PSINet Adventures- "Why Don't We Just Take Him Out and Shoot Him?"

Thomas Conner • May 2, 2014

In the summer of 1999, PSINet was performing its due diligence prior to the acquisition of Telalink and it provided our first insight into one of PSINet's more colorful personalities - our soon-to-be new boss.

Some really fun and exciting things are happening at Sitemason these days. That all started right around the beginning of the year and I have been remiss in keeping up with my blog duties. My last post about the loss of my cat, Misty, most certainly deserves a follow-up since I have been adopted by a new cat, Mrs. Patmore. I’ll write about her soon but allow me to return to the Telalink story for now.


The summer of 1999 was a flurry of activity. The letter of Intent and term sheet that we received from PSINet required the scrutiny of Frank Woods, our broker, and Anne Arney, our attorney. Of course, that was just the beginning of the legal activity that we were about to encounter.

Despite the monumental task of document, proofing, and editing, and the long list of tasks that were required of us to enable PSINet staff and their appointees to exercise their “due diligence” of our accounting, operations, customer list, infrastructure, staffing, etc., the news was already getting better. Before we could even get to work on some of the finer details of the transaction, Bill Butler had already received a phone call from PSINet’s “Southeast Region President.”


Now, at this point in the story I must tell you that I have decided to not reveal this man’s name. I’ll just call him “Mr. Southeast Region President.” I will describe him, but I’ve decided that his name is no longer important. I feel like I have more creative license if I can paint a picture of this man’s personality rather than publish his name and you, the reader, may feel compelled to Google him. Of course, I did Google him. He still exists. It appears that he’s still a tech executive and who knows what he’s like now? I don’t and I don’t need to know. All I can do is share what it was like to be around him when we were bought…


Mr. Southeast Region President liked us and we liked him…initially. He was from Brooklyn and I don’t really know how else to describe him but that he looked, acted, and talked as if he had stepped right out of a mafia movie. Sort of a Michael Corleone look with a Tommy DeVito (think Joe Pesci in “Goodfellas”) attitude and mouth- dark, slicked-back hair, svelte, nicely styled clothes, always tan due to the fact that he moved to Tampa. He was the kind of guy who would smile at you with his perfectly white capped teeth, put his arm around you and, while he’s still smiling, say, “Don’t f**k with me. Understand?”


Back to the phone call with Bill. It must have been a hell of a call because, after Bill explained our business and told Mr. Southeast Region President all about us, he committed an additional million dollars more on the purchase price of the company and decided to travel to Nashville to meet us by week’s end. Bill, Tim, Bob, Scott and I arranged to host him for lunch at the San Antonio Taco Company (still one of my favorite spots) where he bought us all beers and fajitas.


Think about it. We were already willing to sign a letter of intent to sell out at $5.5 millions and this guy basically says, “I tell you what. How about we pay $6.5 million?” OF COURSE I liked him! 


His message was this: “We love your company. We love how you do things. We love your team. We love your customers. We love your image. We love everything about you. The good news is that when we buy you, you’ll just keep doing the same thing. Hell, you can even keep the Telalink name. That means more to Nashville than the 'PSINet' name. I’m thinking we’ll say ‘Telalink, Powered by PSINet.' What do you guys think?”

We were all sold on this guy. He was going to be the best person ever to be in charge of us after we sell. “Wow, he really gets us!” we all thought. “How could we ever go wrong working with this guy?” Except…


The thing was, we all sort of thought that just MAYBE we WOULD leave at some point. And, if so, what would we do? It was pretty clear that Bill was getting very restless and was really wanting to go out on his own. Tim and I were content to work together and we talked about what that looked like.


There was ONE thing that Tim and I wondered about. Would PSINet have any interest in all of our code- the scripts that we developed for our web hosting customers? Basically, that’s what he and Andrew Webber, among others, had spent much of their time on- building scripts that made website development and management tasks simpler- like a form builder and commerce, to name a few- radically sophisticated stuff that few people could do in those days. If so, then great. Those guys would just keep programming scripts for PSINet. If not, then maybe we could keep the code and start another business. And, if that’s the case, then maybe it would make sense for Andrew to leave right after the acquisition and he could work for our new start-up. There was much pondering in those days. “What does PSINet want? What do they need? Can we work for them? Will they keep us? What if things AREN’T perfect after the acquisition?”


