Chapter 20
THE AFTERMATH
I drove home from the Vineyard feeling euphoric, singing old Motown songs the whole way. I was Levi Stubbs, the lead singer for the Four Tops: “Sugar pie, honey bunch. You know that I love you.” I felt like Philippe Petit, that guy who successfully walked on a high wire thousands of feet above the ground between two buildings of the World Trade Center complex. Vicky, usually my co–lead singer, was strangely silent. I took the subway to the office, a shit-eating grin on my face the whole way, and immediately convened a Serious Eats management committee meeting. I told them about the completed negotiations and the specifics of the deal. I exchanged high fives with every one of them.
We paid off all our debts; my investors, including my brother and my friends, got 90 percent of their money back in cash, along with some Fexy stock. The cash was a return on an investment that most of them had totally written off years earlier, so everybody was thrilled to take such a small loss.
Mike sent me an email the following day: “You have gotten to pursue a dream and realize it more perfectly than the world usually permits. You have even made a few bucks in the process. Not a bad run so far.” I treasured that email then and every day since.
We kept our apartment—whew—and Vicky and I even made some money. By the time I repaid all the debts, paid my investors and my employees, I had made enough money to feather our retirement. It wasn’t a Silicon Valley–like score. Far from it. Every successful tech entrepreneur or venture capitalist would have laughed at what Vicky and I made from the sale. It would have been walking-around money for them. Still, it was enough for us.
The Serious Eaters were just as happy as everybody else, at least initially. Everyone in our little tribe cashed in their Serious Eats stock. It didn’t make any of them rich, but I think it made them feel like they had gotten something tangible from sticking with me through the joyride.
Vicky? That first week she was calling all her friends with the good news. She was doing some serious exhaling herself.
Fexy wanted me to stay on and play to my natural strengths, to be Serious Eats’ creative director, spiritual leader, and den mother, both for continuity’s sake and for the overall good of the company. They took the checkbook away, and all financial functions—a wise move for what are now painfully obvious reasons.
So not only did I have some cash in the bank, but I finally had my dream job, the job I had started Serious Eats to do, the job I had been trying to create for myself since I’d published New York Eats in 1992—and with none of the boring, stressful distractions. It was all bonus, no onus.
So why wasn’t I happy?
I’d gotten off a nine-year roller-coaster ride seemingly unhurt, with my faculties intact. But in the weeks after the sale, once the high wore off, I couldn’t avoid noticing that my constant anxiety and the accompanying stress I felt hadn’t abated. If anything, they were worse, as though I was suffering from a form of business PTSD. I couldn’t shake the cumulative effects of the thrill ride; instead of being calmed by Fexy taking over the business aspects of Serious Eats, I found myself feeling more and more anxious. I was sure that another catastrophe would come out of nowhere to befall us at any moment.
At the same time, I noticed a not-so-subtle shift in both the way Vicky talked about the sale and her attitude toward it. From her tone of voice when we spoke, it was clear that the sale hadn’t completely resolved everything that had been so difficult between us.
Mike was the first one to notice my extreme discomfort. Over a terrific brisket and beef rib lunch at Hill Country Barbecue, a few blocks from his house, he expressed his puzzlement. “I just don’t get it. You should feel really good about this ending. You dodged a bullet. Hell, you dodged a hail of bullets. Think of the alternatives you narrowly avoided. Yet you’re as stressed out as ever. Get a grip, bro.” Mike was always trying to get me to mainline reality.
I wasn’t ready to. Change was coming fast, and although I’ve had to deal with a lot of it in my life, I’d never learned to like it. I tried to sort through my feelings, to figure out why this event that I had worked so long and hard for had failed to give me the satisfaction I craved.
First of all, now that the company was sold, I was seen as “the man.” The Serious Eaters felt like I’d put our whole family up for adoption. They resented me for doing that. The problem was that I felt that way too, and could relate to their bristling resentment, even while I felt powerless to do anything about it.
The Serious Eaters were also worried about how the culture of the company would change, and rightfully so. The us-against-the-world mentality, the David-versus-Goliath attitude that bound us, would definitely have to change. Like it or not, we were the big guys now. Or at least, we were bigger.
