By far the most risky campaign we ran was what we referred to as our “George Bush ad.” In Canada, even our conservative voters would be Democrats by United States standards, so nearly 90 percent of the country didn’t approve of George W. Bush. I decided that we could hijack an image of George Bush looking befuddled, put it on billboards, and put in the caption, “Don’t read enough? Listen to audiobooks.” The ad implied, of course, that Bush wasn’t well read and that that was part of why he wasn’t considered the most intellectual of presidents.
I was nervous about the legal implications of using a “celebrity” on a billboard without his permission, but after some research, I came to the conclusion that because of the political and parody nature of the ad—and the relatively small scale—it was unlikely there would be any legal action, and we proceeded with the campaign.
As the caricature began running on two hundred boards in the Toronto area, it turned out we weren’t the only ones leveraging Bush’s unpopularity; Lakeside University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, also had a billboard promoting its university at the expense of Bush and his alma mater, Yale. Because of the combination of our ad and Lakeside’s, both ad campaigns got national TV coverage in Canada, and as a result of that, garnered TV coverage in some US markets as well.
Hours after an ABC affiliate in Buffalo aired a commentary on the Bush ads, I received a phone call. “Hello, may I speak with the head of marketing please?”
The caller, Jason*, was polite, and I said, “Hi, this is Sanjay Singhal, I’m the head of marketing, how can I help you?”
Jason started out reasonably enough. “I wanted to talk to you about your ad campaign featuring George Bush. Is that wise? Have you lost any customers because of the campaign?” I responded honestly, that we’d had six cancellations specifically because of the TV coverage, but not enough to be called a spike in our cancellation rate. I was wondering now if he was a marketing consultant.
Jason grew more agitated. “I don’t think it’s fair of you to be making fun of our president. Y’all should show some respect for another country’s president.” Ah, now I realized it was an American calling. It got progressively worse, despite (or perhaps because of) my reasonability and calmness. Eventually I got, “You show no respect, and you should go back to where you came from!” to which I responded, “Sir, I’m from Eastern Canada. Do you mean I should go back to New Brunswick?”
Then he lost it. “Screw you! I should come up there and take care of you!” And then he hung up.
I had the notion that that might have been a death threat, but for all I knew, he wanted to visit me to give me chicken noodle soup when I was sick. In the end, the campaign was mildly successful, but only because of the TV coverage. There was no legal action. And I didn’t receive any visits from gun-toting Republicans.
Unfortunately, all the creative ad campaigns in the world couldn’t mask the fact that our growth had stagnated and the bright future of Simply Audiobooks was looking dimmer by the day.
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In 2006, Justin became fixated on the idea that we should go into retail, both as a way of generating interest in our online business and as an independent sales (and profit) channel. Sergio wasn’t a fan of the idea, and I didn’t have a strong opinion, but I sided with Justin because it was a growth strategy, and I was a fan of any growth strategy. We bought a downtown Toronto audiobook store and built a test store near our office in Oakville. We also began looking at leasing a retail location in New York City. Sergio argued against all of these moves at management meetings and became particularly outspoken and caustic at a board meeting, embarrassing both Justin and me by saying, “The only reason these two are proposing this retail bullshit is because they’re incompetent and can’t come up with any ideas that are actually any good.”
Shortly after the board meeting, Justin accused Sergio of not being in sync with the team and suggested privately to me that now was the time to let him go, despite his having been with us from nearly the beginning and owning a substantial voting block of shares.
With my acquiescence, Justin prepared the paperwork to let Sergio go, and after scheduling an impromptu management meeting, the three of us convened in a conference room. Justin abruptly said, “Sergio, I don’t think this is working out,” then he leaned over and slid a manila envelope across the table with Sergio’s termination papers inside.
“What the hell is this?” Sergio asked as he opened the envelope. I could see that Justin’s hands had been trembling as he pushed the documents across the table, no doubt expecting a strong reaction. Sergio read the top page and slid the envelope back to Justin. He said, “I’m not accepting this.”
“You don’t have a choice, Sergio,” Justin said. “I’m firing you.”
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After the firing, Sergio remained on the board of directors because of his voting block, and unsurprisingly, board meetings continued to be contentious and hostile. Sergio didn’t limit the hostility to the boardroom. In one instance, just after I was promoted to COO in early 2007, I got a call from Sergio. “Hi Sanjay, it’s Sergio. I just heard about your promotion. Congratulations.” As always, Sergio was unfailingly polite in tone, and he continued, “But really, Sanjay, do you think you’re up to the job? I mean, things haven’t gone well with you running marketing, and now you’re just going to bring your incompetence to the whole company.” It was sickening how he was saying this in the tone you’d use to congratulate someone on a new baby.
He ended with, “Sanjay, I say this as your friend…I think you should just admit that you don’t know what you’re doing and move on to another job before you completely destroy whatever value the company still has.” I finally hung up on him.
Justin hated the harassment even more than I did and started working to bring on new investors who could buy out Sergio. In the process, he started to get more of his friends and relatives onto the board of directors. In one of many conversations with my father about progress at Simply Audiobooks, I mentioned, “Dad, Justin’s stacking the board with his friends.”
