Kill Process

by William Hertling

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Do you want him? Can you hire us?”

  I love the idea. But hiring people. Salary. Money. Damn. Why must it come down to money? Why is money consistently the barrier? For a brief second, the connections flare up in my mind: money equals power, and power equals control, and I almost allow myself to go over the brink and conclude what I really, really need to do is take down our economic system. Merely toppling Tomo will not be enough.

  It’s bad enough my mind even grazes the thought. I pull myself back. Focus on the here-and-now. I want to hire this girl. She seems as crazy as me and twice as smart.

  “I’m interested. I need a couple of days to figure out the finances and see if we can make you an offer, okay?”

  * * *

  The next day, Amber and I bring fish tacos back to the house and work through lunch. We’re pair-programming on a complex bit of code to handle the fractional accounting we’ll need to correctly credit each players in any interaction.

  Amber wants to write each record to the database.

  “We can’t do that,” I say. “We don’t have enough database bandwidth.”

  “It’s a Feldian NoSQL database. It scales linearly.”

  “You’re doing a database hit for each service. We can’t afford that.”

  “Tomo writes a million times more data,” Amber says. “They manage it.”

  “We’re not Tomo, and we don’t have their budget. We need to be more efficient. Write all the data in one go, and then schedule a background task to restructure the data later.”

  “Then we’re writing and reading everything twice.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Look—”

  I’m cut off by my phone beeping. It’s one o’clock, and if I’m going to meet Thomas, I have to leave now.

  “I gotta go.”

  “We’re in the middle of this.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

  “Fine. I’ll take care of it.”

  She doesn’t say anything, yet I hear the unspoken words: “Like I do every night.”

  I hold back a string of curses. “This is important. But, so is obtaining funding. So when I return later, I’m not going to code with you. I’m going to spend the afternoon putting together a draft proposal to take to investors. I’ll schedule time with Mat, and I’ll see what I can set up. Then we can hire Igloo and her partner in here.”

  “That would be good. Get us an office, too, because I want my bedroom back.”

  Holy shit, why does it seem like everything is melting down at once?

  By the time I’m out of there, I’ve got no choice but to drive downtown if I’m going to meet Thomas on time. Traffic is slow over the Morrison Bridge, and I’m already five minutes late as I’m still circling for parking. I end up driving over a curb and the sidewalk to grab a spot in an expensive lot, and pay twelve bucks for the privilege of being late to a walk.

  Thomas looks at his phone as I walk up.

  “One-thirty?”

  “I’m sorry. Really sorry.”

  “I hear those words a lot, but they only go so far. How you treat me is what matters.”

  I take Thomas’s hand in mine. “I hear you. I’m going to try to do better, though I’m still going to screw up. Try to give me the benefit of the doubt if the data are trending in the right direction.”

  He cracks a smile. “You can find a way to relate everything to data. Here.” He pulls out a white paper bag from his jacket pocket and unrolls the top.

  I peer in. “Fudge!”

  He breaks off half, and hands it to me. “Peace offering. Where do you want to walk?”

  “Along the river?”

  We walk for a few minutes, enjoying the fudge, and not saying much of anything. The waterfront is quiet, most folks back at work by now.

  “Thanks for messaging me yesterday,” he says. “I was worried about you.”

  “It’s been really, really busy. I can’t even begin to tell you how busy.”

  “Are things going okay?”

  “They are. We have a really good lead on something, a piece of technology to solve the empty network problem.”

  “That’s a big deal, right?”

  “Yeah, huge. It makes it extra urgent we raise funding.”

  “An acquisition?”

  “No, hiring two employees, though they also want a percentage of the revenue share for their software.”

  Thomas raises one eyebrow. “If they’re employees, you own what they create. It’s not their software, it’s your software.”

  “It’s more complicated. They’re coming in with already developed software.”

  “Then it’s an acquisition,” he says.

  I shrug.

  “You need good legal representation. You need to protect yourself.”

  “I wish you could do it.”

  “It’s not my area of expertise. You need an expert. I gave you a list of lawyers I vetted.”

  “They’ll want more money,” I say. “Money I don’t have.”

  “It’s money well spent to avoid problems later. At least one of them should do it for equity or at reduced cost.”

  I look up at him. “You know what? I didn’t come to talk business. I do that twenty hours a day. Let’s talk about something else. What’s new with you?”

  “The Audi is in the shop for a brake recall until Monday. I have a loaner S4.” Somehow he manages to embody “S” and “4” with deep notes of lust.

  “Oh, good grief. You only got the A4 a few months ago.”

  “I know. But the S4 . . . it’s indescribable.”

  I take his arm in mine. “Try.”

  Thomas tells me about acceleration and horsepower, and I focus on the warmth of his arm under mine.

  CHAPTER 24

  * * *

  “LET ME SEE what you’ve got.”

  I place the tablet in front of Mat. I’ve got the elevator pitch, a twelve-slide deck explaining the problem, solution, product, and team, and a one-page summary. It’s rough but complete.

  He flips through the slides. “Give me the pitch.”

