Three guys sitting at a table in a Thai restaurant in San Francisco, talking about how they use the Internet through their phones. A mishmash of assertions, beliefs about what makes a phone app something you want to use every day. Simplicity matters. Boil function down to one action, maybe two. Tinder works because it's just one of two swipes. Left or right. Simplicity. Simplicity is really the hard thing. And at the next table, three people doing the same thing. And three more beyond that.
More conversations, more tables throughout the restaurant, small sets of people discussing ideas regarding what's needed and why: what our thumbs are for, how many things we want to think about in a given moment, how we organize our thoughts, how to represent that on the opening screen of a telephone. And across the street, another Thai restaurant, with more tables. More murmurings. And beyond that more. An entire chattering region of ideas for ways to use a phone—connect with people, collect the news, manage e-mail, whatever. It is 12:50 P.M. in San Francisco on a Thursday. Just now nobody's wrong; everybody's right.
But pick a number, a relatively big one, to represent how many ideas reside in that chatter at that very moment. Go big. Say four, five thousand ideas. Could be more—nothing is certain in all that buzz. But let's say over a week of these lunches, ten of these ideas will be funded for start by venture capitalists and angel investors. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions even, injected into ideas, operations, development, stemming from this kind of chatter. All of them—developers and venture capitalists—accept the next number, which is more like a constant. If ten ideas are funded, two or three might break even, make a little, be acquired. The hope is that one of them will pay off big. The odds are long.
And yet they flock. Tomorrow more lunches and more sets of three people. More plates of pad Thai. And ideas. More long odds.
At my table, Jonathan Abrams, serial entrepreneur or serial failure, depending on whom you ask, acknowledges two things: 1) At lunch in San Francisco, everybody loves Thai. "It seems to be a law," he says. 2) Things are really simmering at the moment. "We're in one of those periods where—just like 1999—things are really running hot. Whatever it was, that one thing you were looking for, somebody's probably already thought of it, is doing it, or has done it. This is a time where any absurd app you can imagine for a joke—say, Uber for Monkeys—you'll say it with your colleagues, get your laugh, and the next day it will appear in TechCrunch as something that's really happening."
So we're down to stray thoughts? All the good ideas have been thought of?
Abrams stays level on this. "Hardly any of them are good ideas," he says. "Or maybe none of them." He pauses. "Or maybe all of them are." He pokes his fork in the air in front of him. "Being a good idea isn't the point, anyway."
He would know. He had a good idea. One of the great ideas, really. At the beginning of the last decade, Abrams, a former software engineer for a Canadian phone company, invented Friendster, a social-media platform that allowed users to link profile pages. First of its kind. Friendster was Facebook before Myspace was Facebook before Facebook was Facebook. He took it to the brink of success in less than two years, only to watch it die on the vine. Friendster was tattooed in the cultural memory as an Internet failure. Abrams, its inventor and CEO, became the natural personification of that. Fairly or unfairly, Abrams was judged a failure, too. The Man Who Might Have Been Zuckerberg.
Now he's eating noodles, chewing up ideas. He drives a Nissan Altima. Perfectly good car. Better than mine. He's got plenty of money. He seems pretty game. By his own admission, he lives comfortably. There are a number of investments, he's strung out other start-ups of his own, dipped in as an investor in the ideas of others, there's even an honest-to-God brick-and-mortar business in the form of a San Francisco nightclub. Time has passed. But no big hits. Mostly misses. So it must be safe to ask, with Friendster ten years out of his hands: Did he fail? And maybe it should be put to him, since the term has recently been stripped of its shame: Is he himself a failure?
It is a hard ask. Abrams is a stubborn one.
***
Walking a riverboat casino toward a distant poker room, a friend of mine once said, "No one feels sorry for anyone standing at a craps table." I understood immediately.
You don't need to know craps to understand. Listen: You have two dice. You will throw them. Working for or against a 7, the most common roll of them all. There are dozens of bets to be made, quickly too, on a cryptic felt grid. From the start, you know the following: The odds are against you, even if you play flawlessly. Some casinos even label the odds of every bet now: 31 to 1, 8 to 1, 2 to 1. A player leaning on the rail of the table is reacting to the larger number of the two, even though the relationship of the numbers is shouting at him: You will fail. Yes, there are ways to hedge your bets—buy and lay numbers, work a come bet in, maximize your odds, toss down a hard-way bet now and then—but it's easy to get in too deep. And if you think you have a good idea for a betting pattern, you do not. It has already been thought of a thousand times, by better minds than yours. And worse, it is wrong. See, at a craps table, there are no good ideas; there are only good outcomes.