“Do you want me to get involved?” my father replied. “I can buy enough shares to keep the board balanced.” I declined, saying, “Dad, I just don’t think this company is going anywhere. We’re not growing, and it’s a bad investment.”
YOU LOOK YOUNG FOR YOUR AGE
My closest friend in these years was Dr. Rajinder Rathee, or “Raj.” Raj was a charismatic bachelor with a winning smile and a caustic wit, who was often being set up on dates by mutual friends. As an eye surgeon with a zest for life, he also did a lot of travelling, and he and I had developed an annual tradition of taking a month off in March to travel the world. In 2005, it was Southeast Asia, and we tacked on two days in India at the end of the trip because he had a “date” with a flight attendant from Mumbai—a fix-up attempt by a mutual friend.
On arrival in Mumbai, we took an air-conditioned cab downtown to the Hilton at Nariman Point, where the crews for Lufthansa flights were quartered when on layover in the city. It was my first time in Mumbai, and as we entered downtown, I saw a pretty girl in her early twenties walking on the side of the street in a halter top and shorts. “Wow, you’d never see that in New Delhi,” I commented to Raj. He responded with a high five and a smile. “Buddy, this is going to be a great trip.”
Checking us into the hotel, the reception clerk stared at me a few seconds too long as I slid across my credit card and passport. Looking behind me first, I asked her, “Sorry, is something wrong?” She shook her head once, looked at my ID, and said, “I’m so sorry, sir. It’s just that you look exactly like Anil Ambani.” I smiled knowingly, although I had no idea who she was talking about. I mentioned it to Raj, and a few minutes later in our hotel room, I connected to the hotel Wi-Fi and looked up Anil Ambani using Google Images. Sliding the laptop over to Raj, I said, “Unbelievable. From some angles I do look like this guy. And he’s one of the ten richest men in the world!” We got a good laugh out of it and then shut the laptop a
nd started to get ready for his date.
For the initial meeting, I would serve as chaperone, so we both had to be presentable. As always, Raj took longer to get ready than I did, so I went down to the lobby and started chatting up Jasprit, the cute clerk at the reception desk who had checked us in a few hours earlier. Standing closer to her this time, I realized she had a bit of body odour, and my eyes started to wander just as a heart-stoppingly beautiful girl in slacks and a striped, long-sleeved shirt walked past me to the elevator, where she stood having an animated conversation with a hotel manager. Just as I was thinking, “Man, too bad she’s not the girl we’re meeting,” the elevator door opened and out walked Raj, who saw the girl and immediately gave her a big smile and a hug. “You must be Rishika!”
“Oh my god!” I thought. I was single too, but nobody was rerouting me internationally to hook up with beautiful women. Stoically, I joined Raj and Rishika for a walk along the seaside in front of the hotel. The one-hour walk was uneventful, but pleasant enough that they made plans for lunch the next day. Heading back up to our room, Raj pushed the button for the twentieth floor and turned to me to say, “Okay, now that that’s done with, let’s get this party started!” In Singapore a few days earlier, a friend had told us to connect with a couple of girls in Mumbai who were also travelling—he’d assured us they were “fun to hang out with.”
We met up with the girls at Olive’s, a lively restaurant in the suburbs with a hip vibe. We spent the night calling me “Anil” or “Mr. Ambani” and watching me get stares and astonishingly good service while we got progressively more drunk and rowdy. I gave up on my charade during a game of “Dare,” when I pretended to be a gay hairdresser and fondled an anonymous girl’s hair while fawning, “Dahling, I your hair. I really must get you into my salon…”
It was a great night, and waking up with a hangover the next morning, Raj said, “Wow, those girls were fun. I wonder if we should call them to get together again today?”
“Uh, don’t you have lunch with Rishika in an hour?”
Shaking his head (presumably to clear it), Raj replied, “Oh, damn, you’re right.”
I joined the two of them briefly as they started the meal, staying just long enough for Rishika to settle into her chair and, in a scene out of a movie, remove her barrette and shake out her hair as she shot Raj a broad smile. Feeling redundant, I said, “Well, I guess I’ll leave you two to get to know each other better. Raj, I’ll be in our room. Rishika, it was a pleasure meeting you.”
Two hours later, Raj sauntered into our hotel room, woke me up from a nap, and said, “All right, that’s over with, let’s go do some sightseeing.”
“How was lunch?”
“Buddy, I don’t know,” Raj replied. “She’s got a stick up her butt or something. No fun at all.”
I thought to myself, “She’s a flight attendant. How not fun could she be?”
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I told Rishika about this conversation a year and a half later, and she exclaimed, “Well, what did he expect? I was being prim and proper like I’m supposed to be on a first date, not acting like the wild and fun girl that you’ve fallen in love with!” She and I had kept in touch after things didn’t work out with Raj, and sparks flew when she came to visit Canada the following year, resulting in my marriage proposal and her acceptance in September of 2006.
