Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  Guzman leaves, gesturing for Sinnathamby to follow, but he stays.

  Sinnathamby is possibly the hero of this complicated story.

  6. THE DEALER

  Danny Zappin arrived in Los Angeles in 2004 after spending two years in the federal penitentiary in Lompoc. He had four months left on his sentence—he’d been convicted of smuggling ecstasy—and the court agreed to let him serve them under house arrest at his friend Paul’s place, on Martel near the corner of Sunset and La Brea in Hollywood.

  It was a rough part of town in 2004, but Danny didn’t get to see much of it. He was allowed out of Paul’s house only for his drug tests and to work as a valet in Beverly Hills. Before going to prison, he was an aspiring actor and filmmaker. He’d been to film school in South Florida in the nineties and shot music videos for college bands using his Canon XL1, one of the first affordable high-end digital video cameras.

  The view from the window at Paul’s place was of a city without seasons. Danny could see the streets that had always lured would-be stars and starlets, but he was forbidden from interacting with them. Danny wanted to be a star, but he was a convicted felon lacking connections. He’d shot hundreds of hours of footage: film shorts, music videos, random tape. But he had no way to get it seen or distributed. Before he’d gone to prison, he would show videos to friends; he’d even been in a few small festivals.

  In 2005, still under house arrest, Danny got his first email address. He began to create a social life for himself online. He found MySpace, the website people thought might connect the content in Los Angeles with the technology of Silicon Valley. And maybe it did, because MySpace led Danny Zappin to YouTube, which became an obsession.

  YouTube was just months old when Danny started uploading music videos and clips from his director’s reel. He re-edited and mashed some of it together. The response was overwhelming. YouTube was growing fast but was lacking original content. Viewers left comments telling him what they wanted. He wrote comments back that were playful, funny. He made a video of himself goofy-dancing, challenging his fans to dance worse. There were hundreds of comments. He called himself Danny Diamond. His YouTube channel was called the Diamond Factory. Danny had always wanted to break into Hollywood, but on YouTube, unlike in Hollywood, you didn’t have to audition. It was exhilarating to have access to a global audience and upload stuff and just see the number of views explode. You could build a following and lots of subscribers, distribute work directly to a wildly enthusiastic audience of your own creation.

  As his mandatory home confinement ended, Hollywood still seemed out of reach, but that didn’t matter anymore. He’d left Hollywood behind without leaving his room.

  Now I’m sitting across from Danny, under a gigantic peaked skylight, in a conference room that used to be an art gallery. He has short red hair and the calculating calm of a surfer. Twelve large paintings hang high on the walls above us, including an orange portrait of Frida Kahlo; a sharp blue graphic that looks like strands of fiber stabbing themselves, and a similar painting in gray; and two colorful squares by the spray-paint artist Ricky Watts.

  “I was a power user in the early days,” Danny says. “I knew how to tag, title, get on a list, engage the audience through comments. I was obsessed and excited about creating content and music videos.”

  Soon after he completed his sentence, he moved in with his girlfriend, Lisa Donovan, in Venice. Venice was more Danny’s style.

  Venice was for outsiders, for people who made things. Danny was an actor and filmmaker, but he had no access. For him, and many before him, serious artists didn’t stand in front of a Hollywood studio waiting to be let in. They went to Venice instead.

  Danny arrived in 2005. “Venice was much edgier in those days and had not been gentrified,” Danny says. “Police helicopters were constantly flying over my neighborhood. Gang violence was still a big issue. There was no Silicon Beach or any tech scene to speak of. I liked the grittiness and artistic edge. It felt more real than Hollywood, and I found the people to be far more interesting.”

  Lisa and Danny started making videos together, and Lisa’s channel exploded. What Danny and Lisa wanted wasn’t really any different from what more-mainstream performers want: validation, access, power. And then an idea occurred to them. Couldn’t they team up with other YouTube power users?

