More Awesome Than Money (31 page)

Mike had something else on his mind entirely: he wanted to check out the Occupy Oakland encampment, a sprout of the movement calling for economic justice that had started under the banner of Occupy Wall Street. Nearly from the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests in the fall of 2010, Ilya had been an avid follower, at least on his computer screen. He had a live stream of the protests running virtually all the time back in the Hive. When the movement spread across the country, the demonstrations and occupations became must-see spectacles for many people. It was not clear now, at the end of October, how much longer they would last, at least in Oakland and San Francisco.
Officials in San Francisco were giving signals, widely reported online and in the mainstream press, that police were preparing to raid and roust the San Francisco encampment on the Embarcadero that night. And the day before, the authorities in Oakland had used rubber bullets and batons to clear protesters. Word of the clashes hummed on the social media lines. Mike had been an occasional confidant and advocate of Ilya's for a year, ever since Ilya was wracked with doubts of his worthiness for the project. Ilya became a regular at Mike's occasional board game nights, a gathering of low-key, sociable geekery. A visit to the Occupy camp would, at least, be a change of venue for Ilya's tension. He agreed to go along.

They left the Pivotal offices on Market Street and grabbed the subway for the twenty-minute ride to downtown Oakland. At city hall, they headed to the Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, which the protesters had renamed Oscar Grant Plaza after an unarmed young man who had been shot and killed on a subway platform by a police officer.

When they got there, the protestors were heaving metal barricades, triumphantly dismantling corrals set up by the police. The scene was chaotic, and unnerved Ilya. He and Mike walked across the plaza to a Subway hero shop, bought sandwiches, and watched the events as they ate. Then a call went out for people to gather across the bay in San Francisco, on the Embarcadero. Mike planned to go.

They headed back across the bay to San Francisco on the BART. At the Embarcadero stop, as Mike prepared to get out, Ilya said, “I've got a ton of work.” He continued on his way to the Hive.

An e-mail was waiting for him when he got out of the subway.

From: Yosem Companys

Date: Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 8:09 PM

Subject: I quit

To: Daniel Vincent Grippi , Ilya Zhitomirskiy , Maxwell Salzberg

It pains me a lot to say this, as I love you guys, and I love Diaspora. I believe in the cause. But I'm going to get straight to the point: I quit.

After his phone call with Max, and then Dan's call saying that everything could be worked out, Yosem had spent the afternoon and evening coming to a view that he was stuck in a rerun of the last nine months. The precise pattern he and Dan had discussed at the beginning of October, of decisions made and then countermanded by Max, was made plain in the events of that day. He did not need to think about his decision any longer.

“We've done everything possible over the past few weeks, so Max wouldn't feel bad about the situation, even though he was the one who caused it by at best engaging in poor communication and at worst lying to everyone.

“For a week or two after the situation arose with Max, I mentioned to Dan that Diaspora had for the first time stopped being fun for me. It had been fun the whole time prior to that, but Max just made it impossible for everyone to continue having fun. And yet after the whole situation Max acted as though we had done something to offend him, when in any company under those circumstances he would have been fired, and no one would have cared one iota about his feelings.

“So I've come to the conclusion that there is only one solution: Either I go, or Max goes. Since I know you guys are friends and have known each other longer than you know me, I will just make it easy for you: I go.”

Later that night, the phone rang, first Dan, then Ilya, asking him to reconsider. Yosem said his terms were firm.

“I don't think Max has to leave completely, but he definitely has to be off the board. If Max agrees not to be involved in any decision-making function for the business, then I will come back. Otherwise, I won't.”

“Y
ou need to talk to Max,” Ilya said. “If you guys talk on the phone, you will be able to resolve this.”

In fact, the situation had become irreconcilable.

Max called Yosem the following day. Max had valued his counsel for more than a year. More than anyone else, the two of them had thought about getting Diaspora to a sustainable place. For the last month, he felt, Yosem simply was cutting him out.

“I'm sorry you're upset about this,” Max said.

As he saw it, the others were not remembering things correctly; they simply were inattentive to most aspects of the business, wanting to just code and code.

Yosem said that Ilya, Dan, and Rafi had all been consistent in their versions of what had happened. “Either these three people have really terrible memories, or they are just doing this on purpose because of some kind of conspiracy against you, or you're just not telling the truth,” Yosem said. “If you made a mistake, just admit it and say it.”

“I've already apologized,” Max said. “I've told you that I'm sorry for you being upset.”

They briefly discussed the hiring of Sarah, which Yosem had assumed the others knew about. Max said it had always been part of the plan, and that it was in the shared bank of documents that all of them had access to.

