Fake Genius (1)
There was nowhere quite like Silicon Valley when it came to the feverish creation of startups and the flow of investment money.
And where there was that much money, there were bound to be scams of every kind, along with companies that never earned a dime and survived only on the cash of their investors.
A medical startup called Therapis announced that it had developed a revolutionary new technology capable of testing for more than 250 diseases with a single drop of blood.
The media piled on with praise, calling it a revolution in medicine, and Korean outlets even ran it as a shining example of startup success.
That had a lot to do with the fact that the founder was a blonde beauty in her late twenties.
Most of Silicon Valley’s successful founders were men, and women were rare enough to count on one hand. Then, suddenly, a female entrepreneur with both looks and talent appeared like a comet out of nowhere.
She toured the press and the lecture circuit herself, pitching the kit and claiming she would bring it to market within a year.
Investors lined up one after another, eager to throw money at her, and Therapis pulled in billions of dollars until its valuation soared to $10 billion.
But the result?
Nothing like that ever came.
The kit Therapis claimed to have developed couldn’t diagnose 250 diseases at all; it could barely detect fifteen, and even that was no different from existing kits.
The so-called breakthrough technology had never existed in the first place.
Once the truth came out, Therapis’s valuation went from $10 billion to zero overnight, and the investors lost every cent they had put in.
If anyone had stopped to think for even a moment, they would have realized something was off.
From the very beginning, when Therapis first announced its miracle technology, experts in medicine and science had questioned how such a thing could even be possible, but no one bothered to listen to them.
Therapis refused to hold a public demonstration, and it gave investors no information whatsoever about the technology.
Even so, the media wrote its success story for her, and investors eagerly kept pouring money in.
If she hadn’t been a blonde female CEO, would anyone have paid that much attention in the first place?
In the end, everyone had simply been fooled by her pretty face and a plausible-sounding vision.
What made it even funnier was that even the blonde part was fake. Her natural hair was black; she had dyed it blonde.
A bubble never looks like a bubble until it bursts.
The reason I could talk about Rolf that way was because his true nature was later exposed through revelations and lawsuits.
David shook his head and said, “In fact, it’s common in the IT industry for companies to roll out similar services or copy each other. Lawsuits over that happen all the time. But to make a case, you need clear evidence.”
“That’s why I’m going to do a little digging.”
“How?”
I spoke as if I’d been waiting for the question.
“I’ve decided to meet one of Rolf’s old associates.”
Thanks to social media, this was an age when it was easy to contact even strangers.
As soon as I introduced myself as Continue Capital, he replied that he wanted to meet right away.
“I’ll go alone.”
The more successful a person became, the more friends and relatives they seemed to have.
At the same time, they also accumulated a great many jealous enemies.
When Rolf Buchi later achieved enormous success through Cooloud’s IPO, rumors and exposés about him began popping up everywhere.
What mattered was that among those exposés, there was also talk that Minerva had been copied from a program someone else made.
The person who said so was Ranjin Kumar.
He had been Rolf Buchi’s MIT computer science classmate, had worked with him in the early days of the startup Tinting, and had co-founded TalkIt with him before Rolf went on to create Cooloud.
I met him at a whiskey bar.
Knowing that he liked to drink, I had deliberately chosen the place for our meeting.
“Good to meet you. I’m Ranjin Kumar.”
“Han Miru. Thank you for meeting with me.”
He was in his late twenties.
As his name suggested, he was Indian-American.
Even though the United States was a multiethnic country, more than half the population was still white. But if you looked only at San Francisco and the surrounding Silicon Valley area, the picture changed.
The majority race here was Asian. And among Asians, the Chinese and Indian populations were overwhelmingly large.
In India, English was one of the main languages and engineering schools were highly developed, so countless Indians were active in the American IT industry.
Satya Shamalan, one of the three great CEOs of NS, was a prime example.
Kumar smiled and said, “I was curious who had called Alex Preston and Rolf Buchi idiots.”
“News travels fast.”
“That’s just how this industry is.”
Well, there had been no shortage of eyes on him that day.
That had been part of my aim, too. The enemy of my enemy is my friend; anyone who held a grudge against those two would naturally want to meet me.
I ordered a single malt.
“I’m paying, so drink whatever you like.”
It was expensive, but if I thought of it as the price of information, it didn’t feel wasteful at all.
Kumar didn’t hesitate and drank.
After a few glasses, his face relaxed, and he began talking freely about this and that.
There was something oddly addictive about the accent of Indian-Americans. It was the kind of thing that made you want to imitate it once just for fun.
“So why did you want to meet me?”
“I had a few questions about Rolf Buchi.”
Kumar’s expression sharpened with a hint of caution.
“What kind of questions?”
I lowered my voice.
“I did some background checking on the founders before deciding to invest in Cooloud.”
“Alex Preston and Rolf Buchi?”
