Notes on Chapter 18

When It's Over

In Chapter 18, Janet breaks the news to Dan, her old buddy from Xerox: she wasn’t managing anymore. Dan tells her she should go to the Thursday lunch at Gordon-Biersch sometime, where a bunch of their old friends meet.

Dan, of course, is me, and I was working at Oracle at the time, for the late Smokey Wallace

and he did host a weekly lunch at G-B. Smokey was kind of a charter member of the G-B club, as it were. The owners offered to run a tab for him so he wouldn’t have to pay cash all the time, and he said, “No, you don’t understand. The last thing I want is records!”

I only went to this lunch a couple of times. It was a long drive from Oracle, and I didn’t much like to drink at lunch anyway. Smokey didn’t last too long as our VP, which isn’t surprising if you knew him. May his memory be a blessing.

Len

Len is Janet’s father, who’s living in their cabin up in the mountains. The plan was that they’d build a father-in-law house for him, he’d fish every day, repeat until done.

But Len’s not having it. He had a background in accounting and finance, and he’s discovered the online world before the rest of the public. His acumen for investing has attracted a small group of wealthy individuals, and he has a “private placement” fund by which he invests money for them. Len’s not ready to go out to pasture just yet.

He’s definitely ahead of most of the investing world, who are still fixated on the big stocks of the 80’s and still have a sour taste about technology.

Matt and Miriam

We first met our fun Palo Alto couple, Matt and Miriam, in The Big Bucks, when they were grad students at the University of Minnesota. They ended up at 3Com and became friends with Janet and Dan. Miriam is a psychologist at a clinic in Palo Alto, which mainly serves the wives and children of rich Silicon Valley executives, lawyers, and venture capitalists. Miriam yearns, desperately, to be as wealthy as they are, and constantly nags Matt to join a startup and make them so.

“Charity” is a big deal for rich Palo Alto people, and Matt sees the hypocrisy all too clearly. The recipients of their charity are mainly themselves, in the form of high-class culture like TheatreWorks, West Bay Opera, and their nationally famous school system.

East Palo Alto is just a mile to the east, full of poor people who are loved in the abstract, but not in the particular:

“Yeah, like trying to keep them from using ‘our’ parks here!”

Matt was referring to a series of City Council meetings where the residents complained about poor people from East Palo Alto coming over and picnicking in Palo Alto parks because they didn’t have any nice places in their own neighborhood.

This was a real phenomenon.

I can’t really hide the fact that that’s me talking when Matt goes on about TheatreWorks (his lines are shown in bold):

“Wasn’t that wonderful? I just love that we have real professional theater down here and you don’t have to go to The City for it anymore.”

“So what’s their annual budget now? Why do they need even more money?”

She was tired of just ignoring him when he got this way.

“I have no idea, Matt. It costs money to hire professionals.”

“Evidently. I guess it takes more than just developing your own talent.”

She got more irritated.

“So what — we’re supposed to have a bunch of community college graduates put on shows, because they’re ‘local’? I’d rather see something like we used to go to in New York.”

At the time, I was occasionally singing in the chorus with San Jose Lyric Theater, and their annual budget was $160,000. TheatreWorks’ was $5,000,000. Were they thirty times better? I don’t know; maybe 10 times. Their audience was probably three times as large, as a rough guess.

I also happened to know that they brought in lighting designers and other non-acting talent from New York, whose contracts specified what kind of rental car and what class of accommodations they’d receive.

So this deserves a tax deduction? Nope, nope.