The Last Network - Chapter 6
Debris Field
Rabbit had money, but he still had a reputation. No one wanted to leave their job and join his startup, not even his old lieutenants. It stung, but wasn’t surprising. He wasn’t the nicest guy, and being an asshole only works when you have leverage. Rabbit was selling a dream, but people thought it just as likely a nightmare. No one wanted to be the next Frank Meyers. Rejected by his colleagues, Rabbit decided to gain leverage with the only chip he had, money. He was going to buy a company and put them to work on Peared.
He spent the summer picking through the wreckage of the LA startup scene. The place was filthy with failure. He found it crammed tight in WeWork sweatshops, hanging on in Westside office spaces, and working out of Valley homes. After a few months, he could lean out the Jeep and catch the scent of rotting ambition on the wind.
He was a man on the hunt.
He had a few rules. First, no venture capitalists. VCs had put him out of business the first time. Control mattered. Whatever company he was buying, he was buying outright. He wasn’t trading equity. He wasn’t putting together a business plan and there’d be absolutely no power points.
Second, he needed a founder who had the good sense to know he wasn’t the alpha. Sure, he’d have to be a leader for his team, but Rabbit needed a person who realized that they had run their company into the ground. VCs were obsessed with geeky dropouts who coded before they had gotten laid. They’d give those shit stains plenty of second chances. Rabbit needed one who understood his genius ended at technology and didn’t want to get burnt by business again.
Third, there needed to be a strong team in place. He preferred one that had shipped something before bombing out. Something they could look at with pride and blame the cruel world for not recognizing their work. He wanted a confident group of losers, ones that were ready to get back in the game and just needed a surefire idea to rally behind.
It was a tall order, but he didn’t have a lot of options. A company in trouble could overlook a lot of past sins, especially when he was offering cash, upside, and most of all, a real vision. Rabbit was banking on that awestruck look people had after finishing his demo. His prototype opened doors, expanded horizons, blew minds.
In late August he finally found his quarry. Fox had bought a startup called ImmerCast as an experiment in virtual reality broadcasting. They built a streaming delivery network and prepared to do live sports in VR. After virtually no one watched their preseason NFL broadcast, Fox left them to rot on the vine. They’d been in stasis for almost a year and were seriously jaded.
After a week talking with their founder, Sonny Kumar, Rabbit was ready to pull the trigger. ImmerCast had been in the Fox budget to deliver a little over a million in revenue. In that unit, missing budget was a cardinal sin. All Rabbit had to offer was the missing money, and ImmerCast was his. It was a steal. He had a technical leader with serious chops, a tight team that was dying to get back to work, and an easy commute from Hancock Park to their Century City office.