was starting to dawn on me that I did more environmental destruction with my commuting than several generations of Cabloco farmers in the Amazon. I once canoed a portion of the Amazon and I saw multiple families sharing a single machete. At the time it was fashionable to knock Brazil for the “burning of the rainforest,” and traveling through the fires made me wonder about my own business travel.
Waste worried me. When I left my home and native land, the City of Guelph was ticketing people at the curb for failure to properly sort their recyclables. When I arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, they were still tossing everything into the landfill. There was no recycling. I’m not sure I even was an environmentalist at the time. But when you’re in the recycling habit, it’s hard to throw an aluminum can in the trash.
I had an ingrained sense that the failure to recycle items into new products was wrong-headed. When I was in high school in the late seventies, my father and I would tote tin cans down to ARC Industries to be resold into the metal markets. He grew up in the Depression, and wasted virtually nothing.
Moving to a culture that had no sense of recycling jarred me. It awoke the desire for change. When I decided to use recycled cardboard boxes for our shipments, we gobbled up all of the cardboard of two neighboring office buildings. I started shredding fine paper for use as packaging materials, and I pushed several vendors on design changes for their product packaging. We implemented a “buy green” purchasing policy back in the late 1980s.
We were “greening” our operation before the term had been invented. And we weren’t doing it to gain market share. We were doing it because it felt like the right thing to do.
Although we were not running foundries, or locomotives, we were producing. We were kicking out a lot of wealth. Ayn Rand would have been impressed. Our names appeared on a bunch of donor lists. And we employed a lot of people.
We were simply utilizing our skills to exploit markets and opportunities that happened to be global in nature. There was a nagging sense that something was wrong with the trajectory of our lives, as we shuttled back and forth from the airport to our piece of paradise in the woods, but we were not sure what that something was.
We were deep in what David Korten refers to as the “Imperial Consciousness.” We were building an empire.
There was a time when “casual Fridays” meant less starch in our button-down collars. We used to sit around our lunchroom table, in our coats and our ties, discussing the new trend in corporate apparel that we had heard about.
We mused about the local economy, and speculated about our role within it, but we were so immersed in our corporate endeavors, it was a mere topic of conversation — sort of like new trends in office apparel.
That was until I bought BLAST, and moved it to Pitts–boro.
Before it came to Pittsboro, BLAST was a slick little communications tool that Dan and Polly Henderson and their company had developed in Baton Rouge. It would be nice to say it came from the swamps of Louisiana, but a more accurate description would be to say that it came from the petrochemical soup and smog that is Baton Rouge.
BLAST was an acronym for Blocked Asynchronous Transmission, which was a sliding-window protocol that was exceedingly helpful for moving files around — especially well-suited for noisy phone lines.
Dan and Polly had created a remarkable software company.
Their little business suited our burgeoning distribution efforts perfectly. They shoveled out the new features, we sold their software all over Canada and the United States, and they helped us every way they could. This was the time of the nascent Internet, which meant we were also selling modems at an amazing clip. The tired cliché from the business literature of the day was about the Internet gold rush, in which we were the ones selling shovels and pans.
Then US Robotics purchased BLAST, and crushed it, and we were all taken for a bruising ride through the public markets. They were an up and coming manufacturer of industrial modems who had an eye on conquering the world. Stock market analysts told them that before they could go public, they needed to be both a hardware and a software vendor, and so they plucked BLAST out of Louisiana, moved it to Skokie, Illinois and positioned it as window dressing for what would become one of the most spectacular stock offerings in history.
Their clunky modems were replaced by a consumer product which they produced every minute and a half. They went on to see their names on the Fortune magazine list of wealthy individuals, and BLAST was forgotten like the child’s toy that breaks on Christmas morning.
We took the punishment from an install base of loyal customers who had been abandoned.
When we called US Robotics for bug fixes, they informed us that product had been discontinued. When we made a sale that was significant for us, they informed us they could no longer manufacture for that platform. And when the loyal BLAST users called for relief, all we could offer was consolation instead of new revisions.
I used to sit around the office after hours with our core staff, and we would frequently migrate toward a speculative conversation on “What would you do if you owned BLAST?”
“I’d pick up the phone when it rang,” said one.
“I’d call people back when they left messages,” said another.
“I think I’d develop a product for Windows,” said another.
I would leave these conversations, and return to my shack, where I would warm water on the woodstove for a shave, and rejoin the constant prattle of grants and fellowships and gardens that were largely imaginary in nature.
We all knew that BLAST was on its way to extinction, and we mourned the opportunity that we knew would be lost.
I distinctly remember the morning when I was walking to my Honda Accord to begin my usual massive commute, when I was overtaken by a moment of clarity. This was before I had started practicing with John, yet it was a study in manifestation.
It struck me in one moment that I actually could buy the company.
Which is what I did. I met my brothers in Skokie, we did the negotiations, US Robotics shuttled me around in a limousine, and within months we had a deal.
It was the eve of my first acquisition, and it was a heady time. I needed a place to locate the new company, and I needed staff to run it. Instead of inking some space in the go-go action of Research Triangle Park, I decided to gamble on putting the project in Pittsboro. It was a sleepy little farm town five miles from my house, and one of its many abandoned spaces was a bankrupt Mediterranean restaurant that was about the right size.
Industry pundits advised me that I would not be able to attract the necessary talent in a place like Pittsboro, and that I needed to locate closer to the action. I wondered about that. I thought that perhaps the woods of Chatham County was full of talent that was doing the same thing I was — which was hustling around the Park all day and returning to the “paradise” which we seldom had time to enjoy.
The only thing I knew about Pittsboro was that it was close. I turned to my friend Barbara Lorie for guidance and advice, and she took time off from the formation of her co-housing–community to help me out.
She pointed me to Sandy, the Zen priest who did renovation work, and he transformed the Mediterranean restaurant into office space.
