Monday, March 31, 2014

This Company Buys Every CD, DVD And Video Game You Don't Want Anymore

Someone once gave me a CD of heavy metal Hanukkah songs called Gods of Fire. It was funny for a minute. Then it sat on a shelf for years, because I didn’t want to throw it away and it’s not like anyone on eBay would buy it from me, but I finally found a taker. The new company Decluttr paid me $2.85 for it, which, when combined with a bunch of other crap I sent them, netted me a total of $45.95. Decluttr buys anything--because that’s their business model. They will literally buy any CD, DVD, or video game you want to mail them. And they pay the postage, too.

“We have 470 Alanis Morissette Jagged Little Pill CDs,” says its U.S. president, Brett Lauter. “We can’t get rid of them. We open up the box and it’s like, not another one! But we’re still buying them.”

This isn’t some charity for 1990s survivors. The company, including its U.K. counterpart, notched more than $150 million in revenue last year.

The thinking goes like this: Although the number of physical-media retailers has gone down--farewell to Borders, Blockbuster, and many others--an actual market for this stuff still exists. In 2013, 165.4 million CDs were sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. And although consumers could sell their own stuff on eBay or Amazon, it’s a big pain: We’d have to list them individually and manage a ton of listings, all to make a few measly bucks a pop, if anything at all. Who has the time?

Decluttr takes advantage of that gap. The reason it buys everything is simple, Lauter says: “The first CD you scan in may be another Jagged Little Pill. If we say we’re not going to buy it, you may give up. We just lost you. So we’re going to give you the minimum, 50 cents, because maybe your second one is Green Day’s Insomniac, and oh my gosh, this will sell quickly.” In fact, that 1995 album is one of the hottest on the market now; Decluttr currently pays people $5 for it. “It would be poor judgment on our part if we’d blown you off on your first CD.”

Decluttr then sells your media in a variety of ways, and earns more than a 50% margin.

The amount it pays you is controlled by a proprietary algorithm, which takes into account how many copies of an item are already in its warehouse, what the item sells for on Amazon or eBay, and how quickly it usually moves. That makes Decluttr’s prices a sort of Billboard chart for the bizarro second-hand market. What’s super hot right now? Judy Collins’s 1971 album Living. “We’re paying $5 because they come in and fly off the shelves,” Lauter says. What’s not hot? The widescreen DVD edition of the 2000 X-Men movie; he has 416 of them piling up.

The company began life in the U.K. in 2007 as musicMagpie, and now receives 100,000 items there every day. Its two British co-founders officially launched a U.S. expansion this past January; they hired Lauter, the one-time CMO of Wine.com, to head up the operation. Lauter’s first move: change the U.S. version’s name to one Americans can understand. (The magpie reference only works in the U.K., where people commonly know it as a bird that picks up shiny objects.) Although it’s done very little marketing, Decluttr is already buying 10,000 items a day from people. Lauter expects to reach profitability by the end of the year.

There’s only one restriction on selling to Decluttr: All media must come with the original artwork. If you kept a disc but threw away the jewel case with the art inside, you’re out of luck. Otherwise, selling is simple. First, download the app. (There’s a web version too, but the app is more elegant.) Use it to scan the barcodes of any items you’re selling; the system instantly tells you what Decluttr will pay. Once you’re done--you need to sell a minimum of 10 items, but there’s no maximum--the system emails you a UPS sheet, which you affix to a box and send off.

Your package arrives in a warehouse just north of Atlanta, where employees confirm that you sent what you promised. Items are immediately listed on Amazon, eBay, or Decluttr’s own site for resale. (Lauter is so embarrassed by Decluttr’s site, which sells 20 items a month, that he refuses to reveal its name: “It’s really, really bad. Honestly, people who are buying off of it right now must be masochists.” He says a better version will be up in a few months.) When a disc is bought, Decluttr buffs it up and, if needed, replaces its jewel case. Then it’s mailed off to its new owner.

Inside the Decluttr warehouse.Photo courtesy of Decluttr

For a world that supposedly stopped buying CDs, sales happen quickly. I sent in a box of 30 items in late February, and within its first day of arrival, the first CD was sold: Depeche Mode’s Delta Machine was sent back to its native U.K. Three weeks later, 12 more items had found new homes.

Decluttr won’t reveal how much my (or anyone’s) CDs sell for, or show any of the individual listings online. This is the one opaque part of its process. That’s in part because doing so would violate agreements the company has with Amazon and eBay. But there’s also security in that secrecy: Decluttr doesn’t want to inspire copycats who are impressed by their margins, or make customers feel ripped off. “Some consumers would say, ‘I just sold you this DVD for a dollar, and you’re selling it for two dollars!’” Lauter says. “They tend to forget, yeah, we paid you a dollar, but we also paid all the shipping, we’re putting it in inventory, we’re refurbishing it, and putting new cases on, and we’re handling customer service issues.’” (For what it’s worth, I found only one copy of my heavy-metal Hanukkah CD on eBay. It’s going for $8.98, being sold by a user called estocks_usa. Decluttr won’t confirm whether this is the same CD they bought from me for one third the price. Either way: Good luck with that, estocks_usa.)

So, what will happen to all those languishing copies of Jagged Little Pill? In a few months, Decluttr will have a solution: It’s launching a wholesaling business, where it’ll sell used CDs in bulk to places like Dollar Tree and mom-and-pop shops. The margin is lower, but at least Decluttr can offload the junkiest of the junk. This already happens in the U.K., where a discount chain might, say, request a random mix of 200 CDs at a time. If the store prefers, Decluttr will even shrink-wrap its selections so that they look new. Decluttr is also seeking out new relationships with retailers overseas, particularly in parts of the world where physical CDs are more popular.

Lauter is confident that the market for spinning plastic discs will be around for some time. A quarter of Decluttr users, he says, aren’t selling because they don’t want the albums anymore; they’re doing so to make room for more, newer CDs. Still, the numbers don’t look good: CD sales dropped 14.5% between 2012 and 2013, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Perhaps that’s why Decluttr is also expanding past media. Its U.K. version is already buying people’s electronics and used designer clothing; it washes or patches them up, then sells them the same way it hawks music. Lauter expects to do the same by 2015. “When we build up our clothing business, maybe in a year or so, I might see if there a great boutique space in SoHo or something [for Decluttr to sell clothes],” he says. “We get great products--literally, True Religion jeans that cost $300 and maybe someone’s worn two times, and we refurbish them and sell them for $50 dollars. That’s a great deal for somebody.”

Maybe Alanis Morissette has some old jeans she’d like to sell.

Read More

Sunday, March 30, 2014

What's The Best Way To Execute Someone?

German General Anton Dostler is tied to a stake before his execution by a firing squad in the Aversa stockade, Italy, December 1945.
German Gen. Anton Dostler is tied to a stake before his execution by a firing squad in Italy in December 1945. Is it time to bring back this method of capital punishment?

Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration/Colourized by Mads Madsen

Dennis McGuire clearly knew something was wrong. At 10:34 a.m. on Jan. 16, as a crowd at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility looked on, the convicted murderer began gasping for air. Then McGuire began to make snorting and choking sounds. For the next 10 minutes, as a combination of midazolam (a relaxant similar to Valium) and hydromorphone (an analgesic related to morphine) coursed through his veins, McGuire’s chest and stomach heaved as the oxygen in his blood dwindled. Death was approaching, but slowly.

Watching a man gradually suffocate may have come as a surprise to some people in the gallery, but it didn’t surprise David Waisel, an associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, who had predicted this would happen. Ten days earlier Waisel had presented U.S. district court judge Gregory Frost with a nine-page declaration explaining that the state of Ohio planned to use an improper dose of midazolamâ€"a short-acting benzodiazepine that’s often used to induce sedation and amnesia before a medical procedureâ€"to kill McGuire. “In light of the insufficient dose of midazolam,” Waisel wrote, “it is substantially likely that McGuire will be aware of this agony and horror.” Based on his expertise, he felt there was a “substantial, palpable, objectively intolerable risk of experiencing the agony and horrifying sensation of unrelenting air hunger” during the execution, suggesting that “McGuire will remain awake and actively conscious for up to five minutes, during which he will increasingly experience air hunger as the drugs suppress his ability to breathe.” It turns out Waisel may have undershot things; Dennis McGuire took nearly 30 minutes to die.

When I spoke with Waisel about his testimony, he explained that he had used a standard, simple set of criteria called STOP-Bang to determine that McGuire’s airway would likely become obstructed shortly after the medications were administered, causing him to slowly suffocate. He would die, certainly, but not in the manner intended. Medications do different things at different doses, and the amount of midazolam that McGuire received caused his throat to partially close, as though his body was slowly strangling itself from the inside, rather than causing him to drift off to sleep.

In a matter of minutes, it turns out, a physician with even minimal information (gender, neck size, blood pressure) can determine whether an inmate sentenced to death is likely to suffer. The problem, of course, is that the state is not compelled to listen to the physician. The other issue is that the American Medical Association’s code of ethics bars members from participating in executions. This creates a troubling paradox: The people most knowledgeable about the process of lethal injectionâ€"doctors, particularly anesthesiologistsâ€"are often reluctant or unable to impart their insights and skills.

Indeed, most of the anesthesiologists I spoke with declined to comment on the record about lethal injection. One professor of anesthesiology wrote to me, “Obviously it’s a sensitive and complicated subject and I suspect you will find few anesthesiologists who will want to be interviewed about it, even those who support the death penalty. Naturally, our profession does not want to see an erosion of confidence in general anesthesia if there is a public association with capital punishment. Many of us could provide you with optimal technical details on how to more efficiently kill someone, but I don’t think we should be doing it at all, particularly given the flaws in the justice system.”