  “We got to know all these people from different parts of the country, and some of them came to Venice to visit, and it became clear that to do this well, you sort of needed some infrastructure,” Danny says. “It didn’t make sense to have every person working for themselves and maintaining all the costs of their own channel. So we came up with the idea of creating something like a studio to help people create content and integrate operations and bring in brand deals and everything.”

  They lived in an apartment just off Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Other YouTube performers started arriving in Venice to work with the nascent studio, which they dubbed Maker. “We had a lot of the top stars at the time, and they all worked together blowing up new people like Kassem G and Shay Carl, HiimRawn and Pete and Epic Rap Battles, Nice Peter,” Danny says. “And by getting these people with a half a million subscribers to recommend new talent and collaborate, we created the biggest, fastest-growing channels.”

  Maker was the first huge YouTube success. To keep growing quickly, it accepted venture capital. But the investors decided they didn’t want Danny as CEO, citing his felony conviction. Fights erupted between the studio and the talent, most noticeably with Ray William Johnson, possibly Maker’s biggest star, who accused Maker of trying to strong-arm him into signing away the rights to shows he created prior to joining the studio.

  Ultimately Danny got pushed out, or, depending on who’s telling the story, he resigned. Lawsuits are still pending. He split up with Lisa. Maker was sold to Disney for half a billion dollars. Danny walked away with a reported $25 million.

  Now Danny owns Zealot Networks. Its offices are across Venice Boulevard, a short walk from where Mona lives. Danny lives in a nice house on one of the neighborhood’s remaining canals. When the city tried to fill in all the canals after annexing Venice in 1925, there wasn’t enough of a tax base to pay for the work. Ironically, the remaining canals are now among the most desirable places to live in Venice.

  Zealot bought eighteen media companies in its first year. The onetime felon, who gleefully made dancing videos to share with his fans, is now looking for a bigger piece of the pie. You’re only an outsider for so long.

  7. THE GUN FOR HIRE

  I drive south from Venice, past the marina. Past Playa Vista, where shining skeletons of the new Facebook offices are rising from the marsh, under the planes thunderously approaching LAX, then heading on to El Segundo. I’m not sure what I’m hoping to find. I feel like some kind of holistic detective, sifting through evidence, trying to piece something together without knowing the crime I’m trying to solve.

  Some people think El Segundo is part of Silicon Beach, though it seems awfully far away. Borders are not always so easy to de-fine until you cross one. All I know is that El Segundo was established as Standard Oil’s second refinery on the West Coast. Now it’s a warren of eight-lane boulevards and faceless office parks, pressed between the ocean and hills covered with slowly swinging derricks.

  I park at a monstrous cube of glass—one of a dozen that stand near each other like a see-through fort—and take the elevator to the eighth floor to meet Chuck Davis, the CEO of Swagbucks. Swagbucks offers rewards to people who buy things online. Previously Chuck led Disney’s online business group. He says Swagbucks had no trouble hiring talent in Los Angeles. “The bigger problem was the investors,” he says. “They were all up north. They wanted us to be in Silicon Valley.”

  Chuck’s helped Disney Internet Group with online shopping and travel, sales and subscriptions. “The word ‘e-commerce’ didn’t exist yet,” he says. Then Chuck moved over to Shopzilla, which was sold to Scripps. After that he joined Fandango, which had been op
erating in the same building. He left one rapidly expanding company for another. Fandango was sold to Comcast, and Chuck stayed on board until a few months after Comcast acquired NBCUniversal. “I believe as CEOs we rent our roles,” Chuck says. “We’re here to do an assignment: create value for the investors.”

  It makes me think of a baseball player casually approaching home plate, thinking about getting back to his family, ready for the game to be over. Or any time our passion leaves us. We rent our roles.

