[This post continues from the previous story]
KG had set himself up in an open floor co-working space, and most of the folks here were already annoyed with his crew.
Some of them were, of course, intrigued.
A few weeks ago he was sitting there on his own, selling low-grade websites to anyone in ear-shot; now, in a sudden change of events, he'd acquired a whole section of tables, with new sales guys and interns hitting the phones from 8am until late.
The moment I entered this space, I knew that I had to access a different level of madness within myself.
My role, although undefined, was to give shape to this chaotic energy that KG had unleashed. There were no rules, and this was essentially one savvy yet immature person starting a company and taking everyone for a joy ride.
The first few weeks flew by: Closing new clients, creating sales scripts & offerings, putting systems in place, setting up and coordinating with a new development team, fast tracking 18-yr old interns into project managers (this was ridiculous!) — it was all in a days work.
I didn't really know what I was doing, but I seemed to have some weird instinct for piecing this together on the fly.
This was a period where a lot of stuff was raw around me: From what KG & I were playing with, to App Development at the cusp of taking off as an industry, the rise of remote international teams, to a faint whisper of this thing called Bitcoin.
There were so many interesting interactions that sowed the seeds for the future. Sleep was therefore hardly an option.
Coffee was my drug, but KG's choice of drugs were, well, quite a bit harder. Throw in his penchant for strippers and (later) prostitutes, you had a troublesome cocktail brewing. No amount of money was going to be enough.
Not used to this level of burning the candle at both ends, a few weeks later I crashed with a horrible flu.
Fed up of lying sick in bed, I woke up one evening & decided to take a walk outside. After getting some fresh air into my lungs, feeling a bit better, I had this feeling to visit KG at the office.
When I buzzed him from the building entrance, he was hosting an impromptu meetup: He'd invited some people he was trying to close on some random offerings. With a flu induced foggy head I went in and introduced myself to a bunch of folks I hadn’t met before.
One of these individuals was Harry, who was an older businessman. Not sure why, but I zoned in on him, and began firing questions about his new startup. But instead of being thrown off by my excessive intensity, he appreciated the line of questioning.
At some point in our interaction — we had now digressed into talking about life, the universe and its mysteries — I started to feel out of kilter again. I took leave of Harry, headed home, then crashed.
The next morning Harry called KG, and said he'd buy whatever he was selling him on, on one condition: He wanted a one-on-one brainstorming session with just me.
KG, despite being a slick salesman, had not managed to close Harry for weeks, so he was awfully curious as to what I'd said to the man? I told him I had no idea. The previous evening I'd just channeled absurdity from a brain high from the flu.
A few days later after I had sufficiently recovered, I invited Harry to come into the office to have a chat. He said that wanted me to help him clean up a presentation he's about to make to the CEO of some shipping conglomerate.
He then asked what I'd charge for a half-day session?
One has to contextualize that a few weeks before this moment, I was about to go to a beach town to work for $20/hour, but I also live in a strange world that lacks linear progression. I knew this was happening to give me a glimpse into a different world, so I said that I'd charge $2,500.
I was experiencing complete lack of internal hesitation in my life; besides, it was the first number that popped into my head.
Subconsciously, I likely had reasons for this. KG's sales coach Eddy (who I despised) had been bragging to the young interns recently that he'd closed a new client for a $2000 session. Even though his claim was dubious, there was a part of me that wanted to outdo him.
Now Harry, despite possessing a reputation of someone who drove a hard bargain, said yes right away. With his quick acceptance of the amount, the thought crossed my mind if I had undercharged him?
My instincts, however, stopped me from getting greedy.
I'd already received a fantastic validation for my theory in life that whenever things would move forward, it would happen exponentially. This particular moment therefore became a vital reference for my journey ahead.
As we got know each other better, I understood that Harry didn't care about the money; he saw me as a kindred spirit, and just wanted us to work together. He also wanted to poach me for his new startup, but realized that trying to pin me to a company role would not work out. So I continued to liaise with him via KG's mad enterprise.
Life, at this point, was providing markers every step of the way.