“Sarah is a core part of the team and she will come here,” Max said.

The conversation ended. Incensed, Yosem emended the “I quit” e-mail that he had sent the previous day. “Just to clarify my conditions,” he wrote. Not only was he insisting that Max not be a director: “Sarah is not coming on board, either.”

All around, the relationships were rubble. Dan felt himself being twisted. Initially incensed by what he saw as Max's presumption, he was now shocked by Yosem's assertiveness. He wanted Yosem to be the CEO, but now Max was insisting that Yosem was acting crazy.

Dan called Yosem again, said he would come to Palo Alto on Saturday, and that they would work it out. Nevertheless, Yosem started forwarding any important e-mail traffic, like press inquiries, to Dan and Peter, though he continued taking care of small bits of business, like people who wrote in requesting an invitation to the site, or had other minor administrative problems. He sent out a note to reporters on the press list, advising them that the project was going to have a beta launch on November 15.

He got another call from Dan on Friday, the twenty-eighth.

“Got some good news,” Dan said, telling him about the discovery of an error in an automated e-mail system. People hadn't stopped joining or started ignoring Diaspora; the e-mail program had accidentally stopped inviting them to join. They would not have a hard time hitting the 2 million mark by the end of 2011.

“That's great,” Yosem said.

“Yesterday, we had a really good meeting with Max, and we realized the product is going to do really well when we do the launch, and we're going to have no trouble raising financing after that. And actually we're kind of upset, because we feel that you've left us hanging out to dry. You quit two days ago and now everything is falling apart because you haven't been doing anything.”

“I have been working,” Yosem said. “I've been depressed and I've been waiting for you guys to resolve the situation, but I've been working and I've been doing stuff.”

Dan also pointed out that Yosem had most of the master passwords and account names for Diaspora's business functions. “We don't know any of that stuff,” Dan said.

“What are you talking about?” Yosem said. “Max is the one who
created all these accounts, and he gave me all that information. I haven't changed any of it.”

“Oh,” Dan said.

Yosem was flabbergasted. Having worked for more than a year without any compensation or promise of it, he did not feel there was any call for him to be blamed for neglecting the interests of the company. He stayed up all night, wrote a quasi-transition plan, and included a list of all the passwords and user names for the company. He cleaned out his in-box and forwarded everything to Dan and Peter. One interesting piece of e-mail that did not go to them was from an organizer of the Occupy Philadelphia movement. He wanted to know if it was possible to adapt Diaspora as a private network among the activists. Yosem forwarded that to Ilya.

At four on Saturday afternoon, he sent out a short announcement to the entire community, to which only a few weeks earlier he had been introduced as the CEO.

“Due to personal reasons, I've left Diaspora,” Yosem wrote. He gave Peter Schurman's e-mail address for inquiries.

—

On Monday, Halloween, as Yosem and I spoke about the trail of events, I could hear his e-mail alert bell ringing in the background. A message arrived from Dan, and it was addressed to the Diaspora grassroots group. The subject was “About Yosem and What's Next.” People had been inquiring about the departure of Yosem.

“We loved working with Yosem and he did really great work while he was here, especially his work with all of you. We're really sad that he's gone.

“His note raised questions, however, and with all the energy all of you give to Diaspora*, you more than deserve an explanation. So here's the deal.

“For a long time, we had discussed with him the possibility of him becoming not just an awesome advisor but the President of the Diaspora* Foundation. A couple of weeks ago, in discussions about what terms would go with that new role, we agreed to consider some things he had proposed. Nothing was formally agreed to or signed, but at that stage he announced to the community that he was President. Last week, it became
clear that we couldn't meet the terms that he was asking for. At that point, suddenly, he left.

“It came at a tough time for all of us, so close to our upcoming launch. The launch will be huge, and it's just around the corner, and there's a ton to do. It will be a challenge to pull off with Yosem gone, but we know we can do it with your help.”

As Yosem scrolled through Dan's e-mail, Emily came home from her shift as a hospital resident, and read over his shoulder.

He tried to figure out who had written the letter, saying that much of the language appeared to be the work of his friend Peter—apart from the direct and, he said, completely disingenuous description of what had gone on with him. Nevertheless, it had gone out in Dan's e-mail.

“I love Dan—Dan's my favorite guy,” Yosem said to me on the phone.

In the background, Emily chimed in: “Not anymore.”

“Dan was always my favorite among them,” Yosem said. “He was very honest when you would talk to him one-to-one.”

“Until today,” Emily said.

The day after we spoke, he sent a reply to the same list that Dan had addressed, saying he had not intended to make any further comment, but did want to post one last thought.