  It reminds me of a woman I was in love with. It wasn’t too long ago. She was living with one of her clients, but he was out of town for a few days. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They lived in a mansion and had a view of the Golden Gate Bridge that looked like a picture sold to tourists. She had long arms and legs and moved with uncanny grace. Men had ghostwritten memoirs for her, signed over apartment complexes, cowritten her dissertation. In the mansion, there were two boxes of drugs, carefully organized and labeled: Ketamine, Cocaine, Moon Rocks. There was a new Tesla parked in the garage. And I remember we took acid and sat on a bench down the street from the mansion. And I realized, through the haze of drugs and desire, that no matter how long I stayed, ultimately I would have to leave—that I wasn’t jealous of the men she loved for free; I was jealous of the men who could afford her.

  8. THE GENIUS

  Meredith Perry just turned twenty-six. Her company is called uBeam, which is developing a device to make electricity wireless. Not like those pads you put your phone on for charging; more like Wi-Fi for electricity. Power. Always. Anywhere, the uBeam website promises. In 2014, Mark Cuban, Marissa Mayer, and Andreessen Horowitz, among others, invested $10 million in Meredith’s company.

  What’s interesting to me about uBeam is that it will be a new technology—if it works. Other start-ups, like TrueCar, are just creating digital versions of services that have been around for decades—lead generators, coupons, catalogs. But sending electricity through the air is something scientists and engineers have been trying to crack since Tesla (Nikola, not Elon).

  The uBeam headquarters are on Main Street in Santa Monica, less than a mile from TrueCar. The doors are thick steel, the kind you’d see at a bank or an intelligence agency. The office has three labs, a machine shop, and a wall of glass enclosing a work area. There is an air of secrecy and a lack of windows. I’m not allowed to take pictures.

  A publicist ushers me down the narrow hallway, back to meet Meredith. We pass a variety of mostly empty rooms. For a hot company with tons of funding, it’s surprisingly underpopulated. In the hallway there are a handful of employees tapping on laptops at a long table, but most of the spaces are empty.

  Meredith greets me, and we sit at a table in her office. I sit cross-legged on the couch, and she sits in a chair. In her sweater, sneakers, and jeans, she looks and sounds like a college student: smart, young, and overflowing with enthusiasm. She starts by trying to explain what an ultrasonic transducer is. Effectively a little transmitter, like the ones used in sonar detection. Her transducer creates a high-frequency sound wave, which a receiver converts into electricity. She says that the receiver could be packaged into something like a cell phone case.

  Meredith tells me, “I think the reason I can tackle complex technology is because I’m good at breaking down complex problems and explaining them to other people.”

  I nod, but I still don’t actually understand how an ultrasonic transducer works.

  “My approach has always been top down,” Perry says. “I get interested in crazy complex scientific problems, then I learn everything I need to know in order to solve them. Part of that is ADD. I don’t want to have to go to four years of electrical-engineering school.” People in Venice often talk about ADD.

  Perry grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. Her father is a plastic surgeon who, she says, developed the world’s best skin creams. Her mother was a child psychologist. “My brother is a comedy writer named Penis Bailey,” she says. “He’s going to be famous. And my sister is a private investigator.”

  “What’s your brother’s name?” I ask.

  “Penis Bailey,” she repeats.

  “As a kid, I was curious,” she continues. “I asked a zillion questions. I was that annoying person where, anything you said, I’d be like, ‘But wait! Why? Tell me how that works!’ And my father just kept answering. He always had the answers.”

  Meredith takes a bag down from the shelf near her desk. “I have, like, a zillion little colored notebooks with all my inventions. My grandpa and I used to write letters back and forth on invention ideas.”

  She takes out a notebook. She says she filled them with ideas while she was in college, at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied astrobiology. The notebooks detail inventions like a jacket that’s also an air bag, for people riding motorcycles. Or a tactile gaming vest, so if you were playing a video game and somebody punched your avatar, you could feel the punch in your own chest. There are designs for an umbrella to use while riding a bicycle and a touch-simulation back massager.

  Like so many other founders I’ve met here, she says she chose Southern California over Silicon Valley for the quality of life. All the tech people in L.A. seem to be in agreement on the high standard of living and cheap rent.