However, I once ran seven hundred bucks into something over twenty grand on one hour-plus roll at the Venetian, the shooter being a kid from Sacramento. The table was mashed ten deep all around after an hour of epic hooting. I collected, and then pressed my bets like mad. My mind was full of ideas. But on what turned out to be the last roll, I had nine grand working, and my last thought before the dice were passed was I'm risking nine grand and I have twenty-two g on my rack. I'm way out of proportion. The 7 fell and I thought, I knew it. I should have never let that thought into my head. Fail! But I was rich! Relatively. And immediately, after this once-in-a-lifetime roll, everyone around me spoke first about what they did wrong. The woman next to me only doubled her money. She whined about it. The two groomsmen across from me lost three thousand on a hard-way bet. One guy made almost a quarter of a million dollars, and I'll never forget it, he said: "I'm still down for the weekend." Even this bald railbird in the crowd behind me, jammed out of the action, turned to his wife and said, "Why couldn't I get in on that? Why do I always miss?" Nearly everyone spoke about the failure of the thing. No one felt sorry for anybody. The table emptied. More failure was coming.
I did like the return. I gambled on that money for two years. In the end, I lost it all. And in that history, my own little torqued-up story, what's the most telling number? Nine grand? Seven hundred? Three thousand? It's one. One time. Once. This happened to me once. Since then, every session feels like a failure, if only by comparison. The result: I don't play craps much now. No one feels sorry for me.
***
"People far overestimate the chances of success from the beginning," says Kent Lindstrom, Abrams's friend and his COO at his latest start-up, a social news aggregator called Nuzzel. "You have an idea for a company, and the true odds that it will work out are probably like one in five hundred. Venture capitalists know this. They cut down the odds by selecting projects carefully, looking for only one real hit, maybe a couple of middle-sized successes. The others go down. So they're prepared for a large measure of failure. But developers still conduct their lives and their careers in this business as if there's only a 50 percent chance it isn't going to work. I'm being conservative there."
In 2002, Abrams may have been the only person in the world who could adequately define the term "social media" to anyone who cared. A former telephone software engineer, he acted on a great idea in a San Francisco apartment using his computer, a borrowed server, and an e-mail list of his friends. To the guy whose server he borrowed to start it up, to a circle of friends he invited to use it, to groups of venture capitalists, to the bewildered hosts of obscure cable television shows when he started to promote it, and to hapless journalists who could only see social media as some weird polyamorous extension of existing dating sites, Friendster, they insisted, had been invented as a way for Abrams to "meet chicks." While that little myth made the rounds, Abrams patented the technology for social media. He invented that shit.
And for a while, Friendster worked. Within a few months of start-up, Friendster had three million users. A corporate board of industry superstars was put together, buyout offers rumored and real were in the offing, and Friendster's thirty-three-year-old CEO Abrams gained a bit of celebrity, showed a little swagger. He did photo shoots being smooched by models. In an early episode of the Jimmy Kimmel show, he makes his entrance by incongruously throwing condoms to the audience while promoting the foundling site. Whether he likes it or not now, the guy was clearly meeting chicks, and some great portion of a billion-dollar industry was bound to be his.
And then, just as quickly, the whole thing tanked. The Friendster site was overwhelmed. Computer screens started locking up, and distant servers crashed, and li'l Friendsters everywhere started drifting away to Myspace and Facebook. Control of the board was wrested from Abrams's hands. "It wasn't working," he says now. "I had to watch as an engineer as engineering problems went unsolved."
Having missed out on the cash-out offers, stock options, and venture-capital infusions that came Friendster's way, having further missed out on the chance to burn his name into the cosmos of the Internet, Abrams was pushed out with a little bit of money and a reputation as an arrogant kid. Roll out the Icarus analogies, the mangling gossip, the mincing gaze of hindsight. Yet Friendster lived on, and lives on still. Abrams points that out every once in a while. Especially when asked about failure. In the years following his departure, it remained a fairly vital social network in India and Southeast Asia (with more than 115 million users worldwide), and more recently has transmogrified into a social-gaming site. Still: It's a shell of what it once was and a shade of what many, especially Abrams, thought it could've become. Was he truly watching the shop? Was he really raising the alarm bells about his site, his creation, his patented idea? He claims no one was listening. That each member of the board was carrying the idea in the direction of his own expertise without considering the basic operating condition of the site, which undoubtedly decayed. Who can say? "Outside of the scale of it, and everyone's expectations, Friendster was just another start-up, one of six or seven I've been involved in. All of them face extraordinarily long odds. Friendster was a good idea, maybe a great idea, and we ran into trouble."
And as the label might apply to him: "I don't think a person in any other part of the country would think of where I ended up as failure," Abrams says. "The scale of things out here is kind of creepy sometimes, and brutally tilted. I didn't have to deal with living out of a car or feeding my kids. It wasn't real in that way. I didn't worry about survival. I owned a nightclub. I had a good bit of money. It was frustrating. That's not suffering."
People forget, he says. Or they haven't been around long enough to remember. "When the Internet bubble burst [in 2001], there was a feeling of failure then. There were moving trucks everywhere. We called it the nuclear winter. There were no second chances. People quit. That was when people left; they went back to school, or they went back to … Texas, or went to work for Hewlett-Packard. I don't know. Starting an Internet concern was like punching yourself in the head. You just didn't try again. People left.
"Is that worse than what happened to me at Friendster?" he asks. "Yes. Yes, it was. After Friendster, I went right back to work. I've been working ever since. That's not so terrible."