At some point during the due diligence and negotiations phase, the picture got clearer- PSINet would eventually move all of the Sitemason hosting to their own servers and convert those accounts to their own product. They did not see much value in our scripts and would not have any problem with us keeping that code. For $100, we were allowed to transfer the intellectual property to a new entity as long as we permitted the Telalink customers to have an unrestricted, perpetual use license of our code. It was a deal. With the ease of that negotiation in mind, and anticipating that we would all soon have a lot of cash, Tim, Andrew and I decided that Andrew could be “let go” from PSINet shortly after the acquisition and he would be in charge of starting a business around our $100 asset. Tim, Andrew and I would be co-owners.


“This will be a win-win!” said Tim. “We can show the PSINet people how responsible we are by helping them determine who they don’t need anymore. They can keep what they really need to run the company and save money and maybe we can even be rewarded with higher salaries for ourselves for making Telalink what it needs to be to fit their model.” It made total sense to me and Andrew was eager to get along and start something new.


All we had to do was convince Mr. Southeast Region President. Tim and I requested a conference call. For whatever reason, we had to arrange the call some time late in the evening. It was probably around 8 pm. All we wanted to do was tell him that we were very excited about the deal as were all of our employees. Additionally, we wanted to recommend that we should offer a severance package to Andrew and let him go soon after the merger. If the hosting was going to be moved and ongoing code development was no longer part of the company strategy, we were sure that PSINet would agree that letting Andrew go would make perfect sense.


I did most of the talking, confident that this would be short and easy. “We simply won’t need Andrew. There may be others who may not be needed and we MAY need to pay others more to keep them. Tim and I have looked at staffing pretty closely and we will have some more recommendations but we just wanted to go ahead and get it on record that Andrew will need to be let go.”


Tim added, “Yeah, we’re basically eliminating his job if we don’t code the Telalink scripts anymore. It just makes sense. We want to do the right thing for PSINet but we figured it wouldn’t be a bad thing if we prepare Andrew for this now, rather than wait until later.”
 
There was silence on the other end.


“Soooooo, would it be okay if we go ahead and plan this?” I said. “We know he’s going to be fine with it. In fact, he’s expecting it. How do you guys handle severance packages?”


Continued silence. I cleared my throat. Tim was in his office and I was in mine so I couldn’t see his face but this wasn’t being greeted with the enthusiastic affirmation that I was expecting.


“Ummmmm, hello?” one of us said. “Are you still on the line?”


Remember, a thick Brooklyn accent. “Aaaahhhh I gotta tell you guys. I don’t think so. Aaaaahhhh I don’t want to kick anyone out before I get a chance to figure out what the “f**k’s going on, you know what I mean? I mean, who’s to say this guy’s not going to run out and start a competing business and take half my f*****k bookings with him, you know? Aaaaaahhhh, no, I need to look this f****r over first. I don’t trust him. What else do we need to talk about?”


“Oh, no-no-no-no-no!” I objected nervously, in a high-pitched, faster-paced voice. “Ha, ha, noooooooo, not Andrew. Of course not. He’s good and, and, and, and we totally trust him. We just won’t have any work for him after the acquisition.”


“Yeah,” said Tim. “This is the best of all worlds. We won’t have to pay him and we certainly won’t have to worry about him competing with us. He would never do that.”


“We can get it in writing,” I interjected. 


And then came the weird part.


“Hey, I got an idea….ahhhhhhh why don’t you just take him out back and shoot him?” said Mr. Southeast.


“Excuse me?” I said. By this time the “me” in “Excuse me” was probably a “high c” pitch.


