Page 65 of The Hard Launch

“It’s a sublet, right?” I asked our real estate agent as we walked through.

“Yes, you’d finish out the last sixteen months of the previous tenant’s lease.”

I thought about seeing if she knew who’d been here previously— maybe they outgrew it! —but once we stopped in the first conference room I decided I didn’t want to know. The door was cracked, dangling from its hinges, and the doorframe itself was splintered. Same for the larger conference room. I noticed it again in what is now my office, along with a large hole in the wall at, say, punching height.

“They’d obviously patch that and get new doors,” she told me. “We can just put it into the agreement. But yes, someone sure had a temper.”

I thought about it overnight, and decided to take it. I told my agent to have the wall patched and painted, but it would be fine to just have the doors removed.

“Smart thinking,” she said. “If there’s no door, no one can slam it.”

Ella insisted on burning sage throughout before we moved in.

I can see the place where the wall was patched in my office. It’s smoother and a little bit shiny, and when I come back from a terrible meeting sometimes I gently place my knuckles against it. I do that today, and I think about a soccer coach I had once who told us that the only kind of anger you should hold onto is the kind that serves you.

It’s not about restraint, really. I’m not a punch-a-hole-in-the-wall kind of guy. But Glenn was just telling me yesterday that it was okay to be a little more honest with the team, especially if it meant being more honest with myself.

So maybe I should go hit the gong and tell everyone they’re going to get laid off because I’m the worst type of failure, the hopeful type who forgot that the lesser of two evils is actually still evil.

My phone rings and it’s Edmund.

“There he is,” Edmund says. “How are you doing after that?”

“I can think of better ways to tell my team our core business is being shut down,” I tell him.

“That’s fair,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting Mike to drop that today. Maybe remind the team to keep that one extra close to the vest for now.”

“Will do,” I say, returning my knuckles to the wall.

“I’ve got to tell you, Jude, I pegged you wrong. I really thought you were going to struggle with all of this. That can happen sometimes when a business is a passion project. But you’re a killer, my friend. Once you and I are on the other side of this one, let’s do some more deals together.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s.”

I put my shoes on, and then my headphones. I take the elevator downstairs and I open the audiobook of the Steve Jobs biography on my phone; I listen to it a lot. As I walk along the bay, I navigate to a specific part and let the narrator read it to me like it’s a fairy tale.

Once upon a time, Steve Jobs was the chairman of Apple’s board of directors. And he found himself at war, in some ways, with the CEO that he himself had installed. Jobs brought that guy in to help him build the future, but he ended up with a person focused more on revenue than innovation. Jobs found himself an outsider within his own company.

While the main teams of Apple worked on their existing product line, he gathered a faction of engineers to build a rival product. He told that team, “it’s better to be pirates than to join the Navy,” and they developed the Macintosh together in a building where a pirate flag flew overhead, with the Apple logo subbed in for the eyepatch.

It doesn’t matter to me that for all his effort, Jobs didn’t succeed that time. Or the next. It’s the trying that counts. I feel a pang knowing this is what Lacey was telling me all along.

I’m not saying my newsletter company is the next Apple. I’m not trying to be Steve Jobs. But the more I walk, the more resolute I become.

I call my friend Ari, who’s an attorney. I tell him what my plan is.

“Dude, Venmo me one dollar.”

“What?”

“Just Venmo me a dollar and where you say what it’s for, write ‘retainer.’”

I do it. “Done. Why?”

“Now I’m your lawyer, and I can’t be deposed when they sue your ass for this. I don’t have time for that shit. But Captain Jude, stop. Don’t do this.”

“I don’t see any reason not to.”

“Do you ever want to get funding again? Do you ever want to get a job somewhere else?” he asks, giving me examples of things I do not want, which I don’t think is his intent.