“Yes. I believe the heart of a startup is its people. Our firm’s policy is to invest in the person before the capital or the technology.”
That wasn’t actually our policy, but I had just made it one.
“And?”
“Alex Preston didn’t seem to have any particular issues, but Rolf Buchi raised a few questions for me.”
“What sort of questions?”
“Whether he’s really a genius developer.”
Kumar’s expression changed slightly.
I pretended not to notice and kept going.
“I met several people who had worked with Rolf Buchi, and every single one of them said something strange. They said he wasn’t a genius at all, just a fraud who copied other people’s ideas and technology.”
“Who said that?”
“I can’t tell you that. I have to protect my sources.”
It was a lie. I hadn’t met anyone else.
But if he believed that other people had said the same thing and that I knew how to keep a confidence, wouldn’t he be more willing to talk?
Sure enough, he opened up.
“I first met Rolf at MIT. We were the same age, but he enrolled a year before I did. Even then, he was already famous. Men and women alike wanted to be close to him, and even the professors treated him differently.”
“That was around the time he founded Tinting, wasn’t it?”
Kumar nodded.
“When Rolf asked me to work with him, I was thrilled. It felt like I’d been acknowledged by a genius. What Rolf did was create the initial program. There were no similar apps at the time, so it caught on quickly. Updating and improving the service was almost entirely my job. I spent night after night tearing the thing apart and rebuilding it.”
“So what did Rolf do?”
“Mostly promotion and marketing. He also went around meeting investors. But people ended up thinking he’d done all the programming himself.”
In truth, there was no reason a founder had to build every line of code.
It was perfectly normal to only provide the idea and have someone else do the development. Or, conversely, to take someone else’s idea and do the development yourself, or just handle the finishing touches.
Either way, there was nothing inherently wrong with it.
But Rolf had gone one step further and bragged as if he had done everything himself. From a developer’s point of view, that wouldn’t have felt good at all.
“In any case, Tinting was a huge success. When the company was sold, Rolf walked away with $1.2 billion, and I made $150 million. I’m still grateful for that. If Rolf hadn’t brought me in back then, I’d probably have ended up living as a salaried worker.”
“I understand you kept working together after that.”
“Yes. It didn’t go very well, though.”
In Silicon Valley, hundreds, even thousands, of startups were born every single day, but fewer than one in a hundred ever succeeded.
Kumar nodded and continued, “We were planning to create a social network called TalkIt, one where people could communicate anonymously. Originally, I had intended to do it with someone else, but Rolf saw the program I’d made and suggested we become partners, so we joined forces. At first, it was fine. Since Rolf Buchi was the founder, the media promoted it on its own, and the user base kept growing. A lot of venture capital firms wanted to invest, too.”
“So why did it fail?”
“Because we couldn’t filter out the bad users. Being able to speak freely and anonymously was both a strength and a weakness. Even decent people can say things they never would in real life once they’re hidden behind anonymity.”
Cyberbullying had become commonplace. Anonymous drug deals and even prostitution were being arranged that way, too.
That didn’t mean the operators could sit there monitoring everything in real time and filtering it all out.
“Rolf insisted he’d improve the system so problematic posts could be monitored and blocked. But he never managed it.”
As the saying went, bad money drives out good. Once the toxic users multiplied, ordinary users gradually began to turn away from TalkIt.
They belatedly set up banned words and strengthened the filters, but that only ended up hurting legitimate users.
In the end, growth slowed and the user base began to shrink.
“Still, I thought there was potential. The real issues were being solved little by little. But when Rolf left to found Cooloud, things got much worse all at once. It wasn’t just that he left, either. He took one of our employees with him.”
“Sid Lucas?”
“That’s right. I didn’t realize it while he was there, but after he was gone, I understood just how big a role he’d been playing the whole time.”
Looking at it that way, Rolf really didn’t seem to lack an eye for genius.
Kumar said with a sneer, “Rolf always wanted to look like a successful businessman. He never cared about costs, so he set up his office in the most expensive place and poured absurd amounts of money into marketing. Investors saw that and happily handed over huge sums. Only now am I realizing it, but investors don’t look at skill — they look at reputation. It’s a bit rich coming from me, but half the founders in Silicon Valley are probably scammers.”
Most startups really did survive on investor money without making a profit. If they succeeded, they became businessmen; if they failed, they became scammers.
Everything he’d said so far was already known to me.
What I wanted to hear was something else, so I began tossing out bait.
“Was it really Rolf who developed Minerva?”
At that, Kumar’s expression changed.
Watching him, I thought to myself:
Why had he exposed Rolf Buchi?
Because he wanted everyone to know the truth? For justice?
Not a chance.
Just because Rolf Buchi was a bastard didn’t mean Ranjin Kumar was a good man for exposing him. He simply wanted to bring Rolf down.
It was easy to sit in the shadows and criticize someone else’s success while doing nothing yourself. It was even easier if the other person had truly done something wrong.