“You heard me. Let’s just take Andrew out and SHOOT HIM If we don’t need him. Aaaaaaahhh, I gotta tell ya, Aaaaahhhh I don’t know what this is all about but there will be plenty of time to figure out who’s dead weight. But ahhhhhhh I don’t want anyone fired right now. I don’t want anyone taking the business out the back door. I’ll fire the f*****g dead weight when I know who’s f*****g dead weight. Anything else? Thanks fellas, for reaching out to me. Aaaaaaahhh I know you’re trying to do the right thing and trying to be a company player. Aaaaaahhh, I’ll talk to you soon. Good night.” Silence.


I ran into Tim’s office. “LET’S JUST SHOOT HIM???!!! What was that?”


Tim was laughing hysterically. “That guy’s a nut! He’s crazy! What is he trying to be, anyway? A real gangster? HA HA HA HA HA!”

“I think he really meant it,” I replied, with a half helping of paranoia and a half helping of sarcasm. “He wants us to kill Andrew! Maybe we’re being bought by a crime syndicate? What the hell have we gotten into?” I smirked. Truthfully, I wasn’t really wearing my conspiracy theory cap but it was funny to think about it.


“He’s a MORON!” said Tim. “A complete idiot! I’m pretty sure I’m not going to want to work for this jackass.”


“Now, Tim. we can’t just leave. We have employment contracts. We have non-competes. That was, for sure, a damn-weird conversation but let’s assume he was drunk or, at least, if he is a moron, that not everyone in the company is like Don Corleone, there.”


“Do what you want but I’m staying away from that fruitcake. I’ll do whatever I need to do to NOT interact with him.”


“I’m too intrigued,” I said. “Besides, we’ll have enough money that there’s no reason not to ride this for a while. We gotta stay and watch this show.”


“Oh, I’m staying. They’ll have to fire me if they want me gone. I just won’t do anything with Mr. Southeast Region President. I’m staying quiet and out of the way.”



It’s amazing how quickly things got strange. This was, most clearly, the beginning of the end. In a matter of a few weeks, we went from counting our millions in our heads and running Telalink in Shangra-la-esque fashion to wondering if our new boss was a mobster and was expecting us to “ice” Andrew. Just to be sure, we told Andrew to drive different routes to work in the future.


The Reluctant Shareholder and Other Tales Surrounding Telalink's Merger Agreement

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"The Radius Must Authenticate to the Sparc"

