and integrate it into our business model.”

  Ava felt herself growing more intrigued. “How will this EasyGov or whatever make money?”

  “Eventually we’ll charge usage and processing fees, like banks, but for now we’re building market share. We’re also contemplating Web advertising. The big deal these days is building a platform that can leverage what we call ‘floating sticky eyeballs.’ ”

  “One pop-up ad and you’ll lose everyone,” she warned.

  “Ava, you need to get out there,” Raj leaned across the table and started to close the sale. He cheerfully boasted that Silicon Valley had been the ultimate boomtown since Netscape incorporated in 1994.

  “Silicon Valley is to the rest of the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world,” Raj said. “You can just feel the electricity in the air.”

  “You’re probably feeling the power lines giving everyone brain cancer,” she said, biting down on an ice cube. “Okay … I’m interested. What’s the next step?”

  “Let’s pick some dates soon for you to come out and meet some people.”

  She smiled a warm smile that had been all too infrequent lately. “I think I’d like that.”

  “I’d like that, too.”

  A game of footsie commenced under the table.

  At the conclusion of the meal, Raj grabbed the check before Ava could even look at it.

  “I’ve got this. This is a recruitment dinner. At GlobeScape, we don’t do anything halfway. Platinum company credit cards are for old money. We have osmium,” he said, throwing down a silvery-blue slice of plastic.

  GlobeScape FedExed plane tickets to her Dupont Circle efficiency apartment. Ava took some vacation days and flew business class for the first time in her life. At the San Jose airport, Raj picked her up in a BMW that could not have been more than six months old.

  “Alright, I’m impressed already,” she said as they drove away from the airport.

  Raj flashed a gleaming smile.

  “We’re just getting started,” he said, kicking the car into a higher gear onto Interstate 880—the engine roared beautifully, for about twenty seconds, before the traffic ahead forced him to stop and idle.

  “Everything’s new out here,” Raj said happily. “Ex
cept Stanford University. I thought about going there.”

  “You were too much of an East Coast guy, huh?”

  “I’m starting to think it was a huge mistake,” he said, before correcting himself. “I mean, I’m glad I met you at NYU, and things turned out fine. But I think we were a couple of oddballs who didn’t fit in.”

  “I always thought the city was big enough for everybody,” she said.

  Until moving to Washington, Ava had considered herself a New Yorker in spirit. For much of her childhood, her father worked in midtown Manhattan in the production department of a large publishing firm. Her mother, an exotic beauty, feminist, and child of Lebanese immigrants, was an author and professor of art at Rutgers University, an avant-garde intellectual.

  Ava only made sense of her parents’ love after it ended. Opposites may attract, but they rarely grow old together. At first glance, Ava’s parents were yin and yang—a levelheaded, rational father and a free-spirited, unpredictable mother. But the nights at home and family vacations included arguments, fights, long awkward silences, and ultimately a sense that everyone was fooling themselves, keeping up a façade until the pair’s joint project, Ava, shipped off.

  When they announced their intent to divorce shortly before Ava went off to college, she resisted the urge to thank them. She knew the pair would not enjoy a happy or even content marriage with an empty nest.

  Growing up, she had all of her material needs more than cared for—they lived in a large house in Maplewood, New Jersey, making day trips to enjoy all of the benefits of pre-Giuliani New York and few of its dangers—but she had been eager to break out of what she found to be stultifying suburbia. The city had taunted her with its proximity, and while her big change-the-world dreams made going to school in Washington tempting, she found herself close to home.

  Raj, two years older and from Edison, New Jersey, was another bright mind determined to escape the boring suburbs.

  “Look, nobody on the East Coast appreciates people who build things,” Raj said as the traffic eked along. “Deep down, you’re a builder. An engineer. You build Web sites and systems and networks instead of bricks and mortar, but the basics are the same. Nobody goes to the Ivy League for an engineering degree. It’s seen as manual labor.”

  She laughed. “Glad to see all this dot-com money hasn’t eroded that chip on your shoulder,” she said.

  “Out here, lawyers, bankers, politicians—they’re all secondclass,” he continued. “Nobody here cares much about movie stars or athletes. This is where the nerds get to be in charge and we’re the kings of the hill.”

  “Funny, I used to think of Washington the same way,” Ava replied. She tried to remember when she stopped liking D.C.

  “Two kinds of kings rule our kingdom,” Raj said. “One is the inventor—the one who actually comes up with the idea and makes it happen. The other kind is the venture capitalist. Anybody who can’t develop Web-based cold fusion in his garage wants to be the guy who discovered and financed the genius who developed Web-based cold fusion in his garage. It’s the star player and manager or coach. Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson.”

  The traffic moved agonizingly slowly. Pretty heavy for mid-morning, thought Ava, frowning.

  “Today, when we finally get through this traffic, you’re going to meet the next Phil Jackson of Silicon Valley.”

  Ava checked in to her hotel in Palo Alto, showered, changed into what she thought were good interview clothes, and Raj drove her to GlobeScape’s campus, just a bit off Sand Hill Drive in Menlo Park, at that moment the most expensive patch of commercial real estate in North America.

  “Our founder, Len Silver, inherited some wealth from his grandparents’ tire company,” Raj said.

  “Lenny,” she chuckled, noticing he looked surprisingly like an old hippie in the company’s portrait in the brochure and on the Web site.