  “Two-thirds of all Tomo users feel violated by the company’s policies around advertising, personal data, and privacy, and manipulated by the selection of information they’re shown. Yet Tomo is the only way they have to maintain friendships, which keeps them captive. No viable competitors have formed because they can’t gain the critical mass of users necessary for people to migrate over and maintain their friendships. Tapestry is our solution to this problem, a new approach to social networking that uses federation and decomposition to prevent the accumulation of power endemic to social networks. Users feel safe, secure, and in control of their personal data, privacy, and friendships. Our approach enables other companies to join forces as well, so any business vulnerable to Tomo’s whims will want to partner with us. Moreover, we’ve built a unique solution to solve the empty network problem, which means that when new users join, they’re engaged and having fun from the first minute, and they’ll stick around until their friends show up.”

  He grimaces. “It’s too big,” he says, his voice low, like he’s talking to himself.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone will believe you’re tackling too much. Also, you’re not saying what’s compelling. A unique solution? Everyone has a unique solution. Say what it is.”

  I try to keep my head up though my heart sinks at his criticism. “How about . . . Every new user gets a digital companion, an AI they can chat with, which makes Tapestry fun right from the first visit.”

  “Better . . .” He’s hesitant. “Keep working on it, and figure out a way to not make it sound so big. Right now it sounds like you need every single company in the world to sign onto your platform to have a chance at success. Failure is preordained, as my friend Owen would say.”

  Damn. More changes? I want some money already.

  “Thanks for the feedback,” I say. “I’ll keep
refining, though I need funding—and soon. I have bills to pay for Tapestry, and I want to hire Igloo and get her chat technology.”

  “Forget venture capital for now, and look for an angel investor. A typical angel investment might be anywhere from twenty-five thousand to a hundred thousand.”

  With Igloo and her partner, we’re four employees. I want to hire more: at least a couple of developers to offload me and Amber, a designer. Add up the salaries, the need for office space if we grow to that size, and a hardware budget for Igloo. “That’s not going to last very long.”

  “It only needs to carry you until you’re a little more viable, refined and proven. Then go to a venture capitalist, and get a bigger investment.”

  “And go through all this pitching stuff again? Why don’t I get more money up front?”

  “The more valuable you appear, the more money you get for a given amount of the company. Let’s say you convince someone the company is worth a million bucks. You trade ten percent of the company for a hundred thousand. Down the road, you’re closer to release, more of what you’re doing has proven out, and you seem like a sure thing. Then the company is worth ten million and you trade ten percent to get a million. Later, when you’ve launched and acquire customers who love the shit out of you, the company will be worth a hundred million. Then you trade away ten percent for ten million.”

  “If I try to raise too much money up front, I’m going to give away too much of the company, and I’ll have nothing left to offer later, when the company is worth more.”

  “Exactly. Listen. Work on the pitch, and I’ll email you an introduction to my buddy, Owen. He’s an angel investor here in Portland. I can get you a meeting with him. But you’re the one who has to convince him you’re worth the investment.”

  * * *

  I join Thomas for a walk after lunch, and tell him about the morning, and he tells me about his case. It’s a quick walk, because I’ve got an appointment with Charlotte.

  “Can I see you tonight?” he asks, before I leave.

  “Ahhh . . . I promised Igloo I’d stop by today.”

  “At night?”

  “No, this afternoon. Then I need to work with Amber tonight. She wants to define the chat API, and write a reference chat provider to interface with IRC.”

  “That’s urgent?”

  “It’s all urgent. We’re racing against time and money and Tomo and people’s goodwill. I also have to work on the pitch, and reply to a bunch of emails.”

  “This weekend. Saturday. You have to take a day off.”

  I wrap my hand around his back and pull him close. “Saturday. It’s a date.”

  I race over to Charlotte’s office, where she greets me at the door as usual, and waits for me to take a seat.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine, just fine.” I’m tapping one toe, and realize I’m impatient to be out of here, even though I sat down only moments ago. I’m counting the things I need to do in my head. “I guess I have a lot on my plate. Like ten things I must do by tonight.”

  “Sounds like a lot. Is that exciting or stressful?”

  “I guess exciting. It reminds me of the early days at Tomo. I was employee number forty-eight.”

  * * *

  2002, San Francisco, 29 years old.

  I’ve been in San Francisco two days and I’ve only slept for four hours. Everyone knows augmented social networks are going to be the next big thing, and this is my chance to get in on the ground floor, employee number forty-eight, thanks to a recommendation from Repard. Sometime during this never-ending fire drill caused by an onslaught of new users signing up for Tomo, I become convinced leaving the consulting firm was a mistake.

  I need to remove a database column, and look at my list of chicken scratch. SQL is not my forte. DROP is the command I want, I think. I type in the DROP command, then query to verify the column’s gone. I receive an error message that the table doesn’t exist. I stare, dumbfounded, at the screen until I realize I’ve deleted not a single column, but the entire table. Now I’m going to have to replicate this entire database again. Hours of work wasted.

  “Fuck my life. Who the hell invented SQL?”