By Thomas Conner • May 20, 2013
My first day at Telalink Corporation, October 11, 1995, was fascinating. I had not been in the office for more than an hour when I received my first phone call. Actually, my desk, computer and phone were not actually set up yet so Mary Watkins, Bill’s mother, took the call. “It’s someone from the Winchester Police Department. Evidently, the neighbor whom you paid to clean out your basement and garage broke into your house and stole a window air conditioner,” said Mary. “The policeman wants to know if you want to press charges.” One of my neighbors was battling a drinking problem. When he was sober, he was a great guy. When he got drunk, he became somewhat mischievous. I gave a hundred dollar bill to another neighbor who agreed to be the escrow agent. If neighbor #1 (the beer lover) cleaned the basement (it was really a cellar. This was a century old house that had belonged to my grandmother) and hauled off all of the trash, neighbor #2 would transfer the $100 to him. Neighbor #1 performed to expectation. Neighbor #2 paid neighbor #1. Evidently, neighbor #1 then proceeded to liquor store #1 and perhaps liquor stores #2, #3 and #4 where he proceeded to convert the $100 into another form of liquid asset. He imbibed the rest of the day and found the courage to claim a small window air conditioner as a bonus. Neighbor #2 was able to watch neighbor #1 break into my house and find his way to a second floor bedroom before the commotion erupted during the air-conditionerctomy. “No need to press charges,” I said. “Tell him to put the AC back and stay out of my house. I’m about to rent it out and if he does something like that again, I’ll have to take a more punitive approach.” Sadly, my new renter proved to be a colorful enough character in her own right but I will save that for another day. Much was happening at Telalink in those days. Joel Moses was dedicating his weekly column in the Nashville Scene to all things Internet. He was giving Telalink plenty of good coverage and Channel 4 (WSMV) traded out commercial spots (“Internet! Twice the Speed! $35!”) in exchange for their own website and access. In fact, not long after the web came along, local news stories about porn on the web were gaining in popularity. It seemed like Tim, ordained by the Nashville media as the foremost authority on Internet porn, was always on the news, discussing the latest trends in the more salacious content on the ‘Net. Bill once commented that he knew that we were on to something when pornographers, gamblers and churches all wanted on the Internet. By this time in the story, Tommy was out, although he was still in. Still an equal shareholder with Tim and Bill, and still a resident of 110 30th Ave N, Tommy decided that this was no life for him and he opted to take a full time job with Vanderbilt. Not long after I arrived, we all agreed that the best arrangement was for me to simply buy him out. That would free him of any responsibilities as a principal and it would validate the importance of my position, not only as the financial officer, but hopefully as leader, negotiator, organizer, and strategist. For example: Issue #1: ITS Communications found out about Telalink and approached Bill about reselling Telalink service as its own service in the Nashville market. Telalink would get paid $10/month per customer. ITS would sell and support the service. While this sounded like an easy deal, ITS sold the hell out of the service and, if I am not mistaken, they sold it unlimited internet access, a still-new concept. Telalink customers were only allowed 30 hours a month but that was soon doubled to keep up with the competition. You see, unless we had an available phone number for every customer to be able to dial into our service at the same time, the first hapless soul to dial in when all of the lines were occupied would get a busy signal. Remember the early ads “no busies?” So, part of the challenge was to limit usage and kick people off after a certain amount of time online. We also gambled that not everyone would dial in at the same time. However, when ITS private-labeled Telalink service, the model was nearly blown up because they were selling accounts faster than we could add phone lines and ITS support was terrible. Back then, customers needed a lot of help, and some luck, to get online. Telalink had created an installer kit that got users set up and it included a free version of Netscape Navigator. ITS customers started to figure out that they were actually just dialing into Telalink and, because they could not get adequate assistance from ITS, they would just call us. Bill was not happy with the arrangement so I read the contract that they signed. It looked pretty simple to me. All we had to do what was give ITS 60 days notice of our intent to cancel. So, I wrote a letter to ITS, referenced the agreement, sent it overnight and added that we would only agree to renew at $35/month per customer. We got an instant response. They argued that this was the same price at which they were selling the service and this would kill their model. We agreed but showed no signs of letting up. If I