And although I’d never wanted it to be this way, I was set to walk away with millions.
CHAPTER 1
At some point it would become clear that I was not well. The people who would see it first, they saw it and had no reason to care. The people who should have seen it next, they were in no state to notice. Yet somewhere, at some point, I would see it myself. Probably I could have seen it all along. But then, back then, I was not seeing anything very clearly at all.
I was Robbie Case, the thirty-five-year-old CEO and largest single shareholder of Core Communications, a new world company that had, in just thirty-six months, become the de facto highway for the nation’s critical financial information. Two-thirds of U.S. mortgage lenders, half of the insurance companies and three-quarters of the nation’s pension-processing centers passed information over the Core network. Aerospace, automotive, defense industries—all used our network to transfer their most important information.
And, as our salespeople were trained to say at this point in their pitch—pausing carefully, smiling slightly, leaning forward in their chairs as they lowered their voices just a bit—“Keep in mind that the statistics I’ve just given you are, already, a few hours old.”
Maybe, looking back, it was our offhand arrogance that I regret most.
We were not techies. We employed no geeks. Instead we were the work-obsessed.
Work has meaning. The money is secondary. Being here I find a kind of personal joy.
At least that’s what it felt like at Core. Because by the year 2007, Core had turned the tediously complex, the horribly mundane, the deathly boring into something so technically cutting-edge and so financially lucrative that potential new employees had to enter a lottery to be considered for a job. The press of all shapes and sizes had to wait—for months at a time—before they had the chance to do an “insider” story on us. And investors and banks undercut each other in the most inappropriate ways for a chance to place ever larger amounts of money with Core.
“We could announce the creation of electricity,” Whitley had once said to me, “and the investors would line up to hand us their cash.”
My father had founded this company as the Mainframe Supply Center Inc. in 1970. Operating from a small office in Northern California, he soon built it into a $26 million reseller of hardware supplies for mainframe computer users. “This company,” he had said to me when I was in my twenties, “is a small but highly profitable, third-party distributor of metal widgets and plastic doohickeys for a niche market of the computing industry.”
I mouthed the word doohickeys. I pictured the word widgets. Rarely had I heard my father use a silly word. And never had he used one in conjunction with his company.
He smiled and nodded back, mouthing doohickeys in sync with me. “It is no more or less than that,” he said.
Then, in 2004, just a few months after my father died and left the company to me, I bought into an invention. A system, really, of hardware and software and satellite uplinks and data protocols that allowed mainframe computers around the world to transfer information to other mainframes, or any other kind of computer, at heretofore unimaginable speeds. Our product, known simply as a Blue Box, did something that had previously existed only as theory and speculation—by pulling information from the mainframes at unthinkable speeds, the Blue Box freed up the mainframes to do, quite simply, even more work. It meant that companies faced with spending millions of dollars on mainframes and related servers could instead free up existing machines by spending just hundreds of thousands on Blue Boxes. The financial benefits were obvious, the productivity gains tremendous.
And, just as appealing to the freakishly obstinate tech people who inevitably had to agree to the use of our system, the Blue Box represented the impossible fulfillment of a long-standing, seemingly unattainable goal. Since the 1970s, companies, universities, independent entrepreneurs—all had been trying to do what we’d done. All had sought to pull information from mainframes at the speeds we’d attained. And all of them had failed.
The process had become known as drawing blood from a mainframe.
Once we introduced our system, I immediately refocused our handful of employees onto developing and marketing Blue Boxes worldwide. We began to sign up our first clients. New customers called us before we could call them. We increased our prices. Investors began to knock on the door of our New York office. We began to buy up those mainframe networking companies that we did not put out of business. We could not hire employees fast enough to support the people signing up for our service. We went public in a blur of up-beat newspaper articles and extended cable news features. We increased our customer base by a factor of ten. Then twenty.
Then thirty.
Then forty.
We did it all in three years.
And now, on that same Monday morning when I’d been floating out my office window, skimming across the rooftops of the cold Manhattan buildings around me, now Core was just ten weeks from hitting a record $21 billion in sales. We were four weeks from acquiring our one hundredth company. We were two days from hiring our five thousandth employee.
It seemed to every observer that we could not be stopped.
When he’d started the company, my father hadn’t ever set a goal of becoming rich. He had become quite wealthy nonetheless, and for him that had been a very nice benefit of doing good work, of satisfying his clients, of building a valued reputation in his industry.
At some point, though, the desire to make money for its own sake did overtake Core.
Except that, three years later, I still wasn’t sure if it was money that had ultimately driven my decisions. Because I’d spent almost none of the money I’d made. A near billionaire without second homes, sports teams, not even a car.
And so maybe it was something else that overtook me. A desire to grow, or face challenges, or find prominence.
Maybe.
There were two spreadsheets capturing the future of this company. One was a financial model showing a near unlimited growth in revenue, a moderate rise in overhead and expenses, a steadily increasing profit margin. Three hundred and ninety-two pages in length, it was the model I’d given to the first group of investors three years earlier. And it was the blueprint that still guided our daily operations and massive growth.
The other spreadsheet I kept hidden, buried deep in a private folder on the hard drive of my computer. It was password protected. It was key encrypted. It was filled with forty pages of fairly meaningless numbers—some personal expenses, a handful of stock investments. But this same file held a hidden, eight-hundred-page spreadsheet. And in those eight hundred pages were the details of the collapse I’d set in motion. There were the descriptions of secret networking, the records of borrowed satellite time, connections between shadow companies funneling money among offshore accounts, locations of hundreds of mainframes and servers hidden quite publicly in buildings and warehouses worldwide. There were procedures showing how no one’s job was what it seemed to be, each employee helping with the spreading of secrets—and each employee unaware of what he or she was really doing. System administrators performing a routine installation on a client’s mainframe in Tulsa were in fact connecting the client to secret mainframes in Budapest or Malaysia. Accountants approving the budgets of a newly acquired production facility were in fact hiding the costs of leased satellite time. Marketing assistants
