More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  At the Hive, Ilya greeted her exuberantly, but there was something off-kilter; the emotional whitecaps of his language and manner were almost too choppy for her to navigate.

  From across the backyard, another guest, Katie Johnson, spotted Ilya and had the same reaction as Aditi. He was not taking care of himself, she thought.

  Katie was a member of one of Ilya’s early crops of friends in San Francisco, the people he had met in early 2011 after returning from the breakdown. She was the one who had invited him to the brunch back in June, only to see him tumble off his bike as he followed a pickup truck, trying to ride while simultaneously sipping a Bloody Mary.

  Over the summer, they got together regularly to talk through their projects. It was a sociable, but not social, relationship.

  Katie had been working with an educational start-up. Ilya had an idea for creating a party app, Epic Parties, that would make it easier to organize parties and, for the people who met one another, to stay in touch later through social media.

  He ordered long rolls of white paper so that any ideas or plans they sketched out would not have to fit on an 81/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper. They created a tongue-in-cheek scroll for a book called Stuff That Leaders Do, with items like, the leader makes sure everyone is included before walking anywhere (when a group would mosey along in tattered formation to the park), or, when the beer ran out, the leader would say, “I’ll go get it.”

  Most of the time, their conversations were about work. One time, they’d gone for a falafel and talked about relationships. He was concerned that a younger girlfriend had become too attached to him, and Katie suggested some gentle ways to detach. She looked forward, always, to their get-togethers: they were ritual renewals, cheerleading sessions. One day in the summer, she got an e-mail from him: Hey, I really want to be your friend, regardless, but if you would ever want to be in a relationship with me, I would really like that. You’re awesome, he had written, no matter what.

  It was a note full of care and risk. Just what you would hope the modern male would be capable of, Katie thought. He was so intuitive and empathetic; he paid attention and was full of energy. She wrote back, telling him that she knew it had not been easy for him to let her know that this was on his mind. It took so much. And it was so great. “But I really see us being friends,” she said.

  Their friendship never missed a beat. But ever since the end of summer at Burning Man, where she had watched him racing about the playa, she felt slightly unsettled by him. He seemed to be working all hours of the day. Yet he remained endlessly, insistently generous. She had a crisis in September: the start-up she was working for had relocated to New York. Ilya was the one person she wanted to talk to about what she could possibly do next, and he had gone with her to brunch at the BrainWash Cafe, a combination Laundromat and dining spot. He made her describe her interests—environmentalism, outdoor activities, bringing people together, collaborative consumption—and think of where they intersected. And that was it: she would create an app for people to organize walks with others. She would call it “hikery.”

  It was a fine session, and Katie was grateful that he had been able to make time for her. He also had started calling various friends to talk up creating nighttime sports leagues, a healthy alternative to the bar life. It was a way to save the world, he said. To Katie, his own health did not seem to be in such a prime state, but maybe that was why he was thinking of alternatives.

  A week before Ilya’s birthday, the Burning Man festival was holding its annual “Decompression” session at a big parking lot in Potrero Hill. It was a one-day reprise of the festival, with performances and art exhibits and reconnections. Ilya’s bedroom window looked toward Potrero Hill, a twenty-minute walk from the house.

  Katie had called him.

  “Are you going to Decompression?” she asked.

  “I really don’t have time,” Ilya said. “I’d love to get together. I’m going for pizza now.”

  They arranged a quick visit, and ended up sitting on the porch at the Hive, talking about the pressures at Diaspora. He made no mention of the burgeoning conflicts over leadership, but told her that he was concerned about the people who had contributed to the project, and not letting them down. He was stoked, though, that they had hired Peter Schurman to organize their mailings. Then she went on to the Decompression event and he went back upstairs to his laptop.

  Now, at the party a week later, he threw his arms around her in welcome. He was very, very high. It seemed like he had not showered in a while, and he seemed exhausted. “Don’t work too hard,” Katie said.

  Before the night was over, a woman Ilya had recently started seeing gave him Special K, ketamine. Its pharmaceutical origins were as an anesthetic used in veterinary medicine. On this occasion, it was meant as a celebratory treat: a drug with short-lived hallucinatory properties typically used in club scenes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The following week, all work getting ready for the beta launch of Diaspora came to a halt. PayPal had frozen its account—something had tripped an internal monitoring mechanism, and the money company apparently became concerned that Diaspora was some kind of flimflam being run through the PayPal account. It took back the money already transferred to their bank. A review would take 180 days.

  Diaspora mounted a digital counterinsurgency. Peter wrote a press release and Yosem gave interviews to the tech press. Dan, Max, and Ilya tweeted to the sixty thousand Diaspora followers on Twitter, then hundreds of community followers also posted tweets, calling on PayPal to unfreeze the Diaspora account. Then WikiLeaks, the digital vault created by Julian Assange to receive and transmit secret documents, weighed in from its Twitter account. They, too, demanded that the Diaspora account be unfrozen.