recall, we were able to triple our ITS revenue for about 4 months while slowing down our phone line orders to a more reasonable level, not that Bellsouth was cooperating with our requests anyway (see paragraph 5 of http://www.thomasbconner.com/post/2013/02/28/whats-an-internet-again.582282). ITS decided to leave us and we were happy to dissolve our association. Suddenly, we had plenty of capacity to grow our customer base. Issue #2: As I recall, Bob was traveling back and forth to “Convent Place” quite a lot in my first few days at Telalink. Part of the reason was related to sheer brilliance. Telalink worked a deal with Charles, the owner, who had converted an old convent into an eclectic assortment of offices, yoga, banquet space, etc. The deal was that we would feed the entire building with a big pipeline of dedicated internet access and then break out lines to individual subscribers throughout the building. It would be a very cool amenity- one of the first “wired” buildings in Nashville...and Telalink’s margins would be very attractive. The not-so-brilliant part was the idea that we would move half of our personnel to Convent Place. Now, at the time, Telalink occupied two condos, conjoined by an enclosed upstairs landing. That’s a total of two kitchens, 4 bathrooms and total of 7 rooms (one was already our server room) that could be used for office space/work stations. Why would we need to split up our team and occupy space in another building? While it first appeared that we had no room, it was also true that Tim and Timmy still lived there. Bill moved out and his bedroom became our shared office along with Scott Holden, “aka Splotchy.” To learn more about Splotchy, go here . In addition, Vanderbilt friend, Dave Tempero (currently IS Business Manager for Network Systems at Nintendo), had his consulting business, Sector 3, operating out of one of the rooms. Finally, there was one more consulting company called Nvision, owned by Shawn Yeager, and I really never knew him or what his company did. He was sort of like Lazlo from Real Genius. Ever so often, I would see Shawn come and go with nothing more than a “Hey, how are you?” and then he would disappear. My point was that it seemed really important to me that we should try to work near one another (i.e. in the same office space), at least until I got a little more familiar with the basics- the who, what, where, when, why, and how of Telalink. In other words, it might be time for some other folks to move out so that we would have enough room for Telalink staff. No move to Convent Place. Issue #3: No insurance. None. On anything or anyone. All I can say is that the first insurance sales person who cold-called me was a lucky man. Until I could get a business commercial liability policy, workers compensation insurance and health insurance coverage for everyone, I went to bed dreaming of catastrophes, injuries and other unsavory workplace disasters that would render Telalink to the status of defendant or debtor. Issue #4: No staff meetings. What I remember were one-on-one conversations and debates between Bill and Robert Beckett, Bob and Robert, Bill and Bob, Splotchy and “the fat guy,” as he was occasionally called and almost everyone had some kind of crude comment to share with Tim in the event that Feisty (Tim’s cat) pooped on a cable or someone’s work area. Izzy, the other office cat, was generally well liked, as was Feisty, but Feisty was unbelievably artful in her fecal distributions throughout the office. I decreed that we would have weekly, face-to face meetings and, accordingly, would take notes. This proved to be a challenge. First, Bob spoke too fast. Secondly, it seemed like everyone spoke in code with letters: TCP/IP, HTML, ISDN, T1, T3, FTP, 56K, 28.8, Bitsurfr, blah, blah blah. At one point, in the midst of a spirited debate between Bill and someone, probably Bob or Robert, his passionate argument boiled down to one Shakespearean moment when he declared, “The Radius MUST authenticate to the Sparc!” He even used hand gestures. I had scribbled indecipherable comments throughout our first staff meeting but there was one thing that resonated, “The Radius must authenticate to the Sparc.” I thought to myself that if there is one thing that you take away from this meeting today, you will believe with all of your heart and all of your soul that the “Radius must authenticate to the Sparc.” The moment came for the scribe to report what was said earlier about something so I re-read my notes. “Bob said something about something that I did not understand. Bill disagreed. Robert disagreed with Bill but said Bob was wrong too....Let’s see, something, something, something and, oh, Bill says, ‘The Radius MUST authenticate to the Sparc.’ That’s really all I got.” Everyone laughed. It must have been funny. Don’t ask me why. Seventeen years later, I still don’t know what they were talking about. By the way, Robert Beckett is now Services Technical Leader for Cisco Systems. You can see him, still talking code, here.  Our meeting adjourned and we reconvened at either Harvey Washbanger's or Rio Bravo. I forget which but it HAD to be one or the other.

