Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 31 The Tutelage

The other Javaheris didn’t welcome Max as unabashedly as Arianna. Those clothes! But the ionizing brilliance that surrounded him, the range of his scientific interests, his ability to paint visions of a better future through applied science, and his apparent joy at being with Arianna won them over eventually.

Her uncle Arsalan saw something else in Max, something generative. He saw Max as a source of ideas that could be harnessed to an industrial empire. Max’s distinctly American originality and impatience was lacking in French business, so having him on your team could give you a certain competitive advantage, if he controlled himself. Arsalan envisioned Max as Directeur Laboratoire, pumping out new products and processes that gave him, Arsalan, the winning formula. When it was clear that the boy was going to be his son-in-law, or his nephew-by-marriage, he began to take Max under his wing and introduce him to the world of business.

The two talked for hours, time after time, about nuances of petroleum refinement, and nuclear fuel cycles, and agribusiness. Arsalan dragged Max to meetings and showed him how decisions are made at the nexus of expertise and private relationships. One could trump the other at any moment, and you could never know in advance which would win. It was always better to stack the deck. Max would have almost unsurpassable credentials. Being from one of les grandes écoles would set him up for the best possible private relationships, too. But the degree would only set him up. He would have to exercise those relationships and develop the skills and the will to nurture a network, a social network. A young man for whom everyone was a con fini was not a good candidate for this. And then, again, there was the matter of his clothes.

In France, fashion is as important to everyday life—and that means business life too—as afternoon sex. He was, literally, unpresentable. Max didn’t have it in his genes. He must have had the repressor gene for fashion. Whatever Arianna taught him about the national sport, Arsalan tried to teach him about grooming and dress, but it was a no-go. Max simply wouldn’t cooperate. He hated the idea of conformance, even though his rigid non-conformance was a kind of conformance to his own standard that everyone sooner or later expected him to conform to. As for an explanation to lion-hearted Arsalan, all he could offer was “I would prefer not to,” a phrase that Arsalan thought befitting of a dumb brute, not the kind of man he would like his niece marry.

Son-in-law or not, Arsalan concluded after some time that Max was destined to be a business failure in France. Most definitely, he was not a big company guy. Maybe, and only maybe, he was a small company guy, an entrepreneur. But in France, that class of character n’existe pas. Entrepreneuring is a sucker’s game there. Between the vestiges of the guild system that keeps newcomers out and the financial burdens imposed on all companies, burdens that are crushing for the small ones—not to mention the missing infrastructure for funding new ventures—emerging companies face even longer odds than in the US. Therefore, being an entrepreneur is for outcasts, the socially inept, the unconnected, and the unambitious, much the same as being a government bureaucrat in America—a characterization common among financially successful people. So, if Max were to go that route, the startup route, he’d be going back to the US, and probably to Silicon Valley, where being a company founder or ceo confers the same social status once bequeathed a whaling captain in New Bedford.

Arsalan counseled him. “Paris is no Silicon Valley, son. Take your academic job, wherever it is. Stay close to people in industry so you understand what counts, but develop your ideas in your lab. Use it as a sandbox and make your inventions there. If you go to Boston, our friend Ali Javan at mit will show you how it’s done. I know investors and company builders who will help you get your ideas into the market. You can get rich doing this, very rich. You will have to learn where the levers are and who the machers are. It will take time. I know you can do it, but don’t give up your day job for any one of them.”

And this became Max’s template.