There were no layoffs, but each member of the Serious Eats staff had to sign an offer letter from Fexy detailing his or her job description, title, and salary. No more loosey-goosey Ed Levine management. Some rebelled and pushed back on the size of the salary increase, but there wasn’t anything I could do about their complaints. The checkbook was no longer in my hands. Given my experience, you’d think I would have welcomed the freedom. But it made me feel impotent instead of liberated.
Fexy did force out our GM, Chris, a blow to the Serious Eaters, who had learned to trust Chris despite his occasionally brusque management style.
I spoke almost daily with Lisa Sharples, one of Fexy’s founders, who said she was going to temporarily assume Chris’s GM role. Lisa is a formidable presence and a really experienced operator, so she had lots of ideas for us to implement at Serious Eats. “Everywhere I’ve worked we’ve had KPIs, and I would like to set up Serious Eats KPIs, working with your whole team,” she said to me over a fine breakfast bowl at Egg Shop on Elizabeth Street. “What’s a KPI?” I asked haltingly. “Key performance indicators,” she replied, “numbers you and your team have to hit. Once we get everyone to buy into them, they give everyone a common set of goals that they can work toward, knowing their bonuses depend on reaching them.”
I told the management committee about the KPIs. They asked the same question I had: “What’s a KPI?” asked our VP of product and chief developer, Paul Cline. I call Paul my silent assassin. He is a man of few words, but when he does talk he’s invariably saying something smart and thoughtful. The management team didn’t really seem to mind the actual KPIs themselves. But they felt their new stepparents were turning out to be much more strict than good old had-to-be-loved-at-any-cost Ed. They felt as if they were losing their freedom.
I may not have given my employees a sense of security, but I did give them an awesome, creatively free place to work, bounded only by their own curiosity and energy levels. The people who were attracted to Serious Eats were people like me—not clock punchers. So it made sense that my own anxieties were reflected back to me by the Serious Eaters.
My fears about people leaving Serious Eats and feeling abandoned when they did were once again haunting me. A few people did leave, so my worst fears were being realized. The Fexy folks expected this to happen. I should have as well, but I didn’t. I desperately needed the family to stay together; every time someone left it felt like a death in the family.
Our brilliant designer and front-end developer, Tracie Lee, left for a great job at the New York Times. Our supremely competent and ever-smiling overall head of production, Chrissie Lamond, left for a job at Fast Company, displeased by the new role Fexy had designated for her.
One set of anxieties and stresses had been replaced by another. I had thought I would welcome not having bottom-line responsibility. Instead I felt constrained and bridled under Fexy’s control.
Mike was right. I did need to get a grip. For me, for Vicky, for the Serious Eaters, for Mike, and for Fexy. I had to stop fighting the changes that were coming fast and furious. I needed, in the words of Joseph Campbell, to find—or in this case relocate—my bliss. I also needed to lead my tribe to the next phase of Serious Eats. But at that moment I was lost, with no compass, no road map, and no GPS.
I have felt lost many times as an adult, and good psychotherapists have often helped me find myself. After many hours talking with my blessed therapist, I finally figured some things out. I know therapists usually don’t play much of a role in entrepreneurial memoirs; maybe if they did there would be fewer unhappy entrepreneurs. Or maybe I’m just more neurotic than your typical entrepreneur. Someone else can collect the data and make that determination. After months of good therapy, and just letting the dust settle, something dawned on me. The money was a relief, but despite what I’d told Vicky and Mike, it had never been about that. It had always been about building a family of like-minded people who shared my passion and sense of purpose, and who made me and Serious Eats better every day. Not that we obsessed about the same things. Max knew everything there was to know about tea, much of which I didn’t care to learn for myself. What mattered to me was that he was obsessive, had a deeply curious mind, and was an engaging storyteller. It had been the same story with Kenji; I didn’t know the first thing about food science and frankly had never even thought much about the subject before. But Kenji made me care. Serious Eats was all about providing a home base for people like Kenji and Max, one without the gatekeepers who had irritated me so much as a younger writer, and trusting them to do their thing. Serious Eats was personal. It had always been personal.