Without an expert in the room, states often rely on executioners who don’t really know what they’re doing. As one anesthesiologist told me, “the executioners are fundamentally incompetent. They have neither the technical skill nor the cognitive ability to do this properly.” Another added, “In medicine, the burden of proof is on the doctor to show that something is safe. We would never give a new drug to a patient until it’s been tested, approved by the FDA, etc. With the death penalty, the burden of proof has been inverted. These compounds, which are clearly causing patients to suffer, are deemed safe until proven otherwise. Yet the department of corrections prevents the release of information pertaining to how the lethal injection is carried out, making it impossible for a lawyer to make a strong case that this method is cruel and unusual.” Georgia is in fact working on a Lethal Injection Secrecy Act. 

As our understanding of cruelty continues to evolveâ€"let’s not forget that drawing and quartering was once an acceptable method of executionâ€"future generations may wonder why lethal injection was performed so poorly and carelessly, and with so little oversight. Part of the problem is the terminology: Words like injection and cocktail and gurney give the illusion that this form of capital punishment is civil. This allows, regrettably, for a softening of the perception of what is actually happening: Medications that were designed to heal have been repurposed to kill.  

And it’s not just the wrong dosesâ€"it’s the wrong drugs. A professor of anesthesiology at a large academic medical center said, “We have the drugs to do it in a way that doesn’t cause suffering. I read the doses they were using and thought, ‘That’s not enough! Who is coming up with this? Whoever did certainly doesn’t do this for a living.’ You need two components for lethal injection: amnesia and analgesia. This ensures the person is not aware and not in pain. Drugs like potassium chloride and pancuronium (a paralytic)â€"the drugs approved by the Supreme Courtâ€"are unnecessary. When they euthanize a dog, they don't use potassium or a paralytic. You don’t even need an anesthesiologist! Any physician could look up the proper dosing in a textbook.” 

While I was researching this piece and discussing with friends the nuances of optimizing lethal injection, a number of them stopped me midsentence and asked, “Who cares?” Should it be our concern that a monster may have experienced profound discomfort in his or her final minutes? Recounting precisely what happened to Dennis McGuireâ€"who was convicted of the 1989 rape and murder of 22-year-old Joy Stewart, who was about 30 weeks pregnant at the timeâ€"led some to express the hope that he did suffer. But regardless of your stance on the death penalty, the story of McGuire’s slow asphyxiation should lead you to wonder whether it violated our Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The Supreme Court has spoken. In the 2008 case Baze v. Rees, the court ruled that the cocktail used in Kentuckyâ€"sodium thiopental (an amnestic), pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and potassium chloride (designed to stop the heart)â€"was not in violation of the Eighth Amendment. So despite what you read about inmates sufferingâ€"Florida convict Angel Diaz took 34 agonizing minutes to die after executioners mistakenly inserted needles into his flesh instead of his veinsâ€"the United States considers lethal injection in its current form neither cruel nor unusual. But Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and an expert on lethal injections, recently told me that “the court’s ruling was based in part on the uniformity of drug combinations across the states.” But as the drugs have become less available, that’s no longer the case. “This is a very different world in 2014,” she said, “than it was in 2008.”

Many of the most effective drugsâ€"including propofol, which contributed to Michael Jackson’s deathâ€"are made at compounding pharmacies in Europe, and the manufacturers are threatening to cease exportation of their products to the United States if they are used for lethal injection, citing the European Union’s ban on the death penalty. This roadblock has led some states to halt executions to consider their options or to search for other ways to end their inmates’ lives. But not all are. Florida executed someone just last week.

Read More

Saturday, March 29, 2014

How The Marathon Bombing Manhunt Really Happened

Adapted from Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City’s Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice by Scott Helman and Jenna Russell, to be published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House company, on April 1. Copyright 2014, Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC.

DAWN BROKE FRIDAY on a still-life city. Streets empty. Businesses dark. Houses closed up. A transit system shut down. The clamorous night, with the frenzy over the suspected terrorists’ photos, the killing of MIT police officer Sean Collier, and then the gunfight in Watertown, had given way to a silent morning, eerie and frightening in its tranquillity. It was the last day of school vacation week. The weather looked promising. A perfect day to hit the playground, to ready a backyard garden for spring. Vacationing families were on their way home, their fridges empty, planning to pick up takeout for dinner. But this was not that kind of Friday.

At daybreak on April 19, 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his name now becoming known to the public, was still unaccounted for. His 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, had died just hours earlier, after a shootout with police. The strain of the four days since the Marathon bombing was weighing heavily. With conviction mounting that the crisis needed to end, authorities turned to a radical plan: locking Greater Boston down until Dzhokhar was in custody. They knew the idea would be controversial â€" a major American city going dark to smoke out a wayward 19-year-old. Who had ever considered such a thing? Could it even be done?

Continue reading below

Just two months earlier, with a massive blizzard enveloping Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick had ordered everyone but essential workers off the roads and shut down public transportation. The decision had its critics â€" “tyrannical,” some complained â€" but it had the desired effect: It kept accidents to a minimum and allowed a more rapid and effective cleanup. The gravity of the terror threat now seemed to justify something even more sweeping.

Patrick went before the TV cameras in Watertown that morning and delivered the unsettling message to residents of Boston, Watertown, Cambridge, Newton, Belmont, and Waltham, nearly 950,000 people in all: Stay inside, lock the door, and don’t open it for anyone but properly credentialed law enforcement officers. “There is a massive manhunt underway,” he said. “We’ve got every asset that we can possibly muster on the ground right now.”

Continue reading below

Nervous parents drew the blinds, trying to explain to their children why they couldn’t run out into the beckoning sunshine. Watertown prayed for its safety, watching columns of police in full SWAT gear canvass its streets. The same nagging thought crept into the minds of many: What if the bomber is hiding near my house?

***

POLICE DREW UP A MAP that included roughly 20 blocks around the spot where Dzhokhar had dumped a carjacked Mercedes. Using Google Maps, they divided the area into five sections. Tactical teams, each composed of as many as three dozen officers, then went to work scouring Watertown block by block.

They rooted through yards, sheds, barns, pickup trucks whose beds were loaded with debris. They looked under porches and in basements. They asked people whether anything seemed amiss on their properties. Often, residents sought out the scrutiny because they thought they had heard footsteps. “They were kind of begging us â€" ‘Check the attic, check the basement, check the car,’ ” said Mike Powell, a police officer and SWAT team member from Malden.

Watertown residents peer through windows during the tense April 19 lockdown.

David L. Ryan/Globe staff/file

Watertown residents peer through windows during the tense April 19 lockdown.

For police, the assignment was already stressful enough, but no one wanted to let anything slip by. “You would hate to be the team that goes in there and misses something,” Powell said. Police knew the risks and urgency of their work, but they also knew they had to approach each house with calm and sensitivity, a task complicated by their conspicuous weaponry and armored vehicles.

Throughout the day Friday, police raced around Watertown chasing reports of suspicious activities. There was the 911 call about a woman reportedly being held hostage inside her home by a man with a gun. The person seen running into a home on Oak Street. The man speaking Russian who had crossed a secure line. The kid in a sweat shirt walking through a backyard. The young man sitting on a porch with a laptop, which seemed possibly connected to another report that Dzhokhar was online threatening retaliation for his brother’s death. “At least a dozen [times] just inside the perimeter, and then at the same time in the command post, we’re hearing different stuff that didn’t turn out to be accurate,” said Watertown Police Chief Ed Deveau. “But you have to run it down.” Watertown would receive 566 calls to 911 on Friday. The day before, there had been 28.

Authorities directed the manhunt operation out of a makeshift command post set up near Watertown’s Arsenal Mall. Around midday, as Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino were preparing to brief the media again, there was a man in the street, not far from where the media had assembled, who said he had an explosive device and was going to blow himself up. Police had to move Patrick and Menino to the other side of some buildings while they checked it out; just another false alarm, in the end. “That,” Patrick said, “was the nature of the day.”

As the hours ticked by, nervous faces peered warily from windows of Watertown houses and apartments as people wrestled with whether to watch or retreat behind the curtains. They were frightened, but they were interested, too. Nothing like this had ever happened here, and it probably never would again. As the day wore on, many couldn’t resist stepping outside their homes, curious, dazed, and increasingly stir-crazy, just to take stock of it all. They watched in disbelief as convoys of armored trucks, State Police cruisers, ambulances, and fire engines from across New England roared up and down their streets, and they tried to read news in their speed and direction. They stiffened at the growl of low-flying helicopters. They leaned on one another for news and comfort. They gripped their smartphones like lifelines. Some turned to alcohol to calm their nerves. The whole day was like one big pregnant moment, and no one knew how it would end.

***

A SWAT team conducts a door-to-door search for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A SWAT team conducts a door-to-door search for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

THEY WERE STARVING when they arrived in Harvard Square around 2 p.m. Deval Patrick was with about a half-dozen state troopers in full-body gear. Nobody had eaten in hours. They pulled up to Charlie’s Kitchen, happy to find the place open. Patrick had to laugh at the irony of it: We know we’ve asked everyone to remain indoors and businesses to close, but, hey, can you make us some cheeseburgers? People in the restaurant applauded the troopers when they walked in. After the meal, Patrick returned to the State House. Exhausted, he lay down on a couch in his office, not bothering to even take off his shoes.

Less than an hour later, his cellphone rang. It was the White House. The president was on the line. Barack Obama, with whom Patrick had been close for years, asked him how he was doing, whether he had everything he needed. The president had been following the investigation closely. They talked about the possible threats that were still out there, what they knew of the intelligence. They discussed the latest development, which involved promising police searches in New Bedford; authorities had picked up a ping down there from one of Dzhokhar’s electronic devices. Then Patrick and Obama discussed the shelter-in-place request. Obama told Patrick what the governor already knew: that they’d have to lift the request soon, regardless of whether they had found the suspect. They couldn’t ask people to stay in lock-down forever. Patrick told the president they planned to wrap up the house-to-house searches by the evening, and then they’d tell the public to carefully resume their lives.

