Free A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder Page B

while.”
    Then, one morning, he drove out to Concord to give one of Kayak’s vice presidents a routine quarterly evaluation. They settled down in the conference room that was home to the stuffed elephant, Annabell. Then the VP, taking the embodied message to heart, asked Paul, “Can I give
you
some feedback?”
    “Sure,” Paul said.
    “How many hours a week do you work at Kayak lately?”
    “I don’t know,” said Paul. “Twenty?”
    “Try three,” said the vice president.
    Paul didn’t believe it, not at first. But when he looked around the office, he realized to his dismay that there were new young people there whom he didn’t know. Whose names he didn’t even know! When and how could this have happened?
    It took him three weeks to act.

2
    Paul lived alone, in a house just off a heavily traveled, tree-lined street in the colonial town of Arlington, ten miles northwest of downtown Boston. No gates or high walls or security cameras stood guard around his house. It was old, but Paul’s extensive renovations had included many half-hidden features, such as the outside wall that could be rolled aside, opening the house’s arms for guests at summer parties. He had bought the place mainly for its setting, half an acre of lawn running down to the edge of a large pond, called Spy Pond. He had equipped the house with a lot of technology: a huge, seldom-watched TV; automated lighting and heating gizmos that he could control with his smartphone; an elaborate sound system. But the house retained some of its old-fashioned self, with its ells, steep roof, and clapboarded walls, and the general lack of ostentation inside.
    He had an office at the far end of the house, but sometimes, as on a night in early February, he carried one of his big, sleek computers out to the dining room. He worked there on email for a while, the computer’s keyboard clicking fast under his fingers, a sound like distant surf. Then that sound stopped, and in a moment the machine began emitting little whoops, like a baby’s digestive sounds—the sound of instant messages being sent and received. “This is a pretty momentous IM for me,” Paul said, staring at the screen.
    A conversation was unfolding there, Paul conversing with Steve Hafner. They typed their messages in lowercase and texting shorthand (“y” meaning “yes,” for instance). Paul had begun the exchange:
“hey”
    “yo”
    “can i type conf?”
    “y”
    “so i’m bored”
    “i know”
    “if i leave, is there anytime better than another?”
    This went on awhile, Steve asking Paul to help him with the transition and Paul writing that he would “love to continue a role” at Kayak. Near the end, Paul wrote: “also, i have no idea what i want to do next.”
    What he did next, as soon as he signed off, was to put in a phone call to Billo. Paul told him: “I just want to let you know that I told Hafner that I probably want to leave Kayak in a couple of months….In a nutshell I’m not sure what I want to do next….And just to say I’d love to find a way to work with you again at some point.”
    Billo said he felt the same way, and Paul hung up. His mind was moving fast. He called Schwenk and told him he was leaving Kayak. “We have to figure out how to reorganize Concord. I have some ideas. The other thing is, I’d love to work with you again. No idea what.”
    When that call ended, Paul said, of Schwenk, “He wants in.” Paul was grinning. Starting a new company with Billo and Schwenk would be
awesome.
“It would get such attention in the industry. Any venture capital firm would give us five million, no questions asked.”
    A moment ago he had told Hafner and Billo he didn’t know what he’d do next. If that had been true, it wasn’t any longer. He would create an incubator. This was the common term for an entity that helps entrepreneurs turn start-ups into actual companies, usually lending them advice and office space and sometimes money, in return for part