Much like in my time before at the Design Studio (where I recognized some crucial things about myself), it was through helping Harry with his software startup, I found that I had a knack to break software quickly and piece back highly complex interactions in a coherent manner.
This was obviously going to come in handy in years to come.
Working with Harry though was no walk in the park: He was half maniac, half monk. His mind operated at a speed that was always a few ‘x’ faster than everyone else. So if it wasn't the constant technical challenges he'd throw at you, he’d hit you with his incisively wise cuts — making you think about yourself and the motivations of your decisions.
But there was no doubting he meant well.
Underneath it all, he was a very kind person and just a keen observer of people. I remember him saying to me at a business dinner event one evening: "Even in this set-up where everyone's wearing a mask, you're looking for meaning in the smallest cracks that appear. You know this role (here with KG) isn't aligned with your purpose, right?"
I didn't quite know how to respond back to him, but those words stayed with me.
A few months past this event, Harry was diagnosed with a terminal illness and he tragically passed away. It happened so fast that it left everyone in shock.
It was heart-breaking, but I was grateful that I got to spend time with him. He and I both knew: the first time we interacted, that he actually 'saw me'. This has only happened a handful of times in my life, where someone just saw the essence of me, and the details didn't matter.
In a way, I was able to see Harry too, and he appreciated this. It's what made our all-too-brief friendship special.
THE WOLF
Life at the startup continued to be a roller coaster, and there was never a dull moment.
With some of our base-level values clashing at regular intervals, KG & I had our fair share of arguments, but we got along well because we could laugh at the same kinds of absurdities.
The one thing you couldn't fault KG on, was in being authentic to his dark side — he owned it. This brought to light the hypocrisy of many people around us, especially at the co-working spot.
There were often half-baked complaints going to the office manager about his unhinged ways, and about him cracking vulgar jokes in the coffee room. Although he wasn't directing it at anybody in particular, he rubbed people the wrong way.
But at the Christmas party later that year, it unraveled.
All it took was, for KG to turn up with his little bags of coke, and the very people who used to make a fuss about his character were now eating out of his hands.
I'll never forget the scene in the mens-room that evening: KG huddled up in the disabled cubicle with a group of guys & girls snorting lines. After months of receiving judgmental looks, he'd found a strange sense of satisfaction in bringing his detractors to his version of reality.
Late into the night with the music blaring, booze over-flowing, KG's dealer turned up with a larger supply of drugs, one of our crazed interns rang in a bunch of strippers using the company credit card, and things swiftly turned into a circus. People's suppressed demons had been set free. The masks, and pretty much everything else had come off.
It was a strange collection of events because I couldn't have planned to outrun a cop as part of this evenings proceedings — especially when I was just stepping out of the party to get something to eat.
As it turned out, I found myself trapped by Officer Wiggam, who was handing out jaywalking tickets like candy. But noticing his poor physical state, and not wanting to comply with a borderline accusation, I took a chance (when the pen slipped from his fingers) and fled the scene.
To my good fortune, a large group of rowdy sports fans were walking past us at the same time. This caused the right amount of commotion to help me disappear into the crowd.
Life’s balancing sense of humor though was well alive, and my over-exuberance led to a poor bet at the casino to finish the night. I knew that I'd invariably lose when gambling for ordinary thrills, so I just had to laugh it off.
Despite this period of my life not being very long, I felt a certain freedom in unlocking darker aspects of myself. The dynamics with women and money were distinctly different to any of the times before — it felt like I was tapped into something beyond the veil.
There were so many interesting, sometimes debaucherous storylines running in parallel, to the extent that each one could have been a blog post of its own. But there was a certain void beneath it all.. and I could never truly shake it off.
IT WAS NIGH
Without a decent purpose driving anyone at the company, fast cash for a bunch of young guys was never going to help to foster any sense of accountability.
The first few months were of course interesting: Experiencing how ridiculous the game of money is when you're plugged into the right pipeline, and to observe how much of business is about confidently selling a narrative while controlling space with strangers.
You mix the above with a pre-judgement people have about you when you're representing some entity from a polished office, and you're suddenly a different person to everyone you encounter.