Patrick knew, by day’s end, that it was time to go back before the cameras. What he had wanted to say â€" what everyone hoped he would say â€" was that after hours of searching, police finally had their suspect in custody. But that was not in the script. Instead he had to deliver the truth: that authorities did not know where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was. The Red Sox and Bruins had called off their games. The Big Apple Circus was in town, but there were no clowns or elephants or trapeze acrobats. The city had more or less ground to a halt. And yet the dragnet had come up empty.

A helicopter hovers over the scene.

David L. Ryan/Globe Staff/file

A helicopter hovers over the scene.

Around 6 p.m., the governor stepped up to a bouquet of microphones at the Watertown command post, a blend of determination and disappointment evident on his and other leaders’ faces. Menino was by his side in a wheelchair, frustrated by how little they had to report but convinced that Dzhokhar was contained in Watertown and that the shelter order should not drag on any longer. “We can return to living our lives,” Patrick said, urging residents to use extra vigilance. Mass transit would reopen immediately.

It made for an odd and unsatisfying juxtaposition â€" residents were being told to resume their lives, but a man suspected of killing four people and maiming scores more could still be right there in their midst. Later, Patrick said he had come to understand that you could trust the public with information â€" that you could be upfront about what you did and did not know and that people would respect that. “I’m not saying there was unanimity in support for what we had to do,” he said. “I think people basically got that we were trying to do what was in their best interest.”

In the car on the way home, Patrick felt drained. And he felt uneasy. He called the house, where his wife, Diane, and his daughter Katherine had been looking after each other. They decided that, on his way back, he would pick up Thai food from a place in Quincy they liked called Pad Thai. They had found it on Yelp a while back. Diane and Katherine placed the order; Patrick didn’t have enough brainpower left to do it himself. Comfort food for an uncomfortable night.

***

ALL DAY LONG, David Henneberry had been looking through his window at the two fuzzy paint rollers lying on his lawn. They weren’t supposed to be there â€" they had fallen out from the tight cover on his boat. He was itching to put them back where they belonged, but he didn’t want to disobey the police. Already, officers driving up and down his street had spotted him on his back steps smoking a cigarette. They had waved, with a look that said OK, but that’s far enough.

The boat in Henneberry’s backyard, the Slipaway II, was 32 years old, but it was nearly impossible to tell. He had owned it for 11 years, and he had been working on it the whole time, restoring the cabin, installing a new teak floor. When winter threatened, Henneberry took pains to protect it from the weather. That was where the fuzzy white paint rollers came in. When the boat was sealed in protective white plastic, Henneberry liked to tuck 10 or so rollers under the bottom edge of the wrap, so it wouldn’t chafe against the boat and leave scratches. It was an extra, almost obsessive bit of care. Now two of the rollers were just lying there on the grass. As soon as he was allowed to venture that far, he would check it out.

Henneberry and his wife, Beth, watched the 6 p.m. press conference on the TV in their living room. They heard Patrick announce that “the stay-indoors request is lifted.” It was all Henneberry needed to hear. Well, they didn’t get him, he thought. He got away somehow, and now he’s in Boston, Worcester, wherever.

Beth was not convinced. I wonder what they’re not saying, she thought. I think they think he’s still here. “I’m going to check the boat,” said her husband, heading to the back door.

Henneberry crossed the small backyard to his garage. He grabbed his stepladder, carried it outside, leaned it up against the side of the boat, and climbed on. He rolled up a section of wrap that covered the boat, put a clamp on it to hold it up, and peered in through the sheet of clear plastic underneath. Sunset was an hour away â€" there was still plenty of light â€" and Henneberry could clearly see blood on the floor. He looked forward, toward the cabin, and saw more blood, under the seats. His eyes traveled back and forth between the sets of bloodstains, his mind working to make sense of what he saw. His gaze shifted, to the deeper interior â€" that’s when he spotted the body. The person had his back toward Henneberry, the hood of a sweat shirt pulled up over his head. The body remained perfectly still as Henneberry, stunned, backed silently down the ladder. Later, he would not remember stepping onto the ground.

A bomb-squad technician works the scene in the multiunit manhunt.

Lucas Jackson/Reuters

A bomb-squad technician works the scene in the multiunit manhunt.

He ran into the house. “I . . . there . . . He’s in the boat,” he managed to stammer. Beth grabbed the phone, dialed 911, and thrust it at him.

“This call is recorded,” the operator told him.

Henneberry recited his name and Franklin Street address. “There’s a body in my boat in the backyard,” he recalled saying.

“Sir, did you say there’s a body in your boat?”

“Yes, there’s someone in my boat,” Henneberry repeated. “And a lot of blood.” He stood at the kitchen sink, watching the boat out the window.

The operator told him that police were on the way. Then he asked whether the man was still in the boat.

“I think so,” Henneberry said. “But I can only see one side.”

Henneberry decided to go back out and check. Cordless phone to his ear, he walked down the porch steps and onto the grass. He moved closer to his 6-foot wooden fence, peering down the side of it to check behind the boat.

“He’s still in the boat,” he assured the operator.

“How do you know that?” the operator asked.

“I’m looking at the other side,” Henneberry said.

As the operator ordered him to get back in the house, Henneberry turned away from the boat. He was facing his driveway when police came running up it, weapons drawn, yelling: “Get back! Get down! Where is he?”

***

A 12-year-old watches a TV report to see what’s happening outside his Watertown apartment.

David L. Ryan/Globe Staff/file

A 12-year-old watches a TV report to see what’s happening outside his Watertown apartment.

AROUND 6:45 P.M., right after Henneberry’s 911 call, Boston Police Superintendent William Evans jumped in his car with two lieutenants, racing toward Franklin Street behind a Watertown cop. State troopers and other police officers quickly descended on the property, too. Evans positioned himself in front of Henneberry’s house, looking straight up the driveway at the boat. He saw the suspect poking at the tarp. Everyone at the scene began yelling. Police thought he might be trying to get a gun through. “We didn’t know what he had,” Evans said. “But given what he did at the scene of the Marathon, given what he did during the shootout, and given what he did to the MIT officer, we knew we were dealing with a serious terrorist here who had weapons to the max.”

Dzhokhar’s movements prompted someone to begin firing at the boat. Other officers immediately joined in, the shots ringing out through the quiet neighborhood. “Hold your fire!” Evans yelled. He believed they had the guy, that things were under control. And he wanted to take Dzhokhar alive. The bullets stopped. Evans didn’t need guns. What he needed were SWAT officers who could get the suspect out.

Rich Correale, Mike Powell, and Nick Cox had spent all day searching homes and properties in Watertown. The SWAT team officers from the city of Malden had just finished scouring an apartment complex. Then the supervisor got a call over the radio: A resident had seen blood on his boat. Police called for SWAT units. A Boston squad was heading to the house and asked the Malden team to join. The Malden guys heard “Shots fired!” over the radio and raced to the scene. With the shelter request now lifted, the streets leading to Franklin were lined with people â€" “like a parade,” Cox said. The Malden team dumped its van and ran the last quarter mile or so, in full SWAT gear.

Everyone’s attention turned to getting Dzhokhar out of the Slipaway II. Police were on edge, not knowing what his intentions were, what weapons he had, or how hurt he was. They tried tear gas, to flush him out, but he didn’t budge. Instead the gas drifted down the driveway, where the Malden team was set up. “We got smoked,” Correale said. “The whole place cleared out.”

Around this time, an FBI tactical unit arrived and took command of the scene behind a leader from the bureau’s Virginia-based Hostage Rescue Team (the FBI would later request the leader not be identified by name). The FBI unit was composed of 14 operatives, including three specialists in crisis negotiation. There were also two “breachers,” who had responsibility for preparing the scene for the operation; a K9 specialist, who coordinated all the responding K9 teams; three “assaulters,” who helped run the show on the ground; two communications specialists, one near the boat and another in a vehicle a few blocks away; and two snipers, who got up on a building and provided cover for everyone else. The team leader quickly won the trust and respect of local police, taking their guidance into account, keeping them informed on next steps, and leading with firmness and unexpected humility.

Hovering in a helicopter, State Police outfitted with thermal-imaging equipment reported that Dzhokhar looked as if he might be trying to start a fire in the boat; dozens of gallons of fuel could be on board. The FBI team leader calmly told everyone to back away. If the boat exploded, he said, the flash would come right down the driveway. “I know this is your party,” the leader told Correale. “But we’re going to want you to back up.”

The Malden SWAT officers were prepared for the worst. They’d been told that Dzhokhar had a weapon and had exchanged gunfire with police. Indeed, throughout the two-hour standoff, all kinds of reports were coming over the transom about Dzhokhar’s purported arsenal â€" that he had a rifle, that he was armed with an AK-47, that he wore a suicide vest. “I was under the impression these people had no regard for human life,” Powell said. “So I’m thinking this guy’s going to go out with the last hurrah, and he’s probably going to try to take as many out with him [as he can].”

At one point, around nightfall, Correale’s cellphone had rung. It was his wife.

“Hey,” she said, “you know they have him in a boat?”

“Yep, I know,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the driveway.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me! You said you were just watching sidewalks!”

The FBI breachers launched at least four or five diversionary devices into the boat, which produced loud, bright explosions meant to stun and disorient Dzhokhar. The idea was to buy police and federal agents time to move in safely. State troopers had also positioned a BearCat â€" an armored military-style vehicle with chunky tires â€" in Henneberry’s backyard. They tried to tip the boat over using the BearCat, but the trailer made that difficult. They punctured the tarp instead. As the standstill continued, the FBI team leader came over to where Correale’s team had assembled alongside a group of SWAT officers from the MBTA Transit Police and officers from a regional unit called North Metro SWAT. If Dzhokhar wouldn’t leave the boat of his own accord, there remained one option for taking him alive: They’d have to go get him.