I had, of course, convinced myself that building my own company was all about money, that Serious Eats was a surefire path to financial security for two entrepreneurially minded people with a need to feel secure. It was an absurd and naive notion, that starting a group food blog with an untried financial model would pave the way to a comfortable retirement.
But that misbegotten notion had given me the permission I needed from the two most important people to me, Vicky and Mike, to embark on my insane journey. So it wasn’t surprising that the sale hadn’t made me happy. Fexy, Lisa, Cliff, and Ben were great. They had saved us and done right by us throughout the entire agonizing acquisition process. But now I realized that getting out of financial jeopardy had created trade-offs I had never anticipated. Serious Eats had always been about the people, and the people weren’t happy. No wonder I was anxious.
Armed with all these realizations, I committed myself to giving up the ghost of Serious Eats past. I would try to embrace the changes that came with the new owners taking charge, and to find compromises that would make us all happy. I was still a people pleaser.
Fexy did impose a lot of structure. Cliff and Lisa and Ben all came from conventional digital publishing backgrounds, so they believed in the business practices they had all employed and succeeded with, practices I was almost allergic to.
For example, Fexy wanted us to fully embrace the idea of sponsored content or native advertising. Native advertising is content created and paid for by brands. This content is written in the voice of the site the advertiser has bought advertising on. It is usually created by a separate team within a site or by freelancers. The whole idea is that native advertising doesn’t look like conventional advertising, so readers are more likely to look at it.
On sites like Serious Eats, and on most other high-quality websites, it is always clearly differentiated from actual editorial content by being marked as “partner content.” We had created sponsored content before Fexy bought us, but we had never fully embraced the concept. Kenji, his chief lieutenant Daniel Gritzer, and I all came from traditional media backgrounds, where the editorial team was walled off from the business types—the suits, as they were derisively called.
The Fexyers thought that we were ideological purists, that we almost resented the business side of the equation, that we didn’t understand how the line between editorial and advertising was becoming increasingly blurred in digital media. The laws of supply and demand, the fact that there was an ever-larger glut of digital ad impressions available, meant the advertisers had all the leverage.
They weren’t wrong.
I had to calmly explain to the Serious Eaters that this was indeed the new reality in the digital publishing realm. If the New York Times embraced native advertising and sponsored content, which it did, we were just going to have to be down with it as well.
Today we have found a way to do native advertising Serious Eats style, without feeling as if we have sold out. Do the Fexy-hired salespeople occasionally ask us to do things that we are uncomfortable doing in the realm of native advertising? Of course they do. That’s their job. Sales folks are paid on commission. But we can and do say no to many of their requests, and the Fexy management team backs us up just about every time. Sometimes the Serious Eats editorial team comes up with their own ideas for how to create sponsored content that doesn’t compromise our integrity and editorial freedom. They have become first-rate creative businesspeople.
In hindsight, much of our collective resentment was misplaced. Serious Eats was a business that Fexy paid handsomely for, and Lisa, Cliff, and Ben were going to create a company based on their previous experiences and their values, the same way I did when I started Serious Eats.
Even I had to admit that most of the changes were necessary, and really good for the company. The staff liked having structure and formalities like salary and performance reviews and a clearly stated vacation policy. It turns out that the Sex Pistols–like punk band that was Serious Eats had to turn into a real band with a professional manager and sufficient funds to stay in nice hotels on the road. Sho Spaeth, Serious Eats’ features editor, once drunkenly said to me that he missed the halcyon, punk-rock days of the site. I reminded Sho that it had not ended well for Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols.
I did finally accept the fact that I had sold Serious Eats, and the Serious Eaters came to realize that Fexy gets us. They were happy that the company was on firmer financial footing, though I was proud that I always made payroll. I accepted and even loved the fact that I didn’t have to live on the edge anymore. I could feel good about having steered the Serious Eats ship into a safe harbor.
But there was still some unfinished business.
