That Will Never Work

AS A KID, ONE of my strongest memories is of my father building miniature steam-powered trains. They weren’t the tiny electric models you buy as a kit, the pieces all built to fit together, matched to a track that you just have to plug in. No, these were for the real fanatics: fully functional miniature trains, their steel wheels powered by steam. Every component—wheels, pistons, cylinders, boilers, cranks, rods, ladders, even the miniature shovels the miniature engineer would use to shovel miniature pieces of coal—had to be built by hand. About the only pieces you didn’t build yourself were the screws that held everything together.

That was fine with my father. He was a nuclear engineer who had found that his skill set was much more lucrative as a financial advisor to major firms who were investing in nuclear power and weapons development. His work allowed my family to live in comfort out in the New York City suburbs, but he missed the lab. He missed the instruments, the calculations, the sense of pride in building something. After a long day on Wall Street, he’d come home, take off his tie, and change into one-piece work overalls, the kind that real train engineers wore. (He collected engineer uniforms from around the world.) Then he’d head to the basement. It was time to build.

I grew up in a pretty normal, upper-middle-class household. The fathers of Chappaqua took the train into the city for work; the mothers took care of the kids in beautiful houses that were a little too big; the kids got into trouble while their parents went to school board meetings and cocktail parties.

When the youngest of us finally began school, my mother started her own real estate firm. Our house was built on a hill flanked by apple orchards, with a big pond in the back. I spent much of my childhood outside, roaming through the acres of woods that surrounded our house. But I also spent a fair amount of time indoors, reading in my parents’ well-stocked library. Two large portraits of Sigmund Freud hung there. In one of them, he was alone; in the other, he was posed next to his wife, Martha Bernays. These were surrounded by a half-dozen smaller photographs and renderings, framed and signed correspondence, and shelves filled with his books: Civilization and Its Discontents, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Interpretation of Dreams.

It was the sixties. Freudian analysis wasn’t exactly uncommon. But we didn’t have a miniature Freud museum in the library because anybody in the house was spending time on a therapist’s couch. It was because he was family. He was Uncle Siggy.

It’s a little more complicated than that. Freud was in fact my father’s great-uncle, making him my great-grand-uncle.

Still, no matter how convoluted the chain of connection, my parents were proud of the family association with Freud. He was a success, a giant of twentieth-century thought, as important an intellectual figure as had existed in their lifetime. It was like being related to Einstein: proof that the family had excelled on both sides of the Atlantic.

My family also had a connection to another important twentieth-century figure: Edward Bernays. Bernays was my grandmother’s brother, and Uncle Siggy’s nephew. If you’ve ever taken any course in advertising, if you’ve taken a course in mass media in the American twentieth century—heck, if you’ve even watched Mad Men or seen a cigarette ad—then you’re familiar with his work. Bernays is, in many ways, the father of modern public relations, the person who really figured out how to apply new discoveries in psychology and psychoanalysis to marketing. He’s the reason we eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. He’s also the reason we celebrate Thomas Edison (and not Joseph Swan) as the inventor of the lightbulb. He’s the guy who, after helping popularize bananas for United Fruit, turned around and waged a propaganda campaign alongside the CIA to stage a coup in Guatemala.

So, not always the most laudable stuff. But even though a lot of what Uncle Edward did wasn’t all that admirable, it did stick in my head that I could do what my father did, every night in our basement—use the tools he’d been given to create something. I was an indifferent student in high school; I majored in geology in college. But if I ever wanted to look at my destiny on a piece of paper, all I had to do was look at my birth certificate. Marc Bernays Randolph. Marketing was my middle name.

My father’s trains were beautiful. They took him years to build. When he was finished with one, he’d give it a coat of paint, and then another, and then another. Then he’d call me down to the basement, hook the train’s boiler up to an air compressor, and perch the train on tiny blocks above his workbench. As the air moved cleanly through the valves, we’d watch the back-and-forth movement of the pistons, the smooth revolution of the drive wheels. We would admire the hand-built systems of rods and connectors that smoothly transferred power to the wheels. My father would even use compressed air to sound the miniature whistle.

I loved that high-pitched noise. To me, it was like a formal announcement of another completed effort, another beautifully made thing. But my father was often melancholy when he heard it. According to him, a real train whistle, powered by steam—not air from a compressor—was a more emotional sound, one that he could only hear in his imagination. There was no track in the basement for his trains. The vast majority of them never saw real movement—just air compressor tests. After I went back upstairs and he turned the air compressor off, he’d lovingly remove the train from the workbench, place it on a shelf, and start a new one.

Over time, I realized that for my dad, it wasn’t finishing the train that he liked. It was the years of labor: the days at the lathe, the thousands of hours at the drill press and milling machine. I don’t have many memories of watching those trains run. What I remember are all the times he excitedly called me down to the basement to show me a piece he’d just built—a piece that, when connected with fifty others, might amount to a single axle.