The FBI leader put his hand on Correale’s shoulder. “We need to move fast,” he said. “Get your team. Get a plan together.”

***

THE CALL CAME while Patrick was waiting to pay for his takeout order at the Thai restaurant. On the phone was Tim Alben, the State Police colonel. Alben told the governor the news: “We think we have the suspect.”

Patrick called his wife and told her he couldn’t come home. They arranged a quick transfer of the food on his way back north. Diane pulled up outside St. Agatha Parish, in their hometown of Milton, and the governor’s car did, too. Patrick hopped out, handed over the takeout, and gave his wife a kiss. “Be careful,” she said, and he was gone. They raced downtown, picked up Patrick’s chief of staff, and booked it to Watertown, blue lights flashing.

The principals gathered in a trailer at the Watertown command post â€" Patrick, Alben, Rick DesLauriers of the FBI, and other top officials, including an FBI tactical supervisor who, with chewing tobacco in his mouth and a Gatorade bottle as a spit cup, kept in constant communication with the leader of the Hostage Rescue Team at the boat. A flat-screen on the wall showed the live feed from a thermal-imaging camera on the State Police helicopter above Henneberry’s property.

For a time, Dzhokhar appeared to be still. They didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. The color of the image on the screen seemed to be fading. Then everyone stirred: He’s moving! He’s moving! Menino couldn’t get into the trailer because of a broken leg, so he sat in the front seat of his sport utility vehicle listening to the police radio, fervently hoping that this was really it. Let’s get this over with, he thought.

As the drama unfolded, the second-guessing began: How had the teams not found Dzhokhar’s hiding place? Was Henneberry’s house within the perimeter that police had spent the entire day searching? A clear answer would prove elusive in the days ahead, as different police officials provided different accounts. What was clear was that no one had searched Henneberry’s house â€" or his garage or his boat or his backyard â€" even though he lived just two-tenths of a mile from where Dzhokhar had ditched the Mercedes. One neighbor had his barn searched, but not his house. Another had her barn searched, but had to ask the officers to check the structure’s cellar.

The searches may have covered hundreds of homes and saturated whole blocks with SWAT officers, but the manhunt had hardly proved to be airtight. They had not, despite the promises, knocked on every door. And so it had been left to David Henneberry to discover Dzhokhar on his own. The chance encounter in a Watertown backyard could easily have ended with another victim.

***

Across the street from the Slipaway II, police have Tsarnaev hemmed in.

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Across the street from the Slipaway II, police have Tsarnaev hemmed in.

GRABBING a kevlar ballistic shield from a federal agent, Rich Correale began to assemble a team to approach the boat. He, Powell, and Cox would lead, followed by the Transit Police officers and members of North Metro SWAT. Two FBI assaulters would provide cover. The SWAT unit lined up in Henneberry’s driveway, Correale in front with the shield, the others in a column behind him. The FBI leader returned and briefed them on what he knew. Negotiators were having some luck getting Dzhokhar to cooperate, in part by citing a public plea by his high school wrestling coach, Peter Payack, to give himself up. Dzhokhar had lifted up his shirt at one point to show that he wasn’t wearing a vest. Correale ran through their plan, how they would go at the boat, try to get Dzhokhar to surrender, and grab him if he didn’t. The FBI leader went down the line to each member of the SWAT team. Flashing a thumbs up, he asked them all: “You good with that?” The leader told them that if they didn’t like what they saw, they should pull back.

As they reached the boat, a couple of the SWAT officers fanned out from the line. They now had a clear view of Dzhokhar, whom negotiators had coaxed onto the side of the boat. “I’m saying: ‘Holy shit, this is the kid on TV. This is him,’ ” Correale said. The same mop of dark hair, the hoodie with blue and orange lettering, the college-boy look that seemed so incongruous with his alleged violent acts. Mike Trovato, a SWAT officer from the city of Revere, remembered his thoughts flashing to his wife and his daughter, who was just a few months old.

Dzhokhar, illuminated like a stage actor by lights police had trained on him, was draped along the edge of the boat’s port side, blood trickling down. His left leg hung over the side, and he was slumped over. He raised his shirt as SWAT officers approached, seeming to offer himself in surrender. But he kept rocking left to right, his right hand dipping out of view inside the boat. He seemed to be falling in and out of consciousness. He was a mess, a bullet round having left a wound on his head, his ear all ripped up, a gash on his neck.

“Show me your hands! Show me your hands!” Correale yelled at him.

“All right, all right,” Dzhokhar said back, his voice woozy, lethargic.

“Get off the boat,” Correale said. “Get off the boat.”

A thermal image of the suspect in the boat.

Massachusetts State Police via AP

A thermal image of the suspect in the boat.

“But it’s gonna hurt,” Dzhokhar replied. The side of the boat was maybe 7 feet off the ground. It wouldn’t be an easy fall.

This was the tensest moment for the SWAT team. They couldn’t see Dzhokhar’s right hand and right leg. They feared what he might be holding, what he might be reaching for. Maybe the groggy voice was a ruse. Maybe he was just pretending to be out of it. Maybe this was all part of the plot. As he began to bring up his right hand, Correale thought, Here it comes. Here it comes. Powell was thinking the same thing as he watched the hand slowly rise: Pay attention to his hand. Pay attention to his hand. Finally Dzhokhar’s hand came into sight. He had nothing. They kept telling him to get off the boat, but he didn’t. The time had come to pull him down.

In a flash, the SWAT officers and others reached up and flung Dzhokhar down. He landed on the ground, and not gently. The officers swarmed, immediately frisking him for explosives and weapons. They pulled up his shirt. They patted down his legs. Trovato put his knees on Dzhokhar’s arm and checked his hands for triggers or cellphones that could detonate a remote bomb. A transit cop snapped handcuffs on his wrists. Around 8:45 p.m., the radio crackled with the words everyone had been waiting for: “He’s in custody! He’s in custody!” A cheer went up in the command trailer back at the mall. Amid the police radio traffic, Menino’s voice cut in: “People of Boston are proud of you.”

In Henneberry’s yard, the officers’ priorities shifted to a new urgency: saving the life of a man suspected of killing and maiming so many. “It was a real possibility that he could die without medical aid,” Trovato said. “I very much wanted him to live.” Like many other cops, he wanted to see Dzhokhar stand trial.

Two medics from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives came running over and began working on him. Two Boston paramedics jumped in, too, and provided oxygen. Dzhokhar was in rough shape: fractured skull, multiple gunshot wounds, including one from a bullet that went through the left side of his face, and injuries to his mouth, pharynx, and middle ear. He was battered and bloody, but he was alive.

***

The suspect is searched for weapons.

Associated Press

The suspect is searched for weapons.

AT 8:45 P.M., the Boston Police Department tweeted the three words the city badly wanted to hear: “Suspect in custody.” Within minutes, Anderson Cooper and Diane Sawyer were repeating it on CNN and ABC. Greater Boston erupted in euphoria. All the pressure that had been building since the bombing, all that anxiety and uncertainty, evaporated. Revelers streamed into the streets near Fenway Park. They flooded Boston Common. They ran out onto the sidewalks. They waved American flags and shouted teary thank yous to police. They belted out “God Bless America.” In Watertown, they cheered as Dzhokhar’s ambulance sped toward Beth Israel Deaconess hospital. In the center of town, a crowd gathered outside the H&R Block and hollered attaboys at the cops, whose blue lights swirled in the darkness.

Correale, Powell, and Cox stayed at the scene for a few minutes, then started the unhurried walk back to their van. It didn’t take long before the gravity of it all began to sink in. That’s probably going to be a piece of history right there, Powell thought. “The drive back, we’re like we can’t believe we were involved in that,” Correale said. “What are the odds?”

At 10:05 p.m., Obama spoke at the White House. He promised a thorough examination of the Tsarnaev brothers’ backgrounds, possible motivations, and associates. He paid homage to the fallen. And he praised Boston’s spirit for carrying the city through one of the most trying weeks imaginable. “Whatever they thought they could ultimately achieve, they’ve already failed,” the president said of the terrorists. “They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated.” Back in his temporary quarters at the Parkman House on Beacon Hill, Menino cracked his bedroom window and heard the party on the Common. He felt proud of the city and happy as hell.

EMTs prepare to transport Tsarnaev to Beth Israel Deaconess.

CJ Gunther/EPA

EMTs prepare to transport Tsarnaev to Beth Israel Deaconess.

The sense of liberation Friday night was real, and in many ways deserved. Since 2:50 p.m. on Monday, Boston had been in terror’s grip. The sense of release could hardly have been more welcome. It was easy, though, for most of the celebrants to shout and to sing and to broadcast their civic pride in the “Boston Strong” T-shirts that were suddenly everywhere. It was easy to go to bed knowing that they could wake once again to a peaceful city, restored to its rightful sense of order. It was easy to look forward to the next morning’s Starbucks ritual, thankful that your son’s baseball game was back on.

But for all the wounded and the grieving families still reeling from Monday’s attack, there would be no such unburdening. There would be no luxury of exhalation. The week had ended for everyone else. Not for them. In many ways, it never would. As the brother of bombing victim Krystle Campbell put it: “I’m happy that nobody else is going to get hurt by these guys. But it’s not going to bring her back.” The only thing to do was to move forward, one day at a time, in hopes that tomorrow would be better than yesterday.