With the deal really done, I had to take stock of the collateral damage Serious Eats had done to my relationships with both Vicky and Mike. The fight to keep Serious Eats alive had been a grueling nine-year battle and, like most battles, it had left some wounds that still hadn’t healed.
I mistakenly thought at the time that the proceeds of the sale would wipe away all of Vicky’s conflicted feelings about the whole Serious Eats saga. The rewards were worth the risks, weren’t they? But I couldn’t wipe the slate clean. Why? Because when I learned about the relationship between risk and reward in business, no teacher at Columbia Business School spoke to the collateral emotional and psychological damage associated with the risks you take to reap the rewards. That damage, it turns out, is really difficult to repair.
Vicky thought I didn’t give credit where credit was due. She was wrong—maybe one of the only things she’s been wrong about in thirty-five years of marriage. It was true that I couldn’t entirely admit how instrumental she’d been. And it’s true that I was too dumb to really give credit where it was due. But it’s also true that I literally can’t imagine what it would have been like to do this without her, and I am keenly aware that it wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t been on my side.
In fact, the most harrowing details I’ve had to relive in writing this book have nothing to do with financial security, only the terrifying knowledge of how close I came to doing real damage to the relationship that made it all possible.
For the nine long years that it took to get Serious Eats off the ground (in fact, long before that, and after) I relied every single day on Vicky’s solid judgment, her business savvy, her good counsel, her sense of humor, and her preternatural calm. Her unwavering belief in me was—and is—humbling. I do not for a moment downplay the difficulty of the situations I put her in, or the tremendous sacrifices she had to make.
Which isn’t to say that I was any good at communicating any of this at the time. So we kept fighting. More than a year after I sold the business, we had yet another argument that ended without a resolution, neither of us giving an inch.
I got on my bike and rode to Tiffany. I had never been inside Tiffany, so I had no idea what to do when I went through the revolving doors. I asked the person stationed right inside the door where I could buy pearl earrings for my wife. Vicky had been talking about how much she wanted a pair of pearl earrings for years, even before Serious Eats.
A kindly saleswoman showed me a variety of diamond-and-pearl earrings. I picked a pair out for Vicky. It’s not a bad metaphor: a piece of grit in an oyster shell—a lot of work to make something that looks so effortlessly beautiful. She opened the box like a kid opening a present on Christmas morning. Vicky grinned from earring to earring as she walked over to a mirror to try them on. I almost started to cry, mostly out of frustration at myself. Why had it taken me so long to get to this place I obviously needed to be? Pride? Stupidity? Stubbornness? No matter. I made it. Let the healing begin. It continues to this day.
It was easier for Mike and me to put the Serious Eats sale behind us. Though our many confrontations were hard on both of us, he didn’t live with the day-to-day Serious Eats stress in the same way Vicky did. Mike didn’t have to confront a seemingly inconsolable spouse (that would be me) almost every night. And he was never at risk of losing his apartment and his marriage.
This allowed Mike to be the proud father of Serious Eats more easily right after the sale. His daughters told me that Serious Eats was all he talked about—other than, of course, the state of the world, the airline business, cars, and hi-fi equipment. And to me directly, Mike’s first comment after the sale was “I’m proud of the part I played, however large or small it was, in Serious Eats’ success. Now, with the sale out of the way, I hope I retain my right to call you for restaurant reservations.” I would have happily gone myself to any restaurant to secure a “Mike” table—that is to say, quiet, comfortable, and not near the kitchen. And I would have made sure the restaurant’s staff made a not-so-quiet fuss over him, because nobody liked that more than Mike.
Right around the time of the sale, Mike’s kidneys started to fail, just as my dad’s had. He was dying, yet his emails about the “state of play,” as he called his updates on his health, were filled with optimism. Mike really did love life, maybe because he was so delighted and surprised that he had lived longer than both of our parents. Mike was convinced he would not make it out of his fifties. He used to say that every year past fifty-three (our mom’s age when she died), and then fifty-seven (our dad’s when he died), was a bonus. He made it to seventy-five, so that’s a lot of bonus years. He took advantage of each and every one of them.