***
The history of the Internet is oily and personal, featuring a slippery, galumphing wrestling match of would-be visionaries and captains of industry reigning over Silicon Valley. Big fish swallow little fish. Temples fall. Books are written and movies made. Every advance, every development, every battle, every evolutionary leap is documented and ultimately tied to the name, if not the face, of individuals who in turn become the walking, talking Paul Bunyans of American life. Did they bring forward good stuff? For all of us, and quickly. Did they make money for their investors? Loads and loads. And do their creations and companies outlive them? Yes, some.
But the rest of these might-have-been Ellisons and Zuckerbergs? They fall short. They flame out. They even cause the occasional catastrophe. And today, more than ever in its fifteen-minute history, Silicon Valley is ruled by the mantra "Fail fast," the once unlabeled practice that is now utterly self-evident in its title: Move on. Fail-fast dictates include: Try things, test things, break things, change directions. In a culture where "fail fast" is a well-grooved, easily digested mantra migrating outward from Silicon Valley as a means of encouraging creativity and risk taking in more traditional professions, jobs, and lives. "Celebrating failure" has become a greeting-card sentiment fostering jargon such as blameless dialogue, alleviation of core barriers, innovative learning structures, and thought models over practice, execution, outcome. Failure is untoothed and stored in a data bank of cautionary tales used by corporate speakers in the plush tonal confines of TED Talks, in university curriculums, classrooms, and textbooks.
Never has failure been this fetishized, chopped up, and broken down, but it tends to focus on failures of scale—of sloppy, overquick, reactive decision making of people playing with other people's money; of the venture capitalists leaving the wreckage of sequential fails behind them, all in service to treating the world like their own scratch-off lottery card; or—and this is a favorite—of the rich guys who failed and flailed until it all worked out for them (thus validating and redeeming all the failing and flailing). The "fail fast" cheerleaders don't have a lot to say about the guy who has a good idea, one of the great ones, really, and watches it blow up in his face. It's like they don't even understand him, or his failure, at all.
***
So were there dark days after Friendster? "Well, some days are unlike others. You want to get up. You don't want to. Once I stopped paying attention to what was happening to my own company, I was free to think," Abrams says. "That helped." Vague. He speaks as if he can't remember any single day and consistently shifts his answer to broad terms about his frustrations. Was he angry? "Frustrated," he says. In this way, he is robotic. Frustrating is a catchall. Was he depressed? Did he stop answering the phone? "Not really," he says. "I was frustrated with talking and living it."
And now? It's "frustrating because there are so many mistakes in the story people have come to tell," he says. "I've tried to teach myself that I can't engineer these things, these articles. I can't control the perception. They name me before they meet me. It's a formula I've come to accept."
Right now Abrams is sitting with Lindstrom in a shared office called Founders Den, which they created as a space for selected entrepreneurs to develop start-ups. It's carpeted, tiered, a little dreary and utilitarian, reminiscent of a dated television show like thirtysomething. Or something. Here Abrams explains Nuzzel, which collects and unifies news links posted by everyone you follow on the Internet. Social news. Probably another term Abrams might consider patenting.
(Friendster quietly sold those first patents—the ones for social media—to Facebook after Abrams left. "It was unfortunate. I always thought that was a pretty good asset," he says. "If the board had auctioned that off at the right time, that might have been some very nice capital.")
Abrams had a dozen moments when he could have picked up his bet, taken his winnings, and scuttled away with his own set of returns. He failed in any one of those ways. But it's not a craps game. It's work. And Abrams is still working, and he's using the lessons he learned from Friendster to build Nuzzel's success. "That lesson of simplicity," he says, "I think I applied it to Friendster, and I think that was why the Friendster model was initially so successful. And I think it applies to Nuzzel. We're insisting on it. It requires saying no a lot. Saying no to other people's ideas, to extras, to options." Working slower, studying usage, tempering expectations: These sound like the lessons of a midcareer executive in nearly any business, large or small, yet the principles that Abrams is using to run Nuzzel run contrary to the energy and practice of the fail-fast laboratory.
Still, the odds are against him, as they are against any of the triads of idea people in all the Thai restaurants north of Market Street in San Francisco. But these people aren't blind and they're certainly not stupid. Nobody feels sorry for them. And confining Abrams to a fable of failure is a means of denying his role in history as an inventor, casting him as some schmo who lost his winning lottery ticket when he threw his jeans in the washing machine.
Success does not dictate character, but it says something that Abrams doesn't even want to acknowledge failure, let alone celebrate it. He seems almost old-school in his basic refusal to use the word, as if letting the word into the conversation were a kind of jinx. To him, there is nothing redeeming or noble about failure. All of this flies in the face of the emergent culture in which failure is something you own. And you celebrate it. Fast. And then you line up to try again with the ideas, because just now everything is simmering, and the venture capital is flowing. But success itself doesn't seem particularly tied to the speed of our failures nor the way we embrace them, minimize them, ignore them. The reckoning comes when success reinvents everything we are, when it changes us, rather than when we allow failure to simply reinforce itself, and the tawdry, excessive practices by which we got here in the first place.
Is Jonathan Abrams a failure? He made something. He risked something. It didn't work. And now he's making something new again. Call him whatever you want.
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Published in the March 2015 issue.