“I was pretty upset when I read their account, a little bit because what they wrote is a blatant lie, but mostly because their description makes me sound like some power-grabbing impulsive whack job, and I may be many things but I'm not greedy, I'm not power hungry, and I really don't think I'm an impulsive whack job.

“The truth of the matter is that I have worked for Diaspora* for the past year-and-a-half without ever receiving a single dollar in compensation. I wasn't doing it for the money—I was doing it solely because I believe in the idea, and it was fun for me for a very long time. And then, it wasn't fun any more. I learned relatively recently that the business was not being managed the way I thought it should have been.

“So I wrote to the board and said that either they needed to find new leadership—me or somebody else—or I wouldn't be able to continue to be involved. So they offered me the position of President and CEO (still unpaid, of course, since we don't have a lot of extra money), and I accepted. And I did write some messages referring to myself as President and CEO
because I had been told I was. And then I found out that, although the offer had been made, no legal changes had occurred to that effect. When I insisted that they change my legal status, the board told me they were reconsidering the offer and wanted to negotiate some more. So at that point, I put my foot down and said things either had to change immediately, or I was going to resign as President and CEO and leave Diaspora entirely. As you all know, they decided to let me go. And so I went.”

This would be his last message on the subject, Yosem promised.

“I will also try to remember what it felt like when I was 23-years-old and somebody criticized or ditched me, and my feelings got hurt. I'm sure I probably also reacted in a way that was less than impressive. And I'm sure 10 years from now when they are my age they will look back on their behavior and be a little bit embarrassed or ashamed of it all. But then again, isn't embarrassing yourself the entire point of your early 20s anyway? :)”

The message was sent out just before one-thirty
A.M
. on November 1.

A few minutes later, Ilya called Yosem, who didn't hear the phone ring. He only noticed the missed call a few days later. Neither of them tried again. What, after all, would be the point?

—

The departure of Yosem galvanized the remaining three members of the team. Peter was still working with them. Casey, who had tried to broker a peace, stayed on, wondering how they were going to pick up the slack. Dan's anger at Max had shifted, slightly, to Yosem: how could he walk on them at this moment? Dan, always rigorous about punctuality—he wanted a clean start to the day, and a clean end—insisted that they meet every day. He turned his cross-country running endurance skills to coding.

On the Sunday after Yosem quit, Dan tweeted:

is it sadistic of me to say that stress is the best driver for just about anything? #crazysunday #gogogo #keepcalmandcarryon

A moment later, he realized he was not talking about inflicting pain on others, and corrected himself, invoking Homer Simpson.

*Doh masochist

They huddled at the Pivotal tables in hoodies, pasty-faced, racing to meet their November 15 deadline. A big part of that was managing the community and marshaling it to welcome new users and help them find interests and interesting people. Ilya, who had jurisdiction over that part of the operation, was not keeping up with the flood of inquiries about the departure of Yosem and the anger of the devoted early users. It seemed to Max unlikely that they would make the beta release deadline, but the exercise was worth it.

Dan tweeted a picture of a glassy-eyed Max, elbows on the table, over his laptop; in the background, Ilya was gazing into his machine. He captioned it:

so many #nerdproblems right now

In the midst of their sprint, they got news that delighted them.

A Diaspora user in France, David Ammouial, posted a personal announcement.

“I'm a little embarrassed to announce that Diaspora has become a dating service, too. Yeah, don't laugh. Sometime ago, I started to follow somebody's posts (I won't disclose any name), then they started to follow mine as well, and we slowly got to know and appreciate each other's ideas and interests. Since Diaspora doesn't have a chat (yet), we began to chat via Jabber/GTalk and progressively became closer and like each other more. We finally met in real life recently . . . and are now in a relationship. I didn't think using Diaspora could lead to that.

Ilya spotted the post and commented:

OMG This is amazing!!!

Dan weighed in, too:

THIS IS AWESOME. #CONGRATS!

It was, Dan said, soulful news: people could meet one another on Diaspora; they could discover love there. What more was needed? Social networks fancied themselves a more evolved form of dating websites, which
were limited-purpose auction houses. A much broader spectrum of human connection was possible on the social web. But other networks were not set up for this kind of chance encounter between two strangers. On Diaspora, committees of existing members welcomed new users, almost concierges, precisely to help people feel not so isolated in a network that was so devoid of existing friends and acquaintances. That serendipity was part of their fund-raising pitch, and David Ammouial's happy news was a perfect example.

The next afternoon, Dan was using automated programs to see how Diaspora's code held up under simulated use. The load on his computer was immense. He tweeted:

using my macbook pro as a second heater by running #diaspora's test suite