  I turn to the nineteen-year-old next to me, who also happens to be my boss. “Hey!”

  He pulls his headphones off and I hear the tinny sounds of The Offspring escaping from the speakers.

  “You hired me to do security work,” I say. “That’s what I know. Why am I working on the database?”

  “Because the database is the bottleneck. We’ve got ten thousand users signing up each day. You see that guy over there—” He points toward someone in slacks and a dress shirt who’s hunched over in front of a big CRT. “He’s from finance, but he’s working on the database too. He’s using Visual Basic macros to migrate the data because it’s the only language he knows. Everyone does what they can.”

  “Jesus. Visual Basic. Aren’t we making things worse?”

  “If we survive today, we can fix it tomorrow.”

  I want to quit, except I’ve never given up at anything. It’s an ongoing struggle, upping capacity, bringing new servers online, refactoring the database, the one thing that’s hardest to scale. I manage a few hours of sleep here and there, and survive on pizza and burritos. Someone purchased a literal pallet of frozen burritos and the refrigerators are stuffed with them.

  Every couple of days I use the shower in the bathroom next to the bike lockers and change into a new set of clothes from my suitcase, which is here in the office with me. I haven’t even seen the furnished apartment that’s waiting for me.

  On day seven, we swap in a new database schema and deploy code, and miraculously the database engine runs at ten percent load. We’ve gotten ahead of the incoming users and given ourselves a month of breathing room.

  I’m shocked to realize I’m having fun. Security stuff had gotten routine, but this is living on the bleeding edge. It’s a rush.

  Later that year, my boss leaves for another startup and I become Tomo’s database architect.

  * * *

  “When you became the database architect,” Charlotte asks, “what happened to computer security?”

  “I did both for a while. Then we hired someone else to do computer security in 2004. Someone I . . .” I don’t know what’s safe to say here, what she must report or even might repeat. I can’t dive into my long history on the wrong side of computer security laws.

  “Yes?”

  “Someone I knew from my college days. That turned out to be a big mistake. He screwed up, big time, which came back around to me, because I’d recommended him. I thought I was going to be fired.”

  “Really? Merely from recommending someone?”

  “Neil was someone I’d known online, from a board I frequented when I was in college. I’d known him for a few years.”

  “You met him?”

  “Online, not in person. The hacker community is small. Everyone knows everyone else. He was working a dead-end sysadmin job when he was brilliant and should have been doing so much more. He said he wanted a real job, and we needed someone, so I thought it would be a perfect match.”

  “What happened?”

  “Everything was fine for six, seven months. He did his job, stayed on top of all the threats, kept our systems patched, ran penetration tests. Then one week he didn’t come in, didn’t answer his phone. We thought he’d taken a vacation or found a girl or something. The next thing we knew, our users’ data was showing up on Russian sites. He sold us out.”

  My voice catches, and I realize this old story, this forever ago event, affects me more than I imagined.

  “Eventually he showed up on the old boards, bragging about it. He’d done it for a lousy twenty-five thousand, which he could make in a few months working at Tomo. The whole thing had been a scam from the beginning. He never was interested in the job. He wanted to prove he could social engineer his way in, and I fell for it. I’m an idiot.”

  I grab my coffee,
take a slow sip, before I continue.

  “Tomo was a month from closing funding. I had to meet with the board of directors and all the executives to explain why we’d been compromised, and how I was responsible. They talked about me like I wasn’t even there. Why was I responsible for the database? Could I be trusted? I wasn’t a person to them, only a potential risk.” I take a deep breath.

  “They forced me to take three months off while they investigated, because nobody trusted me. It caused a month delay in funding. I came in one day to grab a few things from my desk and they had security escort me the whole time. Everyone stared.”

  “That’s awful.”

  I nod. “It seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, although I also couldn’t imagine the situation getting any better. I went from being on top of the world to doubting everything. My skills, my judgement. Was I worth anything at all to anyone? I was thirty-three years old, and all I wanted to do was move back to New York and live with my mother.”

  Charlotte scribbles something in her notepad. “You didn’t?”

  My blood pounds in my ears, and I try to rub away the unexpected tick in my eye. “No. I met Jeremy. I should have gone to New York. Fuck!” I punch the couch and little clouds of dust puff up. I’m glad I’m angry. I usually can’t even feel anger when I think of him. Anger is better than the total sense of powerlessness that usually engulfs me. That bastard.

  “How did you meet?”

  I shake my head and my breath wheezes in and out through my nostrils. “Not gonna talk about it.” I want to scream. All I can do is sit here on the couch, feeling like I’m going to explode. I can’t say anything, because if I do, I’ll fall to pieces.

  “He was nice in the beginning. I had been single for a while. Curled up in bed talking about our dreams, I felt whole again. Because of all the shit at work, I had stopped believing in myself, and he believed in me. When it felt like I didn’t matter to anyone, he cared about me. It was . . .”

  My throat closes up, and it’s impossible to swallow. I feel like I’m choking and glance around for water.

  Gasping, each word an epic struggle to force out. “A lie. Manipulation. He. Planned. It.”