“What is wrong with you?! Seriously, that was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever sat through.”
Cameron was doing his best to keep his voice down as he ushered Charlie through a marble lobby and toward the revolving glass doors leading onto Lexington Avenue. Tyler was on the other side of Charlie, helping prop him up as they made their way out. Even with identical six-foot-five-inch bookends escorting him on either side, Charlie was barely vertical, staring at his feet as if they were part of someone else’s body, struggling to put one foot in front of the other as he worked his way toward the lobby exit.
The three of them hit the revolving door like a vaudeville act: Tyler through first, dragging Charlie into the same spinning wedge with him because there was a good chance that Charlie, if left on his own, would smash right through one of the panes of glass. Then Cameron, a wedge later, so consumed with his rising frustration that his breath was steaming up the glass in front of him.
Once they were outside, Tyler led Charlie a few feet down the sidewalk toward Fifty-Ninth Street, then released the kid to prop himself up against the building on his own accord; the office lobby had given way to an oversized Gap, its plate glass windows teeming with mannequins in baggy sweats.
“Charlie,” Cameron finally said as a passing group of suits moved far enough away that they hopefully couldn’t hear. “Did you even sleep last night?”
Charlie finally looked up from his shoes. His eyes were wide, but still as bloodshot as they’d been since he’d arrived for the meeting on the seventeenth floor less than thirty minutes ago. His shirt was open three buttons—three goddamn buttons!—revealing a tangle of chest hair and the mottled skin of someone who had obviously spent the previous night in a club. Or maybe two. Hat trick? There were stains on his blazer, he reeked of alcohol, and if he’d slept at all, it had probably been on a floor.
“You look like you’ve been on a five-day bender,” Tyler said.
“No, really, just a few drinks, some tequila … nothing to worry about.…” Charlie’s voice trailed off into a mumble.
Cameron tried again to control his emotions. He was usually the more empathetic one, but at that moment, he was having trouble feeling anything less than anger toward their boy wonder CEO. “Train wreck” would have been a grievous understatement to describe the meeting they’d just attended.
“Do you know how hard it was to set that up?” Tyler asked. “John is one of the most powerful people in Fintech.”
Fintech, a portmanteau of “Financial” and “Technology,” was the fastest-growing sector of venture investing in New York. It essentially included any new technology that had the potential to push the financial world forward, or make it more efficient, such as online banking, robo advisers, statistical consulting, quantitative investing, and of course, blockchain technology. And Tyler was right, John Abercrom, whose office they’d just fled like a circus troupe that had just murdered a member of their audience, and his VC firm, was one of the most influential names in the industry. John and his partners had built a portfolio of investments in over a hundred major companies, many of which were some of the most prominent in the world of Fintech.
Through connections and hard legwork, Cameron and his brother had scored a meeting, only to unleash Charlie Shrem—in all his bloodshot and alcohol-drenched glory—on these titans of the industry.
Before the meeting, from their email exchanges, it had seemed like John and his partners really understood Bitcoin and were genuinely interested in hearing Charlie’s pitch. But despite the warm audience, things had gone sideways from the moment Charlie had entered the room. Charlie had launched into his presentation like the Tasmanian devil. Swirling around in front of the whiteboard, he was literally all over the place. He’d been almost unintelligible, nonsensical. Speaking so fast, everyone in the room was getting whiplash. And all of it punctuated by jokes that fell completely flat; what might have landed in the wee hours of the morning at EVR hit like lead balloons in a boardroom on Lexington.
When the conversation had shifted to the specifics of BitInstant’s model, Charlie had suddenly, bizarrely become defensive. The more technical things had gotten about BitInstant’s operations, compliance, and financials, the more Charlie had shut the questioning down. It was as if he had no interest in talking about the nuts and bolts of his own company. He was too busy playing the CEO of Bitcoin to be the CEO of BitInstant. And before Cameron or Tyler knew it, the meeting was over.
“This can’t happen again,” Tyler said.
“Was it really that bad?” Charlie stammered.
“Worse. You weren’t just unprepared. You looked like you were on coke. Completely schizo.”
“Schizo? That’s a good one. I like it.”
“Charlie … I know you’ve got a lot of other responsibilities,” Cameron said.
Like the nightclub, the cocktail waitress, the globetrotting.
Cameron had talked to Tyler about this a dozen times already; lately, Charlie had been so swept up in the hype machine it was hard to even keep tabs on the guy. He seemed to be everywhere except where he was supposed to be—which is to say either sleeping or at the BitInstant offices working. The site had experienced brownouts twice in the last two weeks, which terrified Cameron. How safe was their investment, if the site kept buckling? What else was about to give? And how had things started to go south so fast?