Scott Helman is a Globe Magazine staff writer and Jenna Russell is a Globe reporter. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Read More

Friday, March 28, 2014

The Inside Story Of How Facebook Got Oculus VR

A whole new world An early prototype for the Oculus Rift, which raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter
A whole new world An early prototype for the Oculus Rift, which raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter Courtesy of Oculus VR
Read More

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

A Field Report From Malaria’s Cradle Of Drug Resistance

Aurich Lawson

In the war against malaria, one small corner of the globe has repeatedly turned the tide, rendering our best weapons moot and medicine on the brink of defeat. Ed Yong reports from the remote border outpost where scientists are making a last stand.

The meandering Moei River marks the natural boundary between Thailand and Myanmar. Its muddy waters are at their fullest, but François Nosten still crosses them in just a minute aboard a narrow, wooden boat. In the dry season, he could wade across. As he steps onto the western riverbank in Myanmar, he passes no checkpoint and presents no passport.

The air is cool. After months of rain, the surrounding jungle pops with vivid lime and emerald hues. Nosten climbs a set of wooden slats that wind away from the bank, up a muddy slope. His pace, as ever, seems relaxed and out of kilter with his almost permanently grave expression and urgent purpose. Nosten, a rangy Frenchman with tousled brown hair and glasses, is one of the world’s leading experts on malaria. He is here to avert a looming disaster. At the top of the slope, he reaches a small village of simple wooden buildings with tin and thatch roofs. This is Hka Naw Tah, home to around 400 people and a testing ground for Nosten’s bold plan to completely stamp out malaria from this critical corner of the world.

Malaria is the work of the single-celled Plasmodium parasites, and Plasmodium falciparum chief among them. They spread between people through the bites of mosquitoes, invading first the liver, then the red blood cells. The first symptoms are generic and flu-like: fever, headache, sweats and chills, vomiting. At that point, the immune system usually curtails the infection. But if the parasites spread to the kidneys, lungs, and brain, things go downhill quickly. Organs start failing. Infected red blood cells clog the brain’s blood vessels, depriving it of oxygen and leading to seizures, unconsciousness, and death.

When Nosten first arrived in Southeast Asia almost 30 years ago, malaria was the biggest killer in the region. Artemisinin changed everything. Spectacularly fast and effective, the drug arrived on the scene in 1994, when options for treating malaria were running out. Since then, “cases have just gone down, down, down,” says Nosten. “I’ve never seen so few in the rainy seasonâ€"a few hundred this year compared to tens of thousands before.”

But he has no time for celebration. Artemisinin used to clear P. falciparum in a day; now, it can take several. The parasite has started to become resistant. The wonder drug is failing. It is the latest reprise of a decades-long theme: we attack malaria with a new drug, it mounts an evolutionary riposte.

Back in his office, Nosten pulls up a map showing the current whereabouts of the resistant parasites. Three colored bands highlight the borders between Cambodia and Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, and Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). Borders. Bold lines on maps, but invisible in reality. A river that can be crossed in a rickety boat is no barrier to a parasite that rides in the salivary glands of mosquitoes or the red blood cells of humans.

History tells us what happens next. Over the last century, almost every frontline antimalarial drugâ€"chloroquine, sulfadoxine, pyrimethamineâ€"has become obsolete because of defiant parasites that emerged from western Cambodia. From this cradle of resistance, the parasites gradually spread west to Africa, causing the deaths of millions. Malaria already kills around 660,000 people every year, and most of them are African kids. If artemisinin resistance reached that continent, it would be catastrophic, especially since there are no good replacement drugs on the immediate horizon.

Nosten thinks that without radical measures, resistance will spread to India and Bangladesh. Once that happens, it will be too late. Those countries are too big, too populous, too uneven in their health services to even dream about containing the resistant parasites. Once there, they will inevitably spread further. He thinks it will happen in three years, maybe four. “Look at the speed of change on this border. It’s exponential. It’s not going to take 10 or 15 years to reach Bangladesh. It’ll take just a few. We have to do something before it’s too late.”

Hundreds of scientists are developing innovative new ways of dealing with malaria, from potential vaccines to new drugs, genetically modified mosquitoes to lethal fungi. As Nosten sees it, none of these will be ready in time. The only way of stopping artemisinin resistance, he says, is to completely remove malaria from its cradle of resistance. “If you want to eliminate artemisinin resistance, you have to eliminate malaria,” says Nosten. Not control it, not contain it. Eliminate it.

That makes the Moei River more than a border between nations. It’s Stalingrad. It’s Thermopylae. It’s the last chance for halting the creeping obsolescence of our best remaining drug. What happens here will decide the fate of millions.

§

The world tried to eliminate malaria 60 years ago. Malaria was a global affliction back then, infecting hundreds of thousands of troops during World War II. This helped motivate a swell of postwar research. To fight the disease, in 1946 the US created what is now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the country’s premier public health institute. After a decisive national eradication program, the nation became malaria-free in 1951. Brazil had also controlled a burgeoning malaria epidemic with insecticides.

Meanwhile, new weapons had emerged. The long-lasting insecticide DDT was already being widely used and killed mosquitoes easily. A new drug called chloroquine did the same to Plasmodium. Armed with these tools and buoyed by earlier successes, the World Health Organization formally launched the Global Malaria Eradication Programme in 1955. DDT was sprayed in countless homes. Chloroquine was even added to table salt in some countries. It was as ambitious a public health initiative as has ever been attempted.

Enlarge / Many nations had stamps to build public support for a past global campaign against malaria. Pakistan's is one of the more violent ones.

Wellcome Library

It worked to a point. Malaria fell dramatically in Taiwan, Sri Lanka, India, the Caribbean, the Balkans, and parts of the South Pacific. But ultimately the problem was too big, the plan too ambitious. It barely made a dent in sub-Saharan Africa, where public health infrastructure was poor and malaria was most prevalent. And its twin pillars soon crumbled as P. falciparum evolved resistance to chloroquine, and mosquitoes evolved resistance to DDT. The disease bounced back across much of Asia and the western Pacific.

In 1969, the eradication program was finally abandoned. Despite several successes, its overall failure had a chilling impact on malaria research. Investments from richer (and now unaffected) countries dwindled, save for a spike of interest during the Vietnam War. The best minds in the field left for fresher challenges. Malaria, now a tropical disease of poor people, became unfashionable.

Read More

Monday, March 24, 2014

The Brutal Ageism Of Tech

“I have more botox in me than any ten people,” Dr. Seth Matarasso told me in an exam room this February.

He is a reality-show producer’s idea of a cosmetic surgeonâ€"his demeanor brash, his bone structure preposterous. Over the course of our hour-long conversation, he would periodically fire questions at me, apropos of nothing, in the manner of my young daughter. “What gym do you go to?” “What’s your back look like?” “Who did your nose?” In lieu of bidding me goodbye, he called out, “Love me, mean it,” as he walked away.

Twenty years ago, when Matarasso first opened shop in San Francisco, he found that he was mostly helping patients in late middle age: former homecoming queens, spouses who’d been cheated on, spouses looking to cheat. Today, his practice is far larger and more lucrative than he could have ever imagined. He sees clients across a range of ages. He says he’s the world’s second-biggest dispenser of Botox. But this growth has nothing to do with his endearingly nebbishy mien. It is, rather, the result of a cultural revolution that has taken place all around him in the Bay Area.

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Claraâ€"based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”

And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”

In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight monthsâ€"engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeonsâ€"I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s. And so it has fallen to Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.

Mike Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle

Seth Matarasso

Unsurprisingly, Matarasso has drawn several conclusions from this sociological experiment in miniature. First, the age at which people seek him out is droppingâ€"Matarasso routinely turns away tech workers in their twenties. A few months ago, a 26-year-old came in seeking hair transplants to ward off his looming baldness. “I told him I wouldn’t let him. His hair pattern isn’t even established,” Matarasso said. The techies also place a premium on subtlety. “They’re not walking into their office in front of thirteen-year-old co-workers looking swollen and deformed. They’d rather go slow, do it gradually,” he told me. This helps explain why Fridays are his busiest days for tech-industry patients: They can recover over the weekend and show up Monday morning looking like an ever-so-slightly more youthful version of themselves, as though they’d resorted to nothing more invasive than a Napa getaway.

And then there are the gender differences. As men have become a larger portion of his practice, Matarasso has noticed that they are both more sheepishâ€"“They’ll say, ‘I’m here to have a mole taken a look at. By the way, while I’m here, what do you think of this?’ ”â€"and more loyal. “They say, ‘Let’s just do it.’ They’re not going to shop around,” he explained.

Matarasso told me that, in ascending order of popularity, the male techies favor laser treatments to clear up broken blood vessels and skin splotches. Next is a treatment called ultherapyâ€"essentially an ultrasound that tightens the skin. “I’ve had it done of course. I was back at work the next day. There’s zero downtime.” But, as yet, there is no technology that trumps good old-fashioned toxins, the most common treatment for the men of tech. They will go in for a little Botox between the eyes and around the mouth. Like most overachievers, they are preoccupied with the jugular. “Men really like the neck,” Matarasso said, pointing out the spot in my own platysma muscle where he would inject some toxin to firm things up.

Showing up at Matarasso’s office may be an extreme measure for middle-aged workers crazed about their places in the tech sector. But, if so, it is only a matter of degree. One thirtysomething told me about a friend at Facebook who half-seriously claims to avoid sun exposure for fear of premature wrinkling. Robert Withers, a counselor who helps Silicon Valley workers over 40 with their job searches, told me he recommends that older applicants have a professional snap the photo they post on their LinkedIn page to ensure that it exudes energy and vigor, not fatigue. He also advises them to spend time in the parking lot of a company where they will be interviewing so they can scope out how people dress.

The darkness of this irony is not hard to see. In the one corner of the American economy defined by its relentless optimism, where the spirit of invention and reinvention reigns supreme, we now have a large and growing class of highly trained, objectively talented, surpassingly ambitious workers who are shunted to the margins, doomed to haunt corporate parking lots and medical waiting rooms, for reasons no one can rationally explain. The consequences are downright depressing.