“A piece of advice,” he told me once, peering through the magnifying glass over his left eye. “If you really want to build an estate, own your own business. Control your own life.”

I was in high school at the time. Most of my energy was directed at girls, rock climbing, and convincing the guy at the liquor store that I was old enough to buy beer. I wasn’t quite sure what an estate was, but I thought I caught his drift. Sure, sure, I thought, why not.

But twenty years later, in the early nineties? I thought I finally knew what he meant. I’d spent years working in marketing for other people, at large corporations and small startups alike. I was a co-founder of MacUser magazine, as well as MacWarehouse and MicroWarehouse, two of the first mail-order sources for computer products. I’d spent years at Borland International, one of the software giants of the eighties. At all of these places, I’d been focused on direct marketing: sending letters and catalogs directly to individual consumers and studying the way they responded. I’d enjoyed it, and I was good at it. I had a knack for connecting products to customers. I knew what people wanted—or if I didn’t, I knew how to figure it out. I knew how to reach them.

But I’d always been working, in some sense, for someone else. At Borland, I’d been part of a huge corporation. And even as a co-founder at MacUser and MacWarehouse, I’d helped develop an idea that was only partly my own. As rewarding as those jobs were, part of me had always wondered what it would be like to build a company from the ground up, completely solo—if it would be more fulfilling if the problems I solved were my problems. That, after all, was what my father was telling me, hammer in hand. That’s why he descended like Vulcan to his workbench under our house in Chappaqua. He wanted to set up his own problems, and then knock them down.

By 1997, so did I. I was a year shy of forty. I had a wonderful wife, three kids, enough money to buy a house that was a little too big for us on a hillside overlooking Santa Cruz.

I also had, somewhat unexpectedly, quite a bit of time on my hands.

Barely six months after acquiring our company and giving me the green light to build out the marketing department I’d inherited, Reed had agreed to the corporate merger that would make all of us—me, Reed, and the two people I’d just brought in to work with me—redundant. For the next four months or so, while the feds went over the paperwork, we had to come to work every day. We were still getting paid, but we had nothing—and I mean nothing—to do.

It was tremendously boring. The Pure Atria offices were nothing like the laid-back startup offices of today. No nap pods, no pinball machines in the lobby. Think: cubicles. Think: fake office plants. Think: a watercooler gurgling at regular intervals.

Reed was busy finalizing the merger and had already started making plans to go back to school. As his tenure as CEO was coming to an end, he was feeling a little burned-out. He wanted to change the world, but he was increasingly convinced that he couldn’t do so as a tech CEO. “If you really want to change the world,” he said, “you don’t need millions of dollars. You need billions.” Barring that, he thought the way to effect change was through education. He was increasingly passionate about education reform, and he thought that no one would take him seriously unless he had an advanced degree in the field. He had his eye on Stanford. He had no desire to start a new company…but he also indicated that he wanted to keep his toe in the water, as an investor or an advisor, or both.

At first, I filled my limbo merger time with athletic pursuits. Along with a big group of fellow East Coast transplants homesick for ice rinks and pucks, I conned a few Californians into comically lopsided parking-lot hockey games. We’d while away a few hours in the shadows of the office park, body-checking each other into parked cars and batting a scuffed-up tennis ball through homemade PVC-pipe goals.

I also spent some time at the driving range, and those first few weeks brought me a revelation: I’ll never be good at golf. I’d always thought that if I spent enough time on it, I could practice my way into a decent golf game, and for weeks I tested that hypothesis. I’d take an hour-and-a-half lunch, then stop by the range on my way back to the offices.

But no matter how many balls I hit, I never got any better.

I think a part of me knew, even then, that a perfect swing wouldn’t cure what ailed me. What I needed wasn’t a sweaty hockey game or a birdie at DeLaveaga. What I needed was the feeling of being deeply engaged with a project. What I needed was purpose.

Hence the ideas for a new company. Hence personalized shampoo by mail.

I kept a little notebook of ideas in my backpack and carried it with me everywhere I went: driving, mountain biking, you name it. It fit into the pocket of hiking shorts really nicely. I’d even take it surfing—leaving it in my backpack on shore, of course. There’s a reason why rejected idea #114 is “personalized surfboards, machine-shaped to your exact size, weight, strength, and surfing style.” They say the best ideas are born of necessity, and nothing’s more necessary than a properly shaped board when you’re scrambling for waves at Pleasure Point.

I’m an idea guy. Give me hours of empty time in a Silicon Valley office with a fast internet connection and multiple whiteboards, and you’re going to need to buy more dry-erase markers. I probably would have come up with business plans just to get out of embarrassing myself at the driving range.