Makers Part 7

They brought him to Perry and Lester's place, which was three condos with the dividing walls knocked out in a complex that had long rust-streaks down its sides and rickety balconies that had been eaten away by salt air. There was a guardhouse at the front of the complex, but it was shuttered, abandoned, and graffiti tagged.

Tjan stepped out of the car and put his hands on his hips and considered the building. "It could use a coat of paint," he said. Suzanne looked closely at him -- he was so deadpan, it was hard to tell what was on his mind. But he slipped her a wink.

"Yeah," Perry said. "It could at that. On the bright side: s.p.a.cious, cheap and there's a pool. There's a lot of this down here since the housing market crashed. The condo a.s.sociation here dissolved about four years ago, so there's not really anyone who's in charge of all the common s.p.a.ces and stuff, just a few condo owners and speculators who own the apartments. Suckers, I'm thinking. Our rent has gone down twice this year, just for asking. I'm thinking we could probably get them to pay us to live here and just keep out the b.u.ms and stuff."

The living quarters were nearly indistinguishable from the workshop at the junkyard: strewn with cool devices in various stages of disa.s.sembly, detritus and art. The plates and dishes and gla.s.ses all had IHOP and Cracker Barrel logos on them. "From thrift shops," Lester explained. "Old people steal them when they get their earlybird specials, and then when they die their kids give them to Goodwill. Cheapest way to get a matched set around here."

Tjan circled the three adjoined cracker-box condos like a dog circling his basket. Finally, he picked an unoccupied master bedroom with moldy lace curtains and a motel-art painting of an abstract landscape over the headboard. He set his suitcase down on the faux-Chinoise chest of drawers and said, "Right, I'm done. Let's get to work."

They took him to the workshop next and his expression hardly changed as they showed him around, showed him their cabinets of wonders. When they were done, he let them walk him to the IHOP and he ordered the most austere thing on the menu, a peanut-b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwich that was technically on the kids' menu -- a kids' menu at a place where the grownups could order a plate of candy!

"So," Perry said. "So, Tjan, come on buddy, give it to me straight -- you hate it? Love it? Can't understand it?"

Tjan set down his sandwich. "You boys are very talented," he said. "They're very good inventions. There are lots of opportunities for synergy within Kodacell: marketing, logistics, even packing materials. There's a little aerogel startup in Oregon that Kodacell is underwriting that you could use for padding when you s.h.i.+p."

Perry and Lester looked at him expectantly. Suzanne broke the silence. "Tjan, did you have any artistic or design ideas about the things that these guys are making?"

Tjan took another bite of sandwich and sipped at his milk. "Well, you'll have to come up with a name for them, something that identifies them. Also, I think you should be careful with trademarked objects. Any time you need to bring in an IP lawyer, you're going to run into huge costs and time delays."

They waited again. "That's it?" Perry said. "Nothing about the designs themselves?"

"I'm the business-manager. That's editorial. I'm artistically autistic. Not my job to help you design things. It's my job to sell the things you design."

"Would it matter what it was we were making? Would you feel the same if it was toothbrushes or staplers?"

Tjan smiled. "If you were making staplers I wouldn't be here, because there's no profit in staplers. Too many compet.i.tors. Toothbrushes are a possibility, if you were making something really revolutionary. People buy about 1.6 toothbrushes a year, so there's lots of opportunity to come up with an innovative design that sells at a good profit over marginal cost for a couple seasons before it gets cloned or out-innovated. What you people are making has an edge because it's you making it, very bespoke and distinctive. I think it will take some time for the world to emerge an effective compet.i.tor to these goods, provided that you can build an initial marketplace ma.s.s-interest in them. There aren't enough people out there who know how to combine all the things you've combined here. The system makes it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you have a really innovative idea, which can't stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and re-invention too. You two fellows appear to be doing that. I don't know anything definitive about the aesthetic qualities of your gadgets, nor how useful they'll be, but I *do* understand their distinctiveness, so that's why I'm here."

It was longer than all the speeches he'd delivered since arriving, put together. Suzanne nodded and made some notes. Perry looked him up and down.

"You're, what, an ex-B-school prof from Cornell, right?"

"Yes, for a few years. And I ran a company for a while, doing import-export from emerging economy states in the former Soviet bloc."

"I see," Perry said. "So you're into what, a new company every 18 months or something?"