Just after our engagement, Rishika was visiting Canada for a week, and we went to see a horrible Indian movie, Umrao Jaan, headlined by Aishwarya Rai. My left arm started tingling a little, and since the movie was boring anyway, I decided to take a quick walk in the empty halls of the cinema. The pain steadily got worse, and by the time I returned to the movie, I leaned into Rishika and said, “This movie is terrible. We have to go.” She must have seen something in my face, because she didn’t object and we rapidly headed to the parking lot.
I started the car, and we headed downtown to my condo. My arm was hurting less now, and I just wanted to get home. A few minutes into the drive, though, I began to feel nauseated, and Rishika asked me, “Are you okay? You look a little pale.” I assured her I was fine, but a few minutes later I pulled the car over on the side of a busy highway, feeling the need to throw up. The cool night air calmed me down a little, and I stepped over a guardrail to lie down on the dirty grass, feeling the nausea come back, but thinking it would go away if I could just lie there for a few minutes. Rishika got out of the car and stood over me, asking anxiously, “Sanjay, what’s wrong?”
“Just give me a minute. I’ll be fine,” I said, even as my brain started to process the fact that I was exhibiting all the classic signs of a heart attack. As I lay there, I felt like going to sleep, so I closed my eyes and began to drift, but then I pictured Rishika—standing on the roadside not knowing what to do, in an unfamiliar country, with her date sprawled on the ground—and my eyes snapped open. I thought to myself, “Damned if I’m going to die on the side of the Don Valley Parkway while my fiancée watches,” and I hauled myself up, got back behind the wheel, and said to her, “I think I might be having a heart attack. There’s a hospital on the way to my condo. We’ll stop and see what they say.”
As I put the car in gear, my head started to clear and the nausea ebbed. I drove carefully to St. Michael’s hospital, only a few minutes from my condo. A close friend of mine had done his cardiology residency there several years earlier, so I was familiar with the location of the building. By the time we got there, I was feeling markedly better and decided to park in a garage across from the hospital rather than pulling into emergency and feeling like an idiot if it turned out I was just the victim of a bad mayo sandwich and an overactive imagination. As we walked up to the hospital door, I slowed and said to Rishika, “You know, I’m feeling a lot better. Let’s just go home.”
She glared at me. “Not a chance. We’re here now. let’s see what they say.”
After I repeated my symptoms and joked that it was probably nothing, a triage nurse told me to wait a moment and made a phone call. Two minutes later, an orderly in a green smock approached me and asked me to come with him. I was quickly put on a bed, wired up to several machines, and fit with an IV; then they took blood samples. I was used to waiting several hours for treatment in emergency rooms, and the rapid response surprised me.
“I thought there were quite a few people in the emergency room, how did I get a bed so quickly?” I asked one of the nurses.
She didn’t give me an answer; all she would say was, “The doctor will be here soon, and he can answer your questions.”
By now I was feeling completely normal, and I was dreading having the doctor come see me and tell me nothing was wrong. When the doctor arrived an hour later, he sat down beside me and started making notes on a clipboard. “Uh, can I go now?” I asked.
He looked me up and down and said, “No, I think you’re going to be here for a few days.”
“A few days?” I said. “I feel fine!”
“You’re not fine. You just had a myocardial infarction.” I must have looked confused because he added, “You just had a heart attack.”
As I was wheeled out of the treatment room into recovery with my eyes closed, I heard a nurse say, “He just had a heart attack? He looks pretty good for fifty.” The other nurse said, “That’s because he’s forty.”
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The next morning, the doctor visited me and said, “You’re going to be just fine. It was a minor heart attack. In fact, there was practically no damage to the heart, and a quick administration of blood thinner dissolved the clot. We’ll have to put in a stent to keep the damaged artery open, but other than that you got off easy. How did you manage to recognize the symptoms and get to the hospital so quickly?”
I grimaced. “I was in a bad movie, so the arm pain was a good excuse to leave.”
He laughed and patted my arm. “Well, it’s a good thing it wasn’t a thriller. Things would have been a lot worse.”
After he left, I grinned and quipped to a relieved Rishika,
“I’m alive today because Aishwarya Rai can’t act!”
IT LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER GOOD IDEA
“Can I show you something?” The question came from Ryan Van Barneveld, a diminutive twenty-four-year-old with glasses and a perpetual smirk. I had hired him for the Simply Audiobooks marketing team as an e-mail marketing specialist, but although he showed great promise in his interview, his greatest achievement to date had been to become the office RISK champion.
I nodded and waved Ryan into my office, and he brought his laptop over to my desk. “You help out entrepreneurs, right?” he asked. “I wasn’t sure if I should show this to you, but I’m hoping you can give me some advice.”
The advice Ryan wanted was about an application he’d created to find video files on the Internet. You’d type in a search for a TV show or movie, and a series of results would show up. Then you clicked on any file, and about thirty seconds later, a separate player window opened up and the video would start playing. I was amazed. Like many people, I had used Torrents for getting media files on the Internet, and this software did it far more quickly, with an unbelievably diverse volume of files, with no concerns about formats and codecs and—Ryan assured me—no danger of viruses. He told me he had designed the software for his wife, who found Torrents too complicated.
“I’ve shown this to a couple of guys who run a software company, and they offered me $25,000 for 50 percent ownership,” Ryan said.
I thought for a moment and said, “You’re fired.”
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