Interns Respond

By Thomas Conner • May 3, 2013
was really glad to get some feedback from the Telalink intern graduates following my last post . There were a few posts in response on my Facebook wall that I thought needed to be merged into my blog so that’s what I am doing today. Before I do, though, I was listening to a story on NPR about how women novelists in the US were being classified in Wikipedia ( http://n.pr/16eApbn ). I was only half listening when the word “Kaldari” rang out and I realized that Ryan Kaldari was being interviewed! Ryan was one of the original “unofficial” MLK interns who attended UC Berkeley before working for Sitemason for many years. He left us to work for Viacom and he now calls San Francisco and Wikipedia his home. One day, I’ll write about how, as a student, Ryan wrote a $2.00 counter check to Rio Bravo to pay for his soda but he either forgot to sign the check or wrote so illegibly that no one could figure out how to contact him, which was only necessary because the check bounced! The Rio Bravo team knew the Telalink crew well enough to venture a guess that the $2 mystery check writer was somehow associated with them. And now, let’s hear from some of Ryan’s colleagues from MLK. First, Paula Pfleiger Thrasher writes: “I think I mentioned in the other post, not quite the full story on how the internships started. Carl Tashian was the first MLK intern, but I think he may have even started before the first official school co-op internship thing for school. Carl can fill in details there. I didn't start until October-ish timeframe in 1995. I had originally lined up an internship downtown that fell through right as the school year started, then ended up instead working out at the McClures in Belle Meade in the receiving department doing data entry on bill of materials/invoices/etc. I did that for at least six weeks then my boss got arrested for tax fraud. Plus it was mind-numbingly dull. So I was looking for a new internship when Carl invited me to Telalink. I started working help desk, and there was a paid employee called Rich (I think - I forget his name? Anyone else remember?). He was kinda passive aggressive and a little jerky. At that time Bill (Butler)/Bob (Collie) were sick of answering customer calls so they put up with him. He eventually quit (got fired?) and at one point the entire help desk team was pretty much me and Bill's mom (Mary Watkins). Crazy. Then we hired Scott (Sears) and later Marc (Powell). I never wrote any real sexy or famous sites, but I did write that dang support website complete with filemaker database backend (I think? can't remember) along with a little homegrown ticket system. Didn't make Time magazine though - ha.” [editor’s note: I am not disclosing the name of the jerky guy but I can state that he was not fired. He left for another position with another company] Daniel Templeton writes: “I was at Sun until it became Oracle and about a year and a half longer. I'm now two Years at Cloudera, the leading Hadoop distro provider. I did indeed marry Cari, and she's now been at Google for six years.”  Finally, Carl Tashian shares this fantastic memoir: Starting around 1993-4 I had dialup Internet access via CTRVAX and later via PPP from Vanderbilt's CS department. I paid by the CPU hour or something. Which at first was expensive, but once I moved to PPP it was actually the wrong way to bill things, so I could be on all day and would barely pay anything in terms of CPU. And perhaps that is why, at some point, Vanderbilt limited access to the university community and shut down outside accounts like mine... But I was hooked to the Internet at that point. I was running a MUD and writing code for it, running a BBS w/UUCP that needed nightly Internet access, I was playing with the first generation of web browsers, I was a newsgroup junkie, and I couldn't imagine giving all that up. I think I got an AOL account for a minute, but that didn't work out--it wasn't close enough to the metal. So I found Telalink. It was exactly what I wanted, but too expensive for me. Something like $40 per month? Way out of my price range. So (and I honestly think this is the first time in my life that I'd ever done this) I cold-called Telalink and invited myself over. I came up the back stairs and climbed a ladder to the roof, where Bill and Bob were grilling up some food and working off of RoofNet, which was really just one ethernet cable snaked through an open window. Anyway, that first meeting was a little awkward, because I was a shy kid so new people were a challenge. But after chatting a bit we went downstairs and I remember Bob showing me around-- the Linux boxes, the Cisco routers, ISDN modems, etc. It was definitely a wonderland for me, and the fact that Telalink had a 256k link was a huge draw. I remember telling Ryan and Paula about it. Anyway, I'm not sure how it came up but I started spending more and more time at Telalink. This felt like it was way before the official internship, which would have been from Sept 1995 to June 1996, where I worked about 25 hours a week at Telalink. Tim, Bill, Bob really stayed out of our way as interns, gave us full access to everything and pretty much let us explore our curiosities as long as we didn't get in the way too much. I think in particular Bill is a great leader in that way--very trusting. And that's how the HTML guide came to be--just by being curious and having the time to follow it through. It felt a lot more like a real job during the Official Internship period. I think it was Ryan, Paula, and I. At some point, before we hired Kelly Setzer, it seemed like all of the web & DNS servers were my responsibility. Bill gave me a pager. I took it very seriously. I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes, and I remember, when Kelly came on board, realizing that he was a Real Sysadmin. I learned a ton from him. Telalink was a great learning environment across the board, life-changing for me. And I think things like the HTML guide got me into college, ultimately. Because I wasn't that psyched about school, didn't take it seriously, and didn't test well. I wanted to make things people would use. Still do. BTW the Telalink Virtual Tour website is still up ( http://tashian.com/virtela/ ). I it threw together by scanning some pics from an old book on telecommunications from the school library. It’s stories like these that remind us just what a frontier it was back then but, maybe even more importantly, what great relationships, vocations and contributions came out of this “internship” community. So much passion to learn and create. I hope that we can get some more stories from other Telalink graduates. I also wonder where and how these stories are happening now.
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