The library that denied me access for having a backpack slightly larger than the "stipulated" size last year, was now letting me walk through with the same backpack — because this time, I was enquiring about their over-priced conference rooms with a wad of cash in my hand.
It's a strange world we live in.
As for KG's playpen, there was no real set of values at inception to build or sustain something as complex as a company.
He was signing up clients now well beyond the capacity to deliver anything resembling quality. He'd also defaulted to selling SEO (as I'd initially feared) because he'd found someone cheap to outsource it all to. Charging huge markups for obscure results, the selling process had become a series of elaborate schemes — to the point where I could no longer keep track.
Having spent plenty of time around sales people in my life, it was fascinating to observe, especially among top sellers, when they were lying about the offering, but never believed that they were. Lock in the sale, get the commission, who cares about the rest?
It didn't matter to KG where the money came from, or how. With a series of successful projects from an initially credentialed list in the bag, it had become easy enough for him to now use the leverage, take money in advance (from gullible new clients), and recklessly spend it. For most of these poor souls, delivery of product was either not in sight, or they'd receive badly watered down implementations after messed up deadlines.
For me, the veneer of initial wins had worn off by now. Closing clients with slick scripts and guile left no lasting satisfaction. I was also tired of handing projects off to a remote development team without being involved creatively in the process.
With all the conversations I was having with smart people during this period, the want to build products had taken hold. I didn't know what to build or when it would happen, but I knew I needed to build things to solve problems which were more real to me.
Meanwhile, things were just about to tip over at Small Street. The client complaints began piling up in a hurry, the development team couldn't keep up with the insane turn around requests, and the Project Managers/ Sales hybrids were at their wits end.
KG was also stringing along newer recruits on commission structures that were getting only more convoluted by the day.
The end arrived for me once he appointed a head of sales, who turned out to have connections with the mob. The first deal this guy tried to get across the line was forcing the overseas development team to rebuild half a dozen shady strip club websites owned by some criminal enterprise. I can't exactly remember why (could've been on religious grounds) but the developers refused to take on the job.
On finding out that KG was ready to fire the dev team for this — he always had some cheaper alternative lined up — it was time for us to have an overdue chat.
We decided to take a walk around the block to settle some issues.
What began as an uncomfortable chat with him trying to deflect away the shit-show the company had turned into, ended up as a full blown shouting match between him & I in the middle of a crowded street.
In a way we both needed to let-off some steam, so it wasn't the worst thing to happen. It allowed us to head to a bar later, and talk things out in a more relaxed manner without the need for posturing.
But KG's antics aside, I knew my real problem was of a different nature. The pressure had been building underneath, via a difficulty in dealing with the facade which people (who I knew) were putting up in the realm of commerce.
Personal vs business had become bullshit to me, and I never saw the need to make up 2 sets of values to function here.
I also came to see how sterile the world of technology was, and I could not successfully play a role in an industry that was only looking to improve the efficiency of a transaction. It was obvious, the massive hole this was going to lead society and culture into.
On one hand, I absolutely loved the potential for creativity & immense opportunity for problem solving in the tech world, on the other, I hadn't figured out how to be more detached about dealing with most surface skimmers.
Although, the purpose wasn't clear to me at this point, I knew I'd have a different role to play in this space in coming years. The seeds — from having experienced both, validation and hollowness — were certainly sown here.
I no longer saw a point in helping people make more money, while I didn't share in my client's or my business associate's values.
I had to go.
It was also predictable that KG's roller-coaster of self sabotage wasn't going to end well. The diet of easy money, hookers, drugs, and no sleep, was always going to disintegrate him.
A couple of months after I moved on, it all came crashing down. KG fired everyone, owed multiple clients their delivery, owed the development team payments, changed his number, and stopped checking his emails.
I don't quite know what happened to him in subsequent years; maybe he flew too close to the sun. But it wouldn't have surprised me if he jumped head first into some intense spiritual development and changed lanes.
He had this side of him that was alive in there, somewhere.
As for me, without encountering this crazy dude, I wouldn't have crossed paths with my friend Harry. And without my experiences at this company, I would not have unlocked the unique kind of madness I would need, to navigate an adventurous and treacherous path in years to come.
