of us turned on our PCs at once. It was time to move on, and Rusty knew it.
“But why a feckin’ 200,000-square-foot fortress?” he asked. “And why for twice our feckin’ 2007 profit? Last year we earned just under eight million—eight, Joy, not
eighteen
. And why in feckin’ Compton, of all places? You want us all dead? Why a
historical landmark
? Why a
listed
monument? You want to spend your time squabbling with sixteen amateur historians? You want to start a fight with half of the goddamn
city council
?”
When we decided to become business partners back in 2003, we made a deal: we can fight, we
should
fight, but with a twenty-four-hour limit. After that we’d get out and earn money again. About three weeks ago we rented a squash court out on Irving Drive, we do that now and again, with the agreement that for forty-five minutes we wouldn’t talk business. But this time we were at each other’s throats about the Old Barracks before the ball even got warm. The same old argument. Our CEO and founder stood there in his faded Guinness T-shirt, milk-bottle legs spread, clutching his racket like a dagger in his freckled fist, hollering: and I’m
damned
if I’m gonna shell out twenty million for a cinder block spook house, and I
don’t
need my face in the
L.A. Times
, and I
didn’t
sell you shares only for you to turn around and bankrupt me. It was the first time since we’d teamed up that we were on totally opposite sides of the fence.
Although I had seen the eruption coming, I was still taken aback. The often costly changes I’d been allowed to make over the past few years attested to Rusty’s confidence in my business sense. I had taken the initiative to shift us from one large to six more specific websites, gradually of course, but with resounding success. I was the one who insisted on buying better cameras and investing in faster connections, so our film sets were now technically on a par with the big Hollywood and Burbank studios. He had given me carte blanche in recruiting personnel. And not onlythe creatives: when I suggested hiring marketing people, a controller, and even a personnel manager to draw up pension and health care plans, he didn’t flinch. Since then our profits had risen from a piddly under three million to last year’s eight.
Squash courts are ingeniously designed kill traps: you can’t get out, no one hears you, the light is merciless. I needed to find his weak spot, and in his case that was Europe. “Wells,” I said, no longer as restrained as during the past month of arranging my arguments like a floral bouquet, “you are
so
conservative, you are
so
slow, you have no guts—what are you, a European?” Rusty enjoyed taking the occasional fifteen minutes to lambaste the big multinationals from what he called the “olde worlde economy”: Shell, Barclays, Renault, Total, the same old list from his days at Goldman Sachs, and the same old pseudo-intellectual explanation that probably was based on some or other rule of thumb and that he presented with such aplomb that you didn’t know if he was serious or pulling your leg. Rusty, sitting on the edge of his desk like a guru as he raked the European business world over the coals.
“The classic CEO just doesn’t get it, Joy. A wimp like him thinks: I have to be innovative, I have to be sustainable, I have to go green, I have to do this, that, and the other. He opens up a can of managers and realizes a year later that those feckin’ morons thought up something totally different than what he meant. So he says: whoa, let’s wait it out a bit.
Stupid
.”
“What do you want,” I asked him that day on the squash court: “to go back to Belfast, or tack an extra zero onto your year-end profits? In two years we’ll either be making fifty million, Wells, or we’ll be broke. What we’re doing now, anyone can do. It’s got to be better. It’s got to be bigger.
Different
. And you know it.”
“That’s pure ballax,” he
“But why a feckin’ 200,000-square-foot fortress?” he asked. “And why for twice our feckin’ 2007 profit? Last year we earned just under eight million—eight, Joy, not
eighteen
. And why in feckin’ Compton, of all places? You want us all dead? Why a
historical landmark
? Why a
listed
monument? You want to spend your time squabbling with sixteen amateur historians? You want to start a fight with half of the goddamn
city council
?”
When we decided to become business partners back in 2003, we made a deal: we can fight, we
should
fight, but with a twenty-four-hour limit. After that we’d get out and earn money again. About three weeks ago we rented a squash court out on Irving Drive, we do that now and again, with the agreement that for forty-five minutes we wouldn’t talk business. But this time we were at each other’s throats about the Old Barracks before the ball even got warm. The same old argument. Our CEO and founder stood there in his faded Guinness T-shirt, milk-bottle legs spread, clutching his racket like a dagger in his freckled fist, hollering: and I’m
damned
if I’m gonna shell out twenty million for a cinder block spook house, and I
don’t
need my face in the
L.A. Times
, and I
didn’t
sell you shares only for you to turn around and bankrupt me. It was the first time since we’d teamed up that we were on totally opposite sides of the fence.
Although I had seen the eruption coming, I was still taken aback. The often costly changes I’d been allowed to make over the past few years attested to Rusty’s confidence in my business sense. I had taken the initiative to shift us from one large to six more specific websites, gradually of course, but with resounding success. I was the one who insisted on buying better cameras and investing in faster connections, so our film sets were now technically on a par with the big Hollywood and Burbank studios. He had given me carte blanche in recruiting personnel. And not onlythe creatives: when I suggested hiring marketing people, a controller, and even a personnel manager to draw up pension and health care plans, he didn’t flinch. Since then our profits had risen from a piddly under three million to last year’s eight.
Squash courts are ingeniously designed kill traps: you can’t get out, no one hears you, the light is merciless. I needed to find his weak spot, and in his case that was Europe. “Wells,” I said, no longer as restrained as during the past month of arranging my arguments like a floral bouquet, “you are
so
conservative, you are
so
slow, you have no guts—what are you, a European?” Rusty enjoyed taking the occasional fifteen minutes to lambaste the big multinationals from what he called the “olde worlde economy”: Shell, Barclays, Renault, Total, the same old list from his days at Goldman Sachs, and the same old pseudo-intellectual explanation that probably was based on some or other rule of thumb and that he presented with such aplomb that you didn’t know if he was serious or pulling your leg. Rusty, sitting on the edge of his desk like a guru as he raked the European business world over the coals.
“The classic CEO just doesn’t get it, Joy. A wimp like him thinks: I have to be innovative, I have to be sustainable, I have to go green, I have to do this, that, and the other. He opens up a can of managers and realizes a year later that those feckin’ morons thought up something totally different than what he meant. So he says: whoa, let’s wait it out a bit.
Stupid
.”
“What do you want,” I asked him that day on the squash court: “to go back to Belfast, or tack an extra zero onto your year-end profits? In two years we’ll either be making fifty million, Wells, or we’ll be broke. What we’re doing now, anyone can do. It’s got to be better. It’s got to be bigger.
Different
. And you know it.”
“That’s pure ballax,” he
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