David Vann - A Mile Down - The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

I had to give up on the $10,000 bond from Redland Insurance Company, also. The deputy attorney general had promised to go after Redland for the bond money, since by law they should have had to pay, but of course he didn’t follow through. They were still suing me for $12,000, however, to indemnify the bond amount and to pay their collection agency. They put marks on my credit history and threatened me in every way they could. So I just listed them in my bankruptcy papers and gave up.

By this time, toward the end of January 2000, the business idea with Rand had become more than just an online consumer guide to yacht charters. We had decided to go for a full boating portal. There was no good boating portal on the web yet, and vertical portals, which focused on bringing together vendors and consumers for a particular industry, were the hottest item for new venture capital investment. Rand’s brother-in-law, Tom, was a venture capitalist and CEO of a start-up, formerly the CFO of Safeway and other large corporations, and he was willing to help us out. I was writing a business plan, and he was going to review it and help us through revisions and research until we were ready to present our plan for funding. Rand, in his characteristic generosity, was willing to split the founder’s shares with me, fifty-fifty.

I clung to this opportunity. This was before tech stocks crashed, and the opportunity looked very good, especially compared with anything else in my life. I put the plan together by the end of January, after about three weeks of working around the clock, and it was a good first stab. Rand’s brother-in-law Tom was impressed. The total market was over $50 billion, the magic number, and the industry was fragmented, with tens of thousands of small businesses and great inefficiencies. It was a perfect example of a market in which a portal could gain dominance, both on the business-to-consumer and business-to-business sides. My plan was for an infomediary, a business that would consolidate information and facilitate transactions, trying to capture only a tiny percentage of a huge volume.

I worked long hours polishing this plan for presentation to investors. Timing was everything. If we were too late, we’d get nothing. And then, on February 8, 2000, the new issue of Boating Industry International featured an article on Internet portals for the boating industry. They had surveyed the field, doing exactly the research I had done, and much of my business plan was in that article. They confirmed that all of the current companies approaching the opportunity were falling short. But the article also listed some new sites that were about to go up, and one of these presented a problem. When I went to their site, which hadn’t been up two weeks earlier, I read about their management team and funding. They were six months ahead of us, and that meant we were sunk.

I asked Tom about other options, about where I could go next, and he suggested approaching them for a partnership. Since the Internet game was a race, in which companies could not develop quickly enough no matter how fast they moved, we might take care of some aspect of the portal in cooperation with them.

So I called the CEO of this dot-com, and he was interested, but he was going to be out of the country for a few weeks. We would meet when he returned. This delay was not good, because Rand was going to throw in the towel, on my recommendation, and things were moving so fast in the industry that even three weeks later, our position was no longer quite as strong. So I kept the appointment but turned it into a job interview.

I was hired, and Nancy took a job at carclub.com, just a few blocks away along the waterfront in San Francisco. We were both happy defectors from teaching, working crazy hours but feeling like it was going to amount to something.

The bankruptcy went well, also. I filed, had my hearing, then needed to wait three months to find out if any of the creditors would file objections to the discharge. It didn’t look like anyone was going to do that. My private lenders were remarkably gracious about the whole thing, telling me they had made the investment with their eyes open, knowing it was a risky business. Only Amber was nasty about it, which was ironic, since she was the only person other than me who could be considered responsible for the failure. She and Heather were trying to sue me through the Employment Development Department, and Nancy and I received a lot of e-mails and phone calls from Amber, but none of this had any effect.

At the bankruptcy hearing, I was questioned for about forty-five minutes, compared to the usual five, because my case was unusual and a bit complicated. But I had nothing to hide, and I even unintentionally entertained the crowd. Oohs and aahs as they heard about each new disaster in the business. The captain who had dumped Grendel near Guatemala, the rudder incident off Casablanca. It was certainly a story no one had heard before, and obviously I had done everything in my power to prevent the eventual failure. It still felt awful, though, to be in court skipping out on my debts. Bankruptcy may be legal, but it doesn’t feel right. I was just hoping the dot-com would succeed and I’d be able to pay everyone back.

The dot-com did well at first. We received a much larger round of funding, and no one believed that the stock crash that began in April 2000 would continue for very long. Everyone expected recovery within a year or less, including the venture capitalists. In hindsight, this was silly, but it was what people in the dot-com world, including me, believed.

Our dot-com was more traditional than most, since our industry — boating — was conservative. We had older managers and dressed at least business-casual, and we didn’t have a foosball table or any other games or wild parties. We just worked eighty-hour weeks and then hundred-hour weeks for five months straight to launch the site. And I found my way to advance within the company.

Though I was hired in business development, I became the “contract guy,” and everyone had me review legal agreements before negotiation or signing. I was interested in contracts because they revealed that business is based, finally, on nothing more than trust and hope, despite what we otherwise believe. What holds the business world together is a house of cards. We didn’t have an in-house legal department, and I was one of only a few people in the sixty-five-person company who could read carefully. So I began reporting directly to every member of our executive management.

Near the end of the summer, I was promoted to work directly under the CFO. I would be responsible for all legal agreements for the company and its subsidiaries. I would call our several law firms when I had questions, but I would do as much of the work myself as possible, to minimize our legal fees, since by this time the company was trying to reduce expenses in a difficult market. My change in position was announced at a company-wide meeting after my work was praised, and I was happy until I found out they wanted me to take on these greater responsibilities without giving me anything in return. They weren’t promoting me to director level, just changing my title to manager of contracts and business development, and they weren’t offering more pay or more stock options.

The CFO was condescending to me. He was a good boss, generally, but now he told me I needed to walk before I learned to run. I hated the clichés of business. Thinking in business is extremely lazy. If I hadn’t needed the job to repay my mother and Rand and all my other creditors, I would have given him an ultimatum, but instead I settled for additional stock options, which I knew would be worthless, and the promise that I would advance in rank and salary soon, most likely in a couple of months, after my formal review.