 

Midway through my first encounter with Dan Scheinman, he warned me that he was weird. He wasn’t wrong. Once, while he was fielding a pitch from two entrepreneurs, I watched him tear apart a bagel with his teeth like a flesh-eating predator. Later, I noticed him absently fingering poppy seeds from a napkin into his mouth.

Though he had ascended to head of acquisitions at Cisco during his 18-year run there, he always felt as if his quirkiness kept him from rising higher. His ideas were unconventional. His rhetorical skills were far from slick. “I’m a crappy presenter,” he told me. “There are people in a room whose talent is to win the first minute. Mine is to win the thirtieth or the sixtieth.” Back in the early 2000s, he proposed that Cisco buy a software company called VMware. It did not go over well. “Cisco is a hardware company,” the suits informed him. Why mess around with software?

Not that this shook his confidence. Scheinman simply concluded that he would have better luck if he made investments without clearing them through a bureaucracy. VMware, after all, became a $50-billion success. And yet, when Scheinman left Cisco in 2011 to become a venture capitalist (V.C.), he attracted not the slightest bit of interest from the established firms on Sand Hill Road.

This, too, did not faze him. Most Silicon Valley investors, he came to believe, were just like the suits at Cisco: highly susceptible to “presentation bias” and, as a result, prone to shallow conventional thinking. “Paul Graham”â€"the founder of Y Combinator, the world’s best-known start-up incubatorâ€"“says the most successful [investor] makes his decisions in twenty-four hours,” Scheinman told me dismissively. It was time to set off on his own.

The only question was what to invest in. “I could see the reality was I had two choices,” Scheinman told me. “One, I could do what everyone else was doing, which is a losing strategy unless you have the most capital.” The alternative was to try to identify a niche that was somehow perceived as less desirable and was therefore less competitive. Finally, during a meeting with two bratty Zuckerberg wannabes, it hit him: Older entrepreneurs were “the mother of all undervalued opportunities.” Indeed, of all the ways that V.C.s could be misled, the allure of youth ranked highest. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32,” Graham told The New York Times in 2013. “After 32, they start to be a little skeptical.”

The economics of the V.C. industry help explain why. Investing in new companies is fantastically risky, and even the best V.C.s fail a large majority of the time. That makes it essential for the returns on successes to be enormous. Whereas a 500 percent return on a $2 million investment (or “5x,” as it’s known) would be considered remarkable in any other line of work, the investments that sustain a large V.C. fund are the “unicorns” and “super-unicorns” that return 100x or 1,000xâ€"the Googles and the Facebooks.

And this is where finance meets what might charitably be called sociology but is really just Silicon Valley mysticism. Finding themselves in the position of chasing 100x or 1,000x returns, V.C.s invariably tell themselves a story about youngsters. “One of the reasons they collectively prefer youth is because youth has the potential for the black swan,” one V.C. told me of his competitors. “It hasn’t been marked down to reality yet. If I was at Google for five years, what’s the chance I would be a black swan? A lot lower than if you never heard of me. That’s the collective mentality.”

Naturally, Scheinman decided to lurch in the opposite direction. He became an angel investor, meaning he typically provides the cash the founders tap once they’ve exhausted their family members and credit cards. If the angel’s bet is sound and the company continues to grow, it will frequently need an “A round” of funding from a V.C. later on, usually between $2 and $10 million. Scheinman’s hypothesis was that, with enough money to pay their bills for a year or two, the older entrepreneurs could rig up a product that was sufficiently impressive to overcome the V.C.s’ prejudice. He could force them to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they were staring at a billion-dollar business.

That was the theory, in any case. In late 2012, Scheinman’s wife, who has an MBA from Berkeley, began to worry about the large sums of money that would periodically vanish from their checking account with little explanation. “She’s like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ” So Scheinman did what any loving husband would: He made her a PowerPoint presentation. After monkeying around with it for the better part of a day, he sat her down at their kitchen island and walked her through his slides. There were precisely two, and the first, titled “strategy,” prompted questions. “Why doesn’t anyone else think this way?” she asked. “Why are you the only one?”

Her anxiety dissipated when Scheinman turned to slide two: “results.” He had invested in nine companies. Three had already raised millions of dollars, including a messaging company called Tango hatched by a former Israeli tank commander pushing 50. “I was told at the time by very famous, very important V.C.s that he had no chance,” Scheinman says. “ ‘The guy doesn’t look like he should be running companies,’ they said. To be honest, I think he’s good looking.” Today, Tango has more than 160 million users and has raised nearly $90 million in several installments from V.C.s. “OK, keep going,’” Scheinman’s wife told him.

The most impressive entrepreneur in Scheinman’s portfolio who hadn’t caught on was a fortysomething Boston-based engineer named Nick Stamos. In the early 2000s, Stamos had been the chief technology officer at one start-up that eventually hit a market value of $1 billion. He later co-founded another that earned tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Everyone Stamos had ever worked with raved about his technical chops, his relentless salesmanship, his flare for innovation. “The picture was remarkable,” Scheinman says.

A few months after he left the second company, Stamos started nCrypted Cloud, which promised to secure the insecurable: private information in cloud storage folders like Dropbox and Google Drive. Scheinman considered the breakthrough revolutionary. He rallied friends from Cisco and Microsoft, who collectively pitched in more than $1 million, and started talking Stamos up across the Valley. He figured it was only a matter of time before nCrypted Cloud made them both very, very rich. The only thing they were up against was 50 years of accumulated bias.

Boston Herald/Angela Rowlings

Nick Stamos

 

Computers weren’t always a symbol of forward thinking. Up until the 1960s, they were the chief accessory of the organization man. Social critics like Lewis Mumford wrote book-length denunciations of them as instruments by which faceless bureaucrats stamped out initiative and imposed conformity.

The truest representation of this was IBM’s headquarters in Armonk, New York, where men in starched white shirts swarmed around mastodon-sized mainframes, which they sold to corporate types whose interests ranged from accounting to human resources. Armonk thrived on discipline. The punch cards were never out of place. God help the engineer who wandered into one of the facility’s many roped-off areas.

It was all the way across the country, in Northern California, where computers finally became hip. A visitor to the research labs that set out to develop personal computers in the 1960s and ’70s would have noticed long-haired twentysomethings lounging barefoot in beanbag chairs, surrounded by a haze of illicit vapors. The young engineers hung posters denouncing Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war. In a departure from IBM protocol, they often brought their pets to work.

The two animating impulses of the local tech scene were a deep suspicion of authority and a belief that the young were agents of salvation. There was, for instance, the People’s Computer Company (PCC), which rented out a storefront in Menlo Park and made a terminal available to anyone who wanted to program or play games. As John Markoff writes in What the Dormouse Said, his book about the tech industry’s hippie roots, the proprietor of the PCC was a former engineer and sometime teacher who believed kids took to computers fearlessly while adults “had all kinds of hang-ups.” His organization’s motto was “Fail young.”

In 1975, a PCC alumnus decided the time had come for all the computer enthusiasts in the Bay Area to get together and trade ideas. The group, dubbed the Homebrew Computer Club, met in a garage and was fundamentally subversive. At each gathering, the Homebrewers exchanged not just tech-world gossip but pirated microchips and software. Age and status were meaningless. “It was not unusual to see a seventeen-year-old conversing as an equal with a prosperous, middle-aged veteran engineer,” writes Steven Levy in Hackers. One of the regular attendees was a young, shaggy-haired Steve Wozniak, who held court in the back of the room among a crew of worshipful teenagers. Wozniak used the Homebrew club to field test the Apple II he’d obsessively tinker with late into the night. Sometimes, he’d bring a high school friend named Steve, and they eventually built a company together.

Fast-forward to the present and it’s hard not to detect the PCC/Homebrew influence on the local patois. In 2011, famed V.C. Vinod Khosla told a conference that “people over forty-five basically die in terms of new ideas.” Michael Moritz, of Sequoia Capital, one of the most pedigreed firms in the tech world, once touted himself as “an incredibly enthusiastic fan of very talented twentysomethings starting companies.” His logic was simple: “They have great passion. They don’t have distractions like families and children and other things that get in the way.” But, of course, whereas the Homebrewers mostly wanted to unleash the power of computers from IBM and share it with the common man, the V.C.s want to harness youthful energy in the service of a trillion-dollar industry.

Whatever the case, the veneration of youth in Silicon Valley now seems way out of proportion to its usefulness. Take Dropbox, which an MIT alumnus named Drew Houston co-founded in 2007, after he got tired of losing access to his files whenever he forgot a thumb drive. Dropbox quickly caught on among users and began to vacuum up piles of venture capital. But the company has never quite outgrown its dorm-room vibe, even now that it houses hundreds of employees in an 85,000-square-foot space. Dropbox has a full-service jamming studio and observes a weekly ritual known as whiskey Fridays. Job candidates have complained about being interviewed in conference rooms with names like “The Break-up Room” and the “Bromance Chamber.” (A spokesman says the names were recently changed.)

Once a year, Houston, who still wears his chunky MIT class ring, presides over “Hack Week,” during which Dropbox headquarters turns into the world’s best-capitalized rumpus room. Employees ride around on skateboards and scooters, play with Legos at all hours, and generally tool around with whatever happens to interest them, other than work, which they are encouraged to set aside. “I’ve been up for about forty hours working on Dropbox Jeopardy,” one engineer told a documentarian who filmed a recent Hack Week. “It’s close to nearing insanity, but it feels worth it.”