With our dad having died of kidney failure in the days before dialysis, this malady was particularly resonant and painful both psychologically and physically. Mike was reluctant to undergo dialysis because he thought it would cramp his style and limit his movements. Of course, he could barely move at that point anyway.
As a result of his illness, Mike couldn’t keep his weight up, a not-so-gentle irony for a man whose gargantuan appetites had had him weighing 310 pounds before undergoing an early and radical form of bariatric surgery in 2002 that removed part of his small intestine. His weight throughout the Serious Eats years fluctuated between 165 and 175 pounds. As he got sicker, he couldn’t keep any weight on.
After the sale we could stop being business partners and resume what had become a deep and abiding kinship and, yes, friendship. In that last year and a half of his life, I was gratified to be able to return some of the comfort and love he had supplied me when I was in desperate need of them fifty years earlier. I could take care of him the way he and Carol took care of me.
He still wanted to eat with me, everything from foie gras to pastrami, and drink good champagne and good wine with the food while I drank iced tea. When he died, the dude had pounds and pounds of foie gras and Wagyu beef stored away in an oversized freezer in the basement of his house in New Haven. It was such a source of pleasure for both of us to enjoy each other’s company again without the Serious Eats conflicts getting in the way.
Almost a year to the day after I sold Serious Eats, I was inducted into the Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America by the James Beard Foundation at the Lyric Opera House in Chicago. I don’t mean to brag, but it was pretty cool. It was the first time the Who’s Who judges had recognized someone involved in digital media. The blogosphere had successfully stormed the gates.
At the time, Mike had three fractured ribs sustained in a fall. He was not well at all. Yet Mike and Carol insisted on coming to Chicago for the ceremony. He even came to the dinner afterward, held at the opera house, and to a few of the after-parties, although he could barely walk. Of course, Mike being Mike, at the dinner he ended up sharing a plate of Aaron Franklin’s incomparable brisket (Franklin Barbecue in Austin is one of those bucket-list items for any food lover) with a Yalie friend of mine while having an animated discussion about the John C. Calhoun controversy on the Yale campus. These conversations were what Mike lived for, so when I looked over and saw him in animated conversation with my friend the food writer Corby Kummer, I was practically in tears. They would have been tears of joy and sadness—joy because Mike was still capable of being Mike and sadness because I knew that wouldn’t be the case for much longer.
We went out for dinner the night before, and in typical Mike fashion, he rejected a couple of tables before we were shown a suitable one. No matter what his physical condition, Mike was still Mike.
Mike died nineteen months after I sold Serious Eats. He was down to 125 pounds by then. It broke my heart to see him like that, pale, painfully thin, and practically devoid of the restless, relentless energy that was his lifelong trademark. Mike was taken by ambulance to the hospital three times in the last six months he was on this earth. Vicky and I would go visit him each time. No matter how sick or weak Mike was, whenever I walked into his hospital room or his house in New Haven, his face lit up like the neon sign at Papaya King. He really was the proud papa of me and Serious Eats, and he took enormous pleasure in our success. And I was the proud and heartbroken younger brother/son/close friend.
A month before he died I brought him and Carol an official Ed Levine brunch from New York: Gaspé smoked salmon and scallion cream cheese from Russ & Daughters, bialys from Hot Bread Kitchen, bagels from Absolute Bagels, sturgeon from Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King, babka from Breads Bakery. He loved every moment of it, though he could manage only a bite or two of each item.
I gave one of the eulogies at Mike’s memorial service, held at an auditorium in the fine arts building at Yale. I recited the note that Mike had sent me after Serious Eats was sold: “You have gotten to pursue a dream and realize it more perfectly than the real world usually permits. You have even made a few bucks in the process. Not a bad run so far.” It takes one to know one, my brother.
When Mike was in his element and healthy and doing one of the million things he loved to do, he used to grin broadly at me and say, “It doesn’t get any better than this, Ed. Enjoy it while you can.”
In one of his novels the late, great writer Jim Harrison, most definitely a serious eater, once wrote of a character: “He’s literally taking bites out of the sun, moon, and earth.”* That’s a pretty apt description of Mike. And I miss the hell out of taking those bites with him.