  “He legally changed it to Lennon in 1980,” Raj corrected her. “Invested the wealth he inherited in a few startups, also got in on Apple and Netscape early. I’ve seen a lot of executives who have brains, but no vision. Well, Lennon Silver has vision by the bucketful.”

  WIRED PROFILE

  When you walk into the Palo Alto offices of GlobeScape.com, the first thing you notice are the giant portraits of world leaders in the hallway leading to the office suite of CEO Lennon Silver. They’re originals, copying Andy Warhol’s Day-Glo-style portraits of Marilyn Monroe: John Kennedy, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Evita Peron. At the end of the hallway is a specially commissioned portrait of Lennon Silver, in the same bold red, green, pink, and blue.

  The implicit comparison is a big boast, and Silver is a man determined to back it up.

  “I’m not a man who plays it safe,” Lennon says in an interview. “I’m different from a lot of other people because I really care about things. I really mean that.”

  In past years, California investors derided Lennon Silver as one of the higher-risk venture capitalists playing in the silicon sandbox. He racked up some legendary wins—getting in on Apple and Netscape early—and some spectacular failures, including ill-fated efforts to sell produce, jewelry, and coffee beans over the Internet.

  Now GlobeScape is Silver’s latest thriving baby, and the venture capitalists are swarming. And he’s particularly excited about his company’s newest project, EasyFed.com. Like many of Silver’s ideas, a personal moment of frustration provided the spark of inspiration.

  “Some House Budget Subcommittee was talking about increasing the tax rate on carried interest—an absolute war crime of a policy idea—and I had no idea how to get in touch with them,” Silver recalls. He found his calls to the IRS, the Joint Tax Committee, and the Securities and Exchange Commission only generated what he called “stunningly unhelpful” responses, and so ending that frustration, on a global scale, became his all-consuming vision.

  Enter EasyFed.com, where the average John Q. Public can log on, search for the government service or interaction they require, enter some data and use some dropdown menus, and voilà!—the frustration of taking on City Hall is gone in a puff of electrons.

  Silver and his team are betting there’s a mint to be made in handling inquiries to the U.S. Mint, but he’s playing his cards close to the vest about how EasyFed.com will operate beyond its currently undisclosed—but reportedly quite considerable—sum of venture capital.

  Asked to detail EasyFed’s revenue model, he demurs. “To truly find something, first you have to lose yourself,” he says with a cryptic smile. “Because the Internet is just beginning to reveal its potential.”

  Ava’s first hour on the small GlobeScape campus was a succession of handshakes. Ava kept waiting for some sort of formal interview process, but mostly this was meetings and greetings.

  She met plenty of folks whose body language and office location seemed important—their titles were “director of inspiration” and “director of innovation,” nothing as mundane as a “chief financial officer”—but their questions about her work at the agency seemed perfunctory. Either all that these guys needed to hear was Raj’s endorsement, or they simply had faith that she would take to the environment like a fish to water.

  The computers on every desk were sleek and astonishingly fast. She knew the equipment back at the agency was dated, but now she felt embarrassed by how clunky and slow her usual tools were.

  “The best computers, servers, software, and everything else we could need,” Raj beamed.

  “This is …” She groped for the right word. “Utopian.”

  “The culture here demands a lot from people, so we need to make sure people have everything they need to do their best work,” Raj said.

  “That notion is absolutely alien to the federal government,” Ava sighed.

  Raj chuckled. “It makes a late night—or lots of late nights—a lot easier to deal with when you’re enjoying what you’re doing. Nobody really worries much about the time clock because what do we love to do? Think, and imagine, and figure stuff out. So we do
that for work for a while and then we do that for fun for a while and a lot of the time one blends into another.”

  Work-life balance problem: solved! thought Ava. Eliminate the distinction entirely!

  Finally, she was brought to the office suite for Silver. His secretary indicated he would be ready in a few moments. The television was muted on CNBC; later that year GlobeScape was scheduled to have its initial public offering, trading on the NASDAQ under the stock symbol “GlobS.”

  At last, the secretary looked up and said, “He’s ready for you. If he’s not at his desk, look in his meditation garden.”

  Ava stepped through the doorway, and found a gorgeous office suite with three enormous flat-screen Sony Trinitron televisions, tuned in to CNBC, CNN, and a soap opera; the sound was down on all three. A computer so advanced Ava had never seen it before sat on his desk; a computer she thought had just arrived on the market was half-disassembled in the corner, apparently being put back into its boxes for use elsewhere.

  The rear wall’s floor-to-ceiling office windows slid open into a large, elaborate, walled garden that stretched around the corner of the building. Ava peered outside, and her eyes readjusted to the bright afternoon sunlight, spying a Buddha statue sitting in a shady corner. Not far away a small fountain bubbled, and orange-and-white carp swam in the waters of a small manmade pond. Over in the farthest corner, on a small wooden platform, the founder sat, meditating.

  Lennon Silver was tall, balding, and had a neatly trimmed, graying beard. The remaining hair in the back was tied in a small braid with some sort of shiny metal clip holding it together. He was clad in a polo shirt and khakis, and a pair of glasses lay folded beside him.

  “Ava Summers …” Silver called out in the garden.

  Ava stepped out, a bit bewildered but enjoying the ride. She waited for Silver to speak, but he sat, eyes closed, seemingly deep in meditative peace. She wondered if she was supposed to say something, or whether she would be interrupting. But he did call me out here, she thought.