Autopsy Posthumously
A Story About Courage, Stupidity, and Hard Cider
We were walking to Devon’s studio, a rent-controlled San Francisco apartment turned Dungeons and Dragons Twitch stream through creative use of curtains, duct taped cameras, and enough D&D paraphernalia to make the entirety of a 1980s ham radio club blush.
“Devon, Devon, hey how do I look?”
Devon laughed and shook his head. He was always well-dressed, in that laid-back 2010s dad sort of way. He wore a pair of Chubby’s shorts, tastefully ending right above the knee, a white T-shirt, gold chain, and a scruffy multicolored cardigan.
We were headed to our first Power Word Update, an event I near pathologically looked forward to and had begged Devon to do since we founded the company. It was a Twitch stream to all of our users, or at least the 14 people that initially tuned in.
As we turned the corner, I picked up my cell phone and impulsively checked my emails. I’m one of those inbox zero OCD freaks. And like a mafia member checking their gun, anytime I entered a room my hand would surreptitiously slip into my pocket and pull out my iPhone Mini to refresh my emails.
An email caught my eye. It read:
?Mr Tucker,
Please see attached our letter of June 25, 2021. [sic]
I clicked into the document. A bunch of legalese, but one line stood out to me: liquidated damages of Three Hundred Thirty Nine Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighteen 27/00 Dollars.
“Devon, we’re getting sued…”
My brain immediately went to the number. We barely had $350k in the bank. $350k - $340k = $10k. Approximately enough for my old college tuition, one Bitcoin, or two payrolls. The company was sunk.
I started sweating. I stopped moving. My flight or fight response had resulted in the third choice, which fortunately wasn’t void oneself, but instead was play dead. Maybe then the email wouldn’t see me.
Devon, older and wiser than myself, gently pried the phone from my hand and scrolled through the email. He scrunched his mouth to one side, and asked, “Who’s Allyance?”
About three months back, I was in my San Francisco apartment, one of those that necessitated a full fanny pack of quarters. With a laundry room that induced a I-better-get-back-down-in-time-in-order-to-change-this-quickly-lest-my-clothes-be-thrown-indiscriminately-out-onto-the-floor sort of paranoia.
I remember the sounds of the apartment. The beep, beep, beep, the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chunk of the garbage truck at 4 a.m. every Sunday. The occasional howling at the wee hours of night due to the lupine madness of passing walkers and remnants of Folsom Street Fair ducking off on the side alley.
I hunched over my laptop in the dark, only my face illuminated. I ate a dinner of falafel. I had befriended the Flying Falafel folks, generously tipping them for the unpromised but oft given free sides of fresh fries and amba sauce, a tangy and polarizing mango slurry.
I was watching a video by Emmett Shear. I’d often watch these old YC videos just as I’d read the old PG essays back in college. They were mesmerizing. There were these legends: the Collison brothers from Stripe; Brian, Joe, and Nate from Airbnb; and my favorite dynamic duo of Dalton and Michael. How starstruck I was interviewing with Dalton during my first application to YC.
Emmett talked about user interviews, a subject I’d grok even after a triple lobotomy. He said, “Segment your users. Do user interviews with new, churned, and retained users. But most importantly, with those not on your platform. The best users to interview… Are your competitor’s users.”
I nodded. Brilliant. I slurped up the Kool-Aid straight from the horse’s mouth. I started to write down a list of our local competitors. Ones that for the most part no longer exist. Folks like Demiplane, or DMsGuild, or Yawning Portal. I distinctly remember the last of these competitors being named Allyance.
“It’s a competing platform.” I stammered.
Devon scrolled through the legalese. He gave one of his characteristic big smiles. “So I’m guessing you user interviewed them. How’d they find out it was you?”
Early on Devon and I had heated arguments. I believed in move fast and break things. You have to break a few TOCs to make a lawsuit, right? And Devon, though he had a strong bias to action, was more cautious. He wanted to launch backwards compatible features with no edge cases.
I remember telling him about the Emmett strategy. “Devon, we’ve been doing all these interviews, but haven’t talked to our competitor’s users.”
“I don’t see what the benefit’s gonna be here. Our competitors are just as small or smaller than us. And honestly, for the most part, their users are bleeding over to us anyways.”
“You don’t know what you don’t know.”
“It just sounds a bit risky.”
“Devon, did I ever tell you the old story from YC? Something that Paul Graham used to make the founders do. He’d have them go out to a hotel and ask for a free room. To get rejected, to overcome their fears, to be courageous.”
My life has been a fight to become more courageous, to be the best version of myself. And each little decision, every choice that we make, changes us. It makes us more courageous, or more cowardly. Not only do we make our choices, our choices slowly make us.
And I viewed taking Emmett’s advice as an act of courage, an act of breaking a few rules to get something valuable.
But courage doesn’t equal stupid.
In this case, I didn’t think, I just did. I went out to all the competitors and Dm’ed users directly on their platform. While I came away with some user insights, I was summarily and instantly banned. Not only because I was reaching out via the platform themselves, clearly against terms of service, but brazen and youthful as I was, I used my StartPlaying email.
“You used your StartPlaying email, right?”
I nodded.
If he had been younger, more headstrong, this was the perfect moment to say, “I told you so.” He could have launched into a harangue.
But he saw me standing there, head hung low, and clearly thinking I had just sunk the company.
He tapped his phone for a moment. I heard an email send. Devon canceled the Power Word Update.
“Look Nate, this isn’t the first time I’ve been sued. Let’s give the lawyers a call and then I’ll tell you the lore drop.”
I met the legal team for Start Playing via Zoom. I recognized their background immediately. It was from a game called FTL. A tactical roguelike where you pilot a ship as part of the rebellion on a race against time to take down the Galactic Empire. I smiled. These were my people.
Sometimes when you know, you know.
When I was a kid, I did mock trial, emphasis on the mock. My flatulent American history professor bullied me into joining because I had an eidetic memory of obscure quotes and ample room in my brain attic.
My first assignment was to play a detective with enough foibles to put the merchant of Venice to shame. I spent 30 minutes before the trial studying. Otherwise, I went into it fresh.
I remember the first question when I was put on the stand. “What’s your badge number?”
I had no idea, so I rattled off a string of random numbers.
The defense lawyer then submitted a piece of evidence: my badge. Whoops. “Can you read the badge number from evidence?”
I looked up smirking at the pimply teen that thought he caught me in the act. “Oh, this was submitted into evidence a couple of weeks ago. We just got reissued badges. Sorry you didn’t get the memo.”
So when I picked up the phone to talk to the court lawyer, not a corporate lawyer, a lawyer that would present cases in front of judges, I knew this guy was right. He was sharp and quick. He could turn up the charisma dial to eleven or down to pittbull. He spoke