It’s safe to say that the reigning sensibility at Dropbox has conquered more or less every corner of the tech world. The ping-pong playing can be ceaseless. The sexual mores are imported from collegeâ€"“They’ll say something like, ‘This has been such a long day. I have to go out and meet some girls, hook up tonight,’ ” says one fortysomething consultant to several start-ups. And the vernacular is steroidally bro-ish. Another engineer in his forties who recently worked at a crowdsourcing company would steel himself anytime he reviewed a colleague’s work. “In programming, you need a throw-away variable,” the engineer explained to me. “So you come up with something quick.” With his co-workers “it would always be ‘dong’ this, ‘dick’ that, ‘balls’ this.”

It can all add up to a wakeful nightmare for the lower-middle-aged. “We have a ping-pong table here,” says a mid-thirties co-founder of a well-funded start-up in New York. “A few of us want to burn it.” The refugee from the crowdsourcing company told me he knew he’d made a mistake the day he walked in the door. He bolted nine months later.

One Friday afternoon in October, I turned up in downtown San Francisco at an apartment that houses a social-media start-up with two twentysomething founders. The CEO was incredibly gracious, spending a few hours introducing me to the engineering team and patiently explaining the business. Around 7:30, one of the employees went out for pizza and everyone began trickling into the kitchen to wash it back with drinks. It seemed like a wholesome take on the usual Friday afternoon ritual. One of the founders had suffered through a weekly “whiskey and cigars” affair at a previous start-up and the company was determined to avoid a similar scene. “I like whiskey and cigars,” the CEO told me. “But what are you going to do with a bunch of dudes sitting around having whiskey and cigars?”

As the room loosened up, a programmer began sparring with a friend over Mitt Romney’s economic plan, rekindling an ongoing debate within the office. “If you’ve been born on third base, you should be taxed more,” he said. The boozy earnestness brought back fond memories, and I wondered if there was something to be said for making the office resemble a dorm room. At which point another long-running debate began to elbow Romney aside. This one was about the anatomy of “midget dildos.” One camp believed little people used regular-sized implements. The other insisted they had miniature versions. Both held their views with impressive conviction. Soon, a debater was illustrating with his hands, and I recalled what an older start-up founder with young colleagues had told me a few weeks earlier. “I really believe in private spaces,” he said. It suddenly seemed like deep wisdom.

 

Nick Stamos got the idea for nCrypted Cloud when a friend called him with a problem: All the executives at his company were using Dropbox to store their work documents so that they could access them whether they were at the office, at home, or on some runway in middle America. But the company’s I.T. department was panickedâ€"it didn’t think Dropbox was secure enough for sensitive files. Stamos decided it was a riddle he could crack.

He’d been solving similar problems for more than two decades. In 1990, he began working for Lotus, one of the early software-making giants, even before graduating from Tufts with two engineering degrees. One night as he was leaving, a supervisor asked if he knew any frat boys who could work the graveyard shift. The Lotus programmers would write code by day, then run tests on it at night. But the tests would inevitably stall out, and the supervisor wanted a college kid to reboot the computers whenever that happened.

“I said, ‘What if I can build you a box to do that, is that interesting?’ ” Stamos asked the supervisor. It was. Stamos trooped off to the engineering lab, and when he returned with a gangly blue box two weeks later, the supervisor was impressed. After a few days, he handed Stamos a check for $18,000 to go build another 60. “I lost my shirt,” Stamos told me. “But I delivered. Ten years later, someone told me they were still using them.”

When Netscape went public in 1995, achieving a valuation of $3 billion in a single day, it dawned on Stamos that his engineering skills might be worth substantially more than $18,000: “I was like, if they can do that, I can do it.” In the late ’90s, he signed up as the first employee at Phase Forward, which saved pharmaceutical companies millions by allowing them to tabulate the results of their clinical trials online. (Previously, the researchers would write down the results on seven-part carbon copy.) Stamos built an engineering team that grew to 100 people before the company went public. Then, in 2002, Stamos left to co-found another start-up, Verdasys, which protects an organization’s data against theft or leaks by insiders. General Electric, DuPont, and the Department of Justice all became customers. But while building a succession of start-ups has netted him a comfortable lifestyle, he has never quite pulled in what the kids call “fuck you money.”

Admittedly, start-up founder is not the first thing that comes to mind when you meet Stamos. He is not a hoodie-wearing geek or an adrenaline-addled brogrammer. At 44, he has the beefy, nondescript look of one of the lesser bar-stool-warmers on “Cheers.” When we connected in Boston’s financial district a few months ago, he led me through a maze of hallways before depositing me into a windowless, 12-by-18-foot room that I assumed was a waiting area but discovered is the office he shares with two colleagues. A Ping-Pong Palace it was not. Twenty minutes later he was back, carrying a white plastic takeout bag. He took me to the communal kitchen, where he opened a Styrofoam box to reveal a big, messy, Italian-looking concoction. He tore off the lid and placed it in front of me, then divided the dish in half.

Over lunch it became clear that Stamos is preoccupied with ageâ€"not so much his own, but with the way his industry fetishizes kids with little insight into the questions he considers worthy. At one point, he complained that “listening is a really hard skill for young folks.”

Stamos is fond of telling a story about sitting down with an engineer whom an acquaintance had referred to him for advice. “I meet with the kid and he’s twenty-one, twenty-two,” Stamos recalls. “He was smart. A Harvard computer-science major.” The kid said he’d already done two start-ups and was looking to try a third. His previous venture was a website where women could enter their medical information and find out which one of hundreds of birth-control pills suited them best, with the least amount of side effects. The website would arrive at the answers by trawling bulletin boards and chat rooms across the Web and learning from other people’s experiences.

“Really, you got this funded?” Stamos asked. Yes, said the kid. “But it obviously didn’t work out,” Stamos replied. Right, said the kid. At which point Stamos began to piece together what must’ve happened. “You collected the data and realized a lot of the data out there is horrible, and you couldn’t make sense of it,” he said. The kid allowed that this was true. “You probably talked to CVSâ€"everyone talks to CVS. And they thought it was the best thing since sliced cheese, but they were never willing to buy it.” Again the kid said yes. “Then you realized that anything you’re doing that has to be regulated, like making medical recommendations, requires FDA approval.” By now the kid was demanding to know how Stamos had guessed all of this. “You see these gray hairs?” he said. “It’s the classic model everyone goes through. I know it from Phase Forward.”

 

Just because overt age-discrimination is illegal doesn’t mean it never happens. In 2011, Google settled a multimillion-dollar claim brought by a computer scientist named Brian Reid, who had been fired when he was 54. Reid said colleagues and supervisors had frequently referred to him as “an old man” and “an old fuddy-duddy” whose ideas were “too old to matter.” They allegedly joked that his CD cases should be called LPs. A labor lawyer I spoke with told me he recently got a call from a thirtysomething supervisor at a start-up who said her job was at risk because the team she was managingâ€"most of them ten years youngerâ€"had rejected her on account of her age. “She was being referred to as a ‘den mother,’ ” says the lawyer. “If no one is following your lead, you’re not much of a supervisor.”

Still, ageism in Silicon Valley is usually more subtle: an extra burden of proof on the middle-aged to show they can hack it, on a scale very few workers of their vintage must deal with anywhere else. “People presume an older developer learned some trade skill five to ten years ago and has been coasting on it ever since,” says a 40-plus developer whose department consists mostly of 20-year-olds.

In 1999, a consultant named Freada Klein began a five-year “quality of work” study of 22 start-ups, whose employees she anonymously surveyed on a regular basis. Though Klein found that few of the companies copped to overt discrimination, many confessed to having elaborate points-based systems for evaluating job candidates, in which they deducted points for being married, having kids, and living in the suburbs. The older candidates were quite literally being held to a higher standard.

In other instances, middle-aged people had to show they weren’t schoolmarm-ish authority figures out to stifle fun and creativityâ€"parents, in other words. “A number of times, people said or wrote in survey comments something like, ‘We don’t want anybody’s parents in here,’ ” says Klein. “ ‘It’s too weird to have someone as old as my parents reporting to me.’ ” Many were referring to candidates in their forties.

Often the discrimination comes veiled in that vaguest of tech-world concepts: culture. One recent trend in Silicon Valley recruiting is for job candidates to interview with a programmer at their level or below after they’ve cleared every other bar in the hiring process. Ostensibly, the point is to make sure a candidate meshes with the whole team, a perfectly noble impulse. In practice, it’s frequently a tool for weeding out older applicants. 

Consider a fortysomething engineer who was recently up for a job at a company whose product he suspected I use daily. The engineer believes he aced all his technical interviews, then he Skyped with a young programmer he would be working with. “He basically tried to explain to me that it’s a college mentality. People bring their college buddies in. They run around the office, which is a big converted factory, running after each other with Nerf guns,” says the engineer. “He mentioned the word ‘culture’ several times.” The engineer quickly deduced that his chances were roughly nil. “I think that was him saying, not in so many words, ‘Dude, you’re too old for us.’ ”

In November, Stamos flew to Silicon Valley so he and Scheinman could meet with V.C.s. It was his second trip there in two months, and the first had gone well. A couple of V.C.s had already invested in some of Stamos’s competitors, but confessed that “your product is way better.” Even the high priests of the industry were impressed. “Sequoia was like, ‘Who the fuck are you? How did you pull this off?’ ” Scheinman told me.

This time there were ten stops on the itinerary, and Stamos hoped he would be flying home with a commitment for $5 to $10 million. But it quickly became clear that no one would be reaching for a checkbook. In some cases, he detected snobbery toward the Boston tech scene. In others, his previous successes barely registered.

Most annoyingly, many of the V.C.s kept dwelling on a metric called Total Addressable Market (TAM), essentially the amount of revenue you think is out there for your product. “That’s a really stupid question to ask,” Stamos griped. “OK, Dropbox, security. Who doesn’t need it? Did you notice the [Edward] Snowden thing? All the companies that have regulatory requirements [for protecting sensitive data]? That’s everybody.” To illustrate, he conservatively estimated that each of the world’s 2,000 biggest companies spent $2 million per year on this type of security, which would put the TAM at $4 billion. But, then, any idiot can go through this exercise and read into whatever assumptions he or she wants.