“But there is something you need to consider,” Tyler paused, his voice lower, “the people who start companies aren’t always the best people to run them.”
Charlie seemed to suddenly sober up, at least enough to understand what Tyler was saying.
“Are you saying that someone else should be CEO?”
It was the first time either of the twins had floated the thought aloud. Charlie had a ton of great ideas, a ton of energy, but did he have the consistency to run a real company? The type of company BitInstant was fast becoming? In a way, Voorhees and Ira weren’t helping matters; they both being incredibly competent was only enabling Charlie, enhancing his worst attributes.
Charlie looked from Tyler to Cameron, craning his neck to match their eyes.
“Maybe Roger is right about you guys.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Cameron said.
A pair of German tourists moved past, close enough for one of them, a young man with a shock of moussed yellow hair, to recognize the twins and point. The man’s partner, a woman in a denim dress, pointed her cell phone at Cameron, took a quick picture, then kept walking. This type of thing happened almost every day.
“I mean,” Charlie continued, “sometimes you guys can be such suits.”
Cameron rolled his eyes. Sometimes suits were necessary. Certainly, they were appropriate at a meeting with one of the biggest names in Fintech.
“As we’ve told you before,” Tyler said, still moderately controlled, “Roger isn’t the best influence.”
Although the twins had avoided meeting with Ver in person in San Jose, they’d been cc’d on numerous emails—and had eventually taken part in multiple hour-long phone conversations with Ver over the past few weeks, discussing BitInstant’s future. It seemed the more successful the company got, the more friction they and the Tokyo libertarian had. Lately, a lot of the conversations had focused on Charlie’s increasing absence from the office. No matter what, regardless of the topic or the set of facts and circumstances, Ver always defended Charlie, even when it meant doing so was to a fault. He’d probably find a way to defend Charlie about the nightmare of a meeting they’d just had too. Cameron could already hear Ver in his head, rationalizing how it was healthy for entrepreneurs to blow off steam.
“He’s been supporting me since the beginning,” Charlie said.
“It’s no longer the beginning,” Cameron shot back, “it’s the now. The stakes are real, you can’t be taking advice from an ex-con.”
Charlie pressed his hands flat against the window behind him, leaving a sweat stain on the glass.
“He went to jail for selling pest control,” Charlie said.
“Explosives,” Cameron corrected. “He’s the kind of guy who likes blowing things up.”
“You don’t know him. He really does want to change the world. Change the government.”
“He wants to change the government because he hates the government. It’s not some noble, philosophical cause. It’s a personal grudge.”
Was Charlie really trying to defend Roger’s conviction? The same Charlie who was espousing the importance of compliance, inside the walls of a major U.S. bank, just weeks ago?
“You don’t know him,” Charlie sputtered.
“You’re right,” Cameron said. “And neither do you. Look, Charlie, you need to understand. These meetings—we’re trying to mainstream Bitcoin. We don’t want it to be some kind of circus novelty riding on fringe ideology. If this is going to be gold 2.0, it has to appeal to everyone. Investment banks aren’t going to set up trading desks for an asset marketed by drug dealers that’s supposed to kill governments.”
Charlie rubbed his eyes.
“None of us are drug dealers.”
“Right now, that’s exactly what you look like. You need to clean up your act.”
Cameron felt his breath coming more easily. Just getting it out into the open helped, like uncapping a bottle of soda. He could tell that Tyler hadn’t finished with the CEO discussion, but for now, they had made their point. Hopefully, it had landed.
“That’s what you guys are for,” Charlie finally responded. “You’re the keynote speakers.”
Cameron had to give him that one. Cameron and Tyler were supposed to be the camera-ready ambassadors—which freed up Charlie to be a ringleader in the sideshow.
A part he seemed eager to play.
“Let’s chalk this up to a learning experience,” Cameron said, before his brother could end on a more pointed note. “At the conference, let’s make sure to be on our best behavior.”
The conference was still months away, but if Charlie hit Bitcoin 2013 like he’d rolled into the meeting they’d just escaped, there was no telling what trouble he’d cause. But then again, he’d said it himself: he wasn’t giving the keynote, they were.
Charlie reached out to shake both their hands.
“You guys are right, of course. What I just did in there—that was inexcusable. And it won’t happen again. Really, it was just a speed bump.”
His palms were wet, and he was trembling, like the first time they’d met.
But as Cameron watched him walk away down Lexington Avenue, Charlie’s little form was engaged in what could only be described as a strut.