at his debtors’ knee-caps. Almost everybody paid up on the spot: Nobody wanted to find out just what he was laughing at.
Unfortunately you lack the physical presence and instinctive sense of the theatrical to make this strategy work. Moreover, since the Gorilla went to monkey heaven, the franchisees and street-level clients have become unduly frisky. Getting a handle on the major defaulters is proving tedious although there are plenty of small fry to make an example of and opportunities for profit along the way: Thanks to the Organization, you are in a position to outsource enforcement to contractors in the budget-medical-supplies business.
But you don’t want to waste your time playing hands-on godfather to a slumful of nitwitted glue sniffers. It’s a lousy business model, with no scope for exponential scaling and monetization of the sweat equity you’re going to have to inject to make any headway. The outputs from the Gorilla’s franchise scale linearly with the human inputs, because criminal retailing is labour-intensive. And while the Gorilla was content to weed his patch in person, you have higher ambitions than a lifetime of stoop labour.
The first thing they teach you in VC school is to pick a business model with scope for non-linear growth. Consequently, you have concluded that it would be far better to trash the Gorilla’s operation completely and establish a new one of your own design (“leveraging best-practice agile methodologies to maximize return on stakeholder investment in accordance with the Operation’s total start-up commitment protocols,” as your funding pitch puts it) than to try to nurse the emphysemic mafia hold-over out of its intensive care bed and back into a wheelchair.
So you drew up your plans and pitched them at the Operation, talked through the cash flow and gained their grudging assent—and more importantly, the first round of stakeholder equity to bootstrap the new business, on condition you keep the old cash cow pumping for the time being. And now you need to recruit an executive team for the start-up.
You’re about to go Gangster 2.0 . . .
One of the disadvantages of the virtual corporate lifestyle is that it keeps you too busy for the local health clubs and dojos. In response, you’ve developed a number of ad hoc work-out substitutes. One of them is that you never catch a bus or a taxi if you can rent a bicycle or walk. Another—which also happens to be good COMSEC practice—is never to contact clients via the networks if you can visit them in person without being observed. So when you walk out of the Hilton, your first stop is the Lothian Bike railing outside.
You always plan to turn up on a client’s doorstep spick and span, unexpected as a hangman. To this end you buy lightweight business suits that are impregnated with a magic nanotech fabric treatment that sheds sweat and body odours, not to mention dirt flung up from road surfaces. Before you start pedalling, you fire up a nifty (and highly illegal) applet that makes the jailbroken disposaphone you’re carrying emulate a cluster of zombie GPS transmitters: You tell it to send your rented bicycle’s tiny mind on a random tour of the Old Town. (It’s all for the best if nobody can interrogate the bike about your movements later.)
Once you’re on the bike lane, the lack of wireless access leaves you blind—but it’s a welcome, familiar feeling, like having your own personal cloaking field. It’s a good palliative against the anxiety you feel for your missing luggage. The police INDECT networks might still be able to track you if they were watching right now, but the rich data they depend on is so bandwidth-intensive that it isn’t routinely archived: In another twenty-four hours, there’ll be no trace that you ever came this way. Before you set off, you downloaded a map and memorized a series of left/right branches and waypoints—it’s an archaic skill called “orienteering”—so you make good
Unfortunately you lack the physical presence and instinctive sense of the theatrical to make this strategy work. Moreover, since the Gorilla went to monkey heaven, the franchisees and street-level clients have become unduly frisky. Getting a handle on the major defaulters is proving tedious although there are plenty of small fry to make an example of and opportunities for profit along the way: Thanks to the Organization, you are in a position to outsource enforcement to contractors in the budget-medical-supplies business.
But you don’t want to waste your time playing hands-on godfather to a slumful of nitwitted glue sniffers. It’s a lousy business model, with no scope for exponential scaling and monetization of the sweat equity you’re going to have to inject to make any headway. The outputs from the Gorilla’s franchise scale linearly with the human inputs, because criminal retailing is labour-intensive. And while the Gorilla was content to weed his patch in person, you have higher ambitions than a lifetime of stoop labour.
The first thing they teach you in VC school is to pick a business model with scope for non-linear growth. Consequently, you have concluded that it would be far better to trash the Gorilla’s operation completely and establish a new one of your own design (“leveraging best-practice agile methodologies to maximize return on stakeholder investment in accordance with the Operation’s total start-up commitment protocols,” as your funding pitch puts it) than to try to nurse the emphysemic mafia hold-over out of its intensive care bed and back into a wheelchair.
So you drew up your plans and pitched them at the Operation, talked through the cash flow and gained their grudging assent—and more importantly, the first round of stakeholder equity to bootstrap the new business, on condition you keep the old cash cow pumping for the time being. And now you need to recruit an executive team for the start-up.
You’re about to go Gangster 2.0 . . .
One of the disadvantages of the virtual corporate lifestyle is that it keeps you too busy for the local health clubs and dojos. In response, you’ve developed a number of ad hoc work-out substitutes. One of them is that you never catch a bus or a taxi if you can rent a bicycle or walk. Another—which also happens to be good COMSEC practice—is never to contact clients via the networks if you can visit them in person without being observed. So when you walk out of the Hilton, your first stop is the Lothian Bike railing outside.
You always plan to turn up on a client’s doorstep spick and span, unexpected as a hangman. To this end you buy lightweight business suits that are impregnated with a magic nanotech fabric treatment that sheds sweat and body odours, not to mention dirt flung up from road surfaces. Before you start pedalling, you fire up a nifty (and highly illegal) applet that makes the jailbroken disposaphone you’re carrying emulate a cluster of zombie GPS transmitters: You tell it to send your rented bicycle’s tiny mind on a random tour of the Old Town. (It’s all for the best if nobody can interrogate the bike about your movements later.)
Once you’re on the bike lane, the lack of wireless access leaves you blind—but it’s a welcome, familiar feeling, like having your own personal cloaking field. It’s a good palliative against the anxiety you feel for your missing luggage. The police INDECT networks might still be able to track you if they were watching right now, but the rich data they depend on is so bandwidth-intensive that it isn’t routinely archived: In another twenty-four hours, there’ll be no trace that you ever came this way. Before you set off, you downloaded a map and memorized a series of left/right branches and waypoints—it’s an archaic skill called “orienteering”—so you make good
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