Reuters/Stephen Lam

Dan Scheinman

“When they indirectly ask stupid questions, that’s where I lean toward, Is there something about me they don’t find comfortable?” he said. “Age is a taboo thing. You can’t talk about it. The way they don’t talk about it is to come up with something else.” (Another founder whose company sells software to big businesses, but who received millions of dollars in V.C. funds, told me Stamos’s impression jibed with his own experience. When the V.C.s got caught up on the TAM, it was almost always about something else.) 

Of the ten V.C.s he met with in November, Stamos told me four seemed to be talking complete nonsense. In two of these meetings, the V.C.s were actively hostile. “They’d already made up their minds,” he said. “They were looking at their phones during the meeting. Not engaging, not looking me in the eye.” The other six expressed varying degrees of interest, but two seemed highly biased against Boston, insisting Stamos would have to move to California, which he said he was open to. Another two abruptly stopped returning his e-mails. “I think we’re left with two basically that we’re pursuing,” he told me.

Scheinman was also getting frustrated, though his view was a bit more nuanced. He has made a living off betting that older entrepreneurs can get fundedâ€"so long as they stamp out all the pretexts V.C.s use to say no. He worried Stamos had come up short. But he was convinced that Stamos’s age was the under-lying issue. “Substitute a twenty-eight-year-old ... and have Nick be the Cyrano to the twenty-eight-year-old, and we would have been funded at a crazy price. That much I believe,” he said.

 

No doubt there are valid reasons to prefer funding youngsters. If, for example, a company is in the market for teenage eyeballs, it probably makes sense to have a founder who’s not long from adolescence. Often these entrepreneurs turn out to be world-class programmers, having affixed themselves to a keyboard since long before puberty. “By the time they’re twenty-two, they’re already expert. They’ve put in the ten thousand hours,” says Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape in his early twenties and is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capitalists. “But it doesn’t happen in other fields. ... You can’t start designing bridges at age ten.”

Still, when you press Silicon Valley V.C.s on their tepid enthusiasm for older entrepreneurs, they tend to talk a lot about “disruption.” Everyone knows you change the world when you’re young and fearless, they say, and that you toil at the margins when you’re old and weary, too cynical to believe real change is possible.

But even if it’s true that the young are more innovative, it’s not entirely clear that we’d want to elevate them above the rest of us. For one thing, there’s something to be said for marginal improvements, which have worked out quite well in other countries. Ben Hammersley, a programmer and author who has advised the British government on creating a technology hub in London, points out that the incremental model largely explains Germany’s economic strength. “The majority of the German economy is light engineering. It’s family-owned businesses engaged in long-term planning,” he says. “ ‘We’re going to be around for another hundred years. What can we do to make a five percent improvement every year?’ ” By contrast, he says, economies that embrace the Silicon Valley model writ largeâ€"throwing massive amounts of money at highly speculative investmentsâ€"are suspiciously bubble-prone.

And then there is the question of what purpose our economic growth actually serves. The most common advice V.C.s give entrepreneurs is to solve a problem they encounter in their daily lives. Unfortunately, the problems the average 22-year-old male programmer has experienced are all about being an affluent single guy in Northern California. That’s how we’ve ended up with so many games (Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Crappy Bird) and all those apps for what one start-up founder described to me as cooler ways to hang out with friends on a Saturday night.

Or take a company called Outbox, which cooked up the idea of charging customers $4.99 a month to collect, scan, and deliver snail mail to their e-mail account, a proposition for which it raised $5 million in venture capital. “This company sends out humans in Priuses three days a week,” one fortysomething programmer groused to me last year. “It only works for people who come home at nine and go to work at ten and have everything else in life taken care of.” Which is to say, the most dynamic portion of the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy has taken it upon itself to replicate a service the U.S. government already performs quite ably. At least up until Outbox folded in January.

When taken to its logical extreme, a tech sector that discriminates in favor of the young might produce an economy with some revolutionary ways of keeping ourselves entertained and in touch at all hours of the day and night. But it would be an economy that shortchanged other essential sectors, like, say, biotech or health care.

Before his thirtieth birthday, Mark Goldenson had already founded two tech start-ups, including an online game-show-playing company, for which he collectively raised more than $20 million. Both promptly failed. Finally, at age 30, he founded a company that helps people locate and receive psychiatric counseling online. It was an idea with potentially enormous social value in a country where millions have unaddressed psychiatric needs, but he never had more trouble raising money. “Sometimes investors ... paint with a broad brush,” he told me. “You’re more likely to make a hundred million dollars in another social network than taking a look at a weird tele-health thing.”

Alas, as Goldenson’s experience suggests, the whole premise of youthful innovation isn’t even true. It turns out older people have historically been just as “disruptive” as younger people. A 2005 paper by Benjamin Jones of the National Bureau of Economic Research studied Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics over the past 100 years, as well as the inventors of revolutionary technologies. Jones found that people in their thirties contributed about 40 percent of the innovations, and those in their forties about 30 percent. People over 50 were responsible for 14 percent, the same share as the twentysomethings. Those under the age of 19 were responsible for exactly nothing. One study found that even over the last ten yearsâ€"the golden age of the prepubescent coder, the youth-obsessed V.C., and the consumer Internet appâ€"the average age of a founder who could claim paternity for a billion-dollar company was a rickety 34.

However much age and experience may grind down the rest of us, it is simply impossible to generalize to that tiny fraction of people so brilliant and driven as to be capable of creating the next Google. “You’re searching for patterns among outliers,” says one skeptical V.C. “The whole exercise on its face is logically absurd.” It is far more apt to think of these freakish specimen as though they fall out of the sky rather than emerge from any predictable feature of human behavior. By definition, they are different from us in almost every way. There’s no reason to believe they would age like us.

 

On a Sunday morning in late February, I joined Stamos and Scheinman for breakfast at the W in San Francisco. Stamos was in town for a kind of world’s fair for the digital-security industry, and his spirits were relatively high. Two private investors from Florida had each committed to a million-plus dollar infusion, as had a small Massachusetts V.C. firm called Long River Ventures. Stamos was poised to raise $3 to $4 million by the end of March. But Scheinman felt it was important to keep at the Silicon Valley V.C.s. He believed the tech sector was in the later stages of an enormous bubble and that Stamos would need more capital to survive the inevitable blow-up.

Despite the promised funding, Stamos was still upset by the V.C.s’ cold shoulder. He seemed preoccupied with some of his competitors, whom he believed had inferior products but had had little problem lining up financial backers. The one that drove him completely nuts was called Ionic Security. Based in Atlanta and founded by a twentysomething who was recently featured in a Forbes “30 under 30” list, the company had somehow raised nearly $40 million from V.C.s, including a $9.4 million round in 2013 led by the storied firm Kleiner Perkins, and another $25.5 million this year. Stamos considered the company amateurish, shuffling from one concept to the next without fleshing any of them out. “If you can convince a brand name V.C. to back you, they won’t let you die,” he groaned. “They will throw good money after bad.”

As the week went on, Stamos became ever more consumed with Ionic, constantly bringing up the company in conversations. It stood for everything he considered unholy about Silicon Valley’s youth fetish. One evening, while we were walking toward the convention floor, he spotted an Ionic executive across the room and said to a friend, “Forty million dollars raised and they still don’t have a product.” (Steve Abbott, Ionic’s CEO, says the company has a product that came out last year, as well as six to twelve paying customers.)

I had to see for myself what $40 million in venture capital buys you. When I showed up at the Ionic boothâ€"really more of a pavilionâ€"I noticed several attractive women gathered off to one side. A sales manager dressed in black invited me to take a seat in one of the tank-sized massage chairs the company had wheeled in, then handed me an iPad and a set of headphones with the Ionic logo.

The iPad played an eleven-minute video, and I began jotting down some notes as the chair worked me over. Suddenly, the sales manager came back toward me and asked that I stop. “We’re still in stealth mode,” he explained apologetically. I didn’t quite understand his urgency because the video was wholly unremarkable and larded with marketing-speak. The only interesting part came toward the end, when Ionic’s young founder catalogued the inscrutable features of his product. “We’d like to show it to you under NDA [non-disclosure agreement],” he said. “We hope you come take a look.” At that moment, I found myself in perfect agreement with Stamos: Here was the future as the V.C.s would have it, and it was contentless and tacky.

Nick Stamos has no kids, few hobbies, and even fewer extravagances. He works all the time and is consumed by his company every second he’s away from it. For as long as he can remember, all he ever wanted to do was to build a start-up that would go public and send the stock tickers into tiltâ€"the way Netscape did when he caught on to the start-up phenomenon back in 1995. He has already come close a few times. If Stamos can’t get Silicon Valley to give him the time of day, the problem isn’t him. It’s Silicon Valley.

On Wednesday morning, the second to last day of the conference, I met Stamos at the Starbucks in the lobby of his hotel. One of the V.C.s he’d met with at Sequoia back in the fall, a man named Aaref, had e-mailed him over the weekend asking if they could find a time to connect while he was in town. Stamos had invited me along, but when I showed up, I found him alone by the picked-over sugar and milk station. His voice had a slight edge and he was less keen on eye contact than usual. He told me Aaref had blown him off.

When the two finally met the following afternoon, Aaref bought Stamos a cup of coffee and gushed about nCrypted Cloud. “He was, ‘Rah rah rah, great, wonderful,’ ” Stamos told me. But Aaref never broached the possibility of funding. The encounter was just a professional courtesy, and after precisely 30 minutes, Aaref said, “I’m really sorry, my next meeting is here.” Stamos looked up and the person waiting for his seat was pimply and young.

Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic. Follow @noamscheiber

Read More
Powered By Blogger · Designed By Top Digg Stories