  “Los Angeles is a city of entrepreneurs,” Perry says. “Here you form a production company and you pitch your movie to a producer and that’s your project. There’s a lot of entrepreneurial DNA in this town. It’s an inspiring place to be.” She’s twenty-six years old and she’s lived here a year and now she’s explaining the city’s sociology to me. People say she’s a genius, but what does that even mean? I was at a party at Sundance once with James Franco’s manager and his wife. His wife introduced me to someone as a genius. Then she introduced me to ten more filmmakers and writers, all geniuses as well. If there is one place where being a genius means nothing, it’s Los Angeles.

  …

  A number of scientists have attacked Perry’s invention. The skeptics say that generating sufficient power with uBeam’s technology would likely make people nearby nauseous and cause hearing loss. By May 2015, none of the scientists listed on uBeam’s patents other than Perry were still at the company. The CTO and CFO had both left, and in April a former VP of engineering wrote a series of blog posts calling the fundamental technology “not even remotely practical.”

  I reread the transcripts of my recorded conversation with Meredith. I come across something she said when we were talking about her brother. The one who goes by Penis Bailey and is embarking on a career as a comedy rap musician with lyrics like “You couldn’t see me coaching Little League / Rather get my pickle squeezed by a chick with triple-Ds.” He wears a silver necklace with a jewel-encrusted pendant in the shape of a large penis. In an interview, he said his penis pendant is always hard because he’s always hard.

  “My brother just moved to L.A.,” Meredith told me. “He’s going to be LA’s next biggest movie star. I guarantee you. I brought him over to Warner Bros., and within five minutes the head of feature films asked him to do punch-ups for all their scripts.”

  “How did you bring him over to Warner?” I asked. She said she’d given a talk there on technology. That part made sense. Meredith is a tech celebrity. Everyone in the L.A. tech scene has heard of her, and Los Angeles is a town obsessed with celebrity. But the idea that a Hollywood executive would meet a kid with sunglasses and a hoodie wearing a large penis necklace and immediately give him scripts to rewrite was beyond belief. A lot of people—who are not wearing penis necklaces—meet studio executives by chance, and none of them are charged with revising the studio’s entire slate.

  Reading through my conversation with Meredith, I’m struck by an absurd optimism, a pathological confidence that’s brought people west for more than a hundred years, first for gold, then for fame. Maybe that’s why Silicon Beach landed here in Los Angeles, where the motto has always been “Fake it till you make it.”

  9. THE HEADSE
T

  Most of the founders I talk to are less social than Meredith. They’re not antisocial, but when I ask what they do outside of work, they tilt their heads, as if I were trying to trick them.

  “It’s essential to move as fast as possible,” says Alex Rosenfeld, the founder and CEO of Vrideo, a virtual reality company working out of ROC, which describes itself as “a collaborative workspace for start-ups, entrepreneurs, and small businesses in the heart of Silicon Beach.” Vrideo’s goal is to be the Vimeo or YouTube of VR. “Every day or week or month advantage we build in right now will be the equivalent of a year or two years’ advantage in three years’ time,” Alex says. “If that makes any sense.”

  “Sure,” I say. Though I’m not sure it does. Friendster had a big advantage over Facebook, and where are they now?

  Virtual reality is the great metaphor of our time. All the self-help business books talk about willing yourself to success, creating your own reality. A virtual reality start-up is like a company trying to create its own reality by creating its own reality. “One of the cool things we’ve been involved in this past year is launching the first-ever virtual reality film festival,” Alex says. “We did a ten-city tour across North America with thirty filmmakers and crowds of around four hundred people for each event.”

  I stop Alex because I want to understand something. “So you had four hundred people in a room wearing headsets, all watching their own virtual reality movie.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If they’re watching it on headsets, couldn’t they just watch it from anywhere? Why do they even need to be in the same place?”

  “Very few people have the headsets right now,” Alex says by way of explanation.

  A room with four hundred people, all exploring their own worlds inside their headsets and headphones, unable to see or hear one another, potentially unaware of one another’s existence. “You call that bringing people together?” I ask.