"Oh no," Tjan said, and he had a little twinkle in his eye and the tiniest hint of a smile. "Oh no. Every six months. A year at the outside. That's my deal. I'm the business guy with the short attention span."

"I see," Perry said. "Kettlewell didn't mention this."

At the junkyard, Tjan wandered around the Elmo-propelled Smart car and peered at its innards, watched the Elmos negotiate their balance and position with minute movements and acoustic signals. "I wouldn't worry about it if I were you," he said. "You guys aren't temperamentally suited to doing just one thing."

Lester laughed. "He's got you there, dude," he said, slapping Perry on the shoulder.

Suzanne got Tjan out for dinner that night. "My dad was in import-export and we travelled a lot, all over Asia and then the former Soviets. He sent me away when I was 16 to finish school in the States, and there was no question but that I would go to Stanford for business school."

"Nice to meet a fellow Californian," she said, and sipped her wine. They'd gone to one of the famed Miami deco restaurants and the fish in front of her was practically a sculpture, so thoroughly plated it was.

"Well, I'm as Californian as..."

"...as possible, under the circ.u.mstances," she said and laughed. "It's a Canadian joke, but it applies equally well to Californians. So you were in B-school when?"

"Ninety eight to 2001. Interesting times to be in the Valley. I read your column, you know."

She looked down at her plate. A lot of people had read the column back then. Women columnists were rare in tech, and she supposed she was good at it, too. "I hope I get remembered as more than the chronicler of the dot-com boom, though," she said.

"Oh, you will," he said. "You'll be remembered as the chronicler of this -- what Kettlewell and Perry and Lester are doing."

"What you're doing, too, right?"

"Oh, yes, what I'm doing too."

A robot rollerbladed past on the boardwalk, turning the occasional somersault. "I should have them build some of those," Tjan said, watching the crowd turn to regard it. It hopped onto and off of the curb, expertly steered around the wandering couples and the occasional homeless person. It had a banner it streamed out behind it: CAP'N JACKS PAINTBALL AND FANBOAT TOURS GET SHOT AND GET WET MIAMI KEY WEST LAUDERDALE.

"You think they can?"

"Sure," Tjan said. "Those two can build anything. That's the point: any moderately skilled pract.i.tioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his forge. That's where we're at. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today. It's a real return to fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a single set of objectives. That's new and it's what I plan on making hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much harder, too -- bigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the main show.

"We're going to create a new cla.s.s of artisans who can change careers every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadn't been imagined a year before."

"That's a pretty unstable market," Suzanne said, and ate some fish.

"That's a *functional* market. Here's what I think the point of a good market is. In a good market, you invent something and you charge all the market will bear for it. Someone else figures out how to do it cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer margin -- not the same thing, you know, in the first case someone is more efficient and in the second they're just less greedy or less ambitious. They do it and so you have to drop your prices to compete. Then someone comes along who's less greedy or more efficient than both of you and undercuts you again, and again, and again, until eventually you get down to a kind of firmament, a baseline that you can't go lower than, the cheapest you can produce a good and stay in business. That's why straightpins, machine screws and reams of paper all cost basically nothing, and make d.a.m.ned little profit for their manufacturers.

"So if you want to make a big profit, you've got to start over again, invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows up. The more this happens, the cheaper and better everything gets. It's how we got here, you see. It's what the system is *for*. We're approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with compet.i.tion and invention getting easier and easier -- it's producing a kind of superabundance that's amazing to watch. My kids just surf it, make themselves over every six months, learn a new interface, a new entertainment, you name it. Change-surfers..." He trailed off.

"You have kids?"

"In St Petersburg, with their mother."

She could tell by his tone that it had been the wrong question to ask. He was looking hangdog. "Well, it must be nice to be so much closer to them than you were in Ithaca."

"What? No, no. The St Petersburg in *Russia*."

"Oh," she said.

They concentrated on their food for a while.

"You know," he said, after they'd ordered coffee and desert, "it's all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, it's providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can't find room for -- that's superabundance."

"I have a locker in Milpitas," she said.

"There you go. It's a growth industry." He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, "My daughter, Lyenitchka, is four, and my son, Sasha, is one. I haven't lived with their mother in three years." He made a face. "Sasha's circ.u.mstances were complicated. They're good kids, though. It just couldn't work with their mother. She's Russian, and connected -- that's how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connections -- so after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But they're good kids."

"Do you see them?"

"We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?"

"Yeah."