  WikiLeaks had famously been blockaded from a number of commercial services, including its PayPal accounts in November 2010, when it began to roll out a cache of documents that had been given to it by a private in the U.S. Army. They included military reports and videos of the shooting of civilians in Iraq, and thousands of diplomatic cables that lacked the usual coats of varnish about how the United States viewed various parties it was dealing with around the world.

  WikiLeaks was followed by more than 1 million people on Twitter, so it was a powerful amplifier for Diaspora’s campaign. After two days, PayPal decided it did not need six months to figure out what was going on. It unfroze the accounts. For all the useless angst the episode had caused, they’d generated plenty of useful sympathy.

  Once the smoke from the PayPal crisis had lifted, Yosem and Casey began pricing office space. It was time for them to leave the nurturing womb at Pivotal.

  In less than a month, mid-November, they would be launching. Volunteers and the Diaspora community, long neglected, were being stroked by Yosem, invited to take on roles in welcoming new users—a touch that would distinguish Diaspora from Facebook and Google. As the tasks became more concrete, Yosem wanted to be able to tell them that he was not only functioning as the CEO, he was the CEO.

  “Where do things stand with the legal paperwork?” Yosem asked Dan.

  Actually, nothing had happened at all.

  “I asked Max to handle it,” Dan said. “I felt bad for him. I wanted him to feel like he was still part of things.”

  At a human level, Dan’s response made perfect sense. He cared about Max. As a business question, it defied human nature.

  “Duh,” Yosem said. “Basically, you fire him as CEO and then you tell him to go through the process of filling out the paperwork for the new CEO. I’m sure he’s not excited to do this task.”

  “Why don’t you do it?” Dan suggested.

  For help getting it done, Yosem turned to Diaspora’s lawyers and to Casey. They got the paperwork together for a board meeting.

  —

  They convened on Monday. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks then on the run from authorities
in Switzerland, had mentioned the PayPal blockade of Diaspora in a press conference that afternoon. “Badass!” Dan exclaimed.

  The hunt for space would continue that week, with Casey and Yosem carrying the ball. Management of the community was a beast, but there were plans now for online meetings in Internet Relay Chat rooms. The night before, Ilya had called Evan Korth, their NYU mentor, to break the news that they were reorganizing the board, and that they would like him to step down. The board had originally been the four guys, with Korth added solely as a tiebreaker in the event of a deadlock. With Rafi about to step down, that role would no longer be needed. Still, it was a sensitive conversation, and Ilya knew that even though Korth was a completely good sport about it, he was a touch hurt.

  “We need to send him a letter that he can sign and formally resign,” Ilya reported.

  Over the weekend, Dan, Ilya, Casey, and the lawyers had gone through the details about Yosem’s appointment. Max had not been included in those exchanges, but he had gotten them that morning, ahead of the meeting.

  “The paperwork is going into the lawyers, and Casey is going to handle the changes to the board and naming me as CEO in the papers,” Yosem said.

  Ilya spoke up.

  “Oh,” he said. “We have to revisit that, to be sure that we approved everything.”

  This was a startling development: everything had been shared well in advance of the meeting. Dan and Yosem were perplexed.

  “What is there left to approve?” Yosem asked. “You already offered me this position. I thought that the terms were set.”

  Some other details had to be discussed, Ilya told him. After the meeting, Dan approached Yosem and said he had been surprised that Ilya had put on the brakes.

  “I had no idea,” he said, promising to find out what was going on.

  In fact, Max and Ilya had discussed Yosem’s appointment as CEO earlier in the day. Max insisted that he had gone along with Yosem’s appointment because everyone agreed that he would serve only as interim CEO while they searched for an established entrepreneur. Moreover, his equity compensation should not vest until he had been there six months. That was not what the terms drafted by the lawyers said: Yosem served at the pleasure of the board, effectively an interim appointment, but that if he were terminated, his shares would vest immediately.

  Dan huddled with Ilya after the meeting, then called Yosem. He did not get into the nuts and bolts of the compensation.

  “I guess we never actually made a motion about it,” Dan said. “We just talked about it with Max and we decided to give you this, but I guess Ilya says we have to pass a motion on it.”

  That meant a formal board meeting. They would get to it the next day, Tuesday.

  “That’s fine,” Yosem said.

  Home in Palo Alto that night, he spoke to his fiancée, Emily, about the developments. “Before they offered me this role of CEO, I used to enjoy the business,” Yosem said. “I was doing it because it was a cause I believed in. Now I’m CEO and I absolutely hate what I’m doing.”

  On Tuesday morning, they could not have a board meeting: Ilya was due to speak on a panel at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference being held that day in San Francisco. He had been in a lather for days about what he would say. The subject: “Social Networks: Exploring How Defending Human Rights Can Actually Strengthen a Company’s Bottom Line.” He was quite pleased to have been invited, though he knew that Diaspora did not exactly have a bottom line. But he got through it.

  Afterward, T. H. Nguyen, a young lawyer, approached Ilya. Having recently left Facebook, she was searching for work and a purpose. Already she had raced through the online material about Diaspora. It was clear that they were neophytes who had little experience figuring out how to make their users happy. She could help.

  “That would be awesome,” Ilya said. “We’d love to have you. Please, get in touch.”

  After the human rights conference had formally broken for the day, the sponsors threw a drinks party at a bar in the Mission. Elizabeth Stark had gone, and Ilya was with her. Samuel J. Klein, known as SJ, was visiting from the East Coast and had been crashing with Stark. But that wasn’t the main reason for his coming to the party. He wanted to meet Ilya.

  They were both committed members of the tribe of technologist-idealists. SJ, a Harvard-educated physicist, had been among the earliest contributors to Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia, starting in 2004, when, as he explained it, the site had “officially become more interesting and instructing than universities and course books.” He was a manager with the One Laptop Per Child project started by Nicholas Negroponte, the cofounder of the media lab at MIT. Its goal was to build network-able laptops for one hundred dollars or less and distribute them to children in the developing world. The project had been criticized for ways in which it fell short of its soaring ambition.

  When Diaspora was getting started, SJ had written to them, suggesting that they get a secretary to manage their correspondence and make sure that useful ideas did not disappear behind the cushions of sofas.

  At the bar, he mentioned that letter to Ilya, who laughed and said it would have been a great idea.

  Even at conferences like this, the social encounters could be overwhelming. They got talking about how to manage that. Both had been toying with ideas for an app that would capture promising contacts from such fleeting connections, but also make them part of a social media structure.

  As they spoke, an attractive woman came up, smiling. She spoke to Ilya:

  “You made my day,” she said.

  “I did?” Ilya said, laughing, embarrassed.

  She had come to the conference, and he had been a singularly inspiring voice. So positive. They fell into conversation; they spoke long enough for Ilya to hear about her plans and wish her well.

  Elizabeth, meanwhile, was getting ready to go back to Palo Alto, and SJ, her guest, was plainly not ready to go. She turned to Ilya.

  “Can SJ stay in the city with you?” she asked.

  “Totally,” Ilya said.

  Ilya gave him the address on Treat Avenue, and told SJ to let himself in whenever he was through.

  A few hours later, SJ arrived at the Hive and found Ilya hacking at ways to create social graphs that connected interesting people he’d met at conferences. Their brainstorms spread down a long sheet of butcher paper.

  The first item on the list was their goal for the business cards that were stuffed into their pockets at the end of such conferences: “Get Rid of Effing Cards.”

  They moved through more items, concluding with a note to integrate “epic projects,” another dream child of Ilya’s. They looked at the time, and realized it had gotten to be four A.M., and both had things to do in the morning. Ilya snapped a picture of the page for safekeeping and e-mailed it to Klein.

  Before turning in, Ilya mentioned one other project: breaking the world record for the longest chain of linked plastic monkeys. They had tried it earlier that summer with Parker Phinney, another drop-in guest at the Hive. Someone had leaned out the window in Ilya’s bedroom on the top floor, but there were limits to how many monkeys could be hung from one another. But the constraint seemed to be the weight of so many monkeys: the chain would collapse before they could get to the record.

  “It’s a physics problem,” Klein said.

  As they talked it through, they came up with a likely solution: weave a series of loops into the configuration, breaking the straight downward load. Ilya could picture it.

  “Awesome,” he said.

  —

  A few hours later on Wednesday morning, Casey and Yosem were crunching numbers. How much were they paying for every server? How much longer would they be paying expenses? What could they afford in rent if they were able to get new space? In short, how much of their resources were they burning every month, and how long could they last?

 
; Dan called Yosem about the CEO job.

  “Is there a way to go ahead with the plans without having to hold a meeting with Max again?” Dan asked.

  That made sense to Yosem. “I don’t think it is a good idea to rehash this again with Max,” he said. “To the extent that Max is getting over it, this is going to put him right back in the position of getting upset again.”

  They checked and discovered that they could make the changes by e-mail. Max then insisted that he, Ilya, and Dan hold an emergency board meeting.

  Yosem headed for the offices of the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. They were willing to host Diaspora free of charge. This was a pleasant development. As he was heading home, the phone rang. The guys had been meeting for three or four hours, and they were all on a conference call. As Yosem and Dan recalled the conversation, Max did most of the talking.

  “Yosem, we have to renegotiate your terms,” Max said. “First of all, we never agreed to give you a seat on the board.”

  “That was part of the agreement,” Yosem said.

  “If it was, we don’t really remember it,” Max said. “We need to discuss that again, but it just really doesn’t make sense for us to do that.”

  Yosem would have essentially replaced Evan Korth as the tiebreaker, but since Rafi was going to resign from the board, there would be no need for a tiebreaker. Moreover, a smaller board made sense because investors would want a seat.

  “In that case, if you want to try to have fewer people, I don’t need to be on the board,” Yosem said.

  There was another item, apparently the result of a misunderstanding, Max said. His 3 percent share would be vested over four years, not one. Also, they would not be changing the papers of incorporation, which still listed Max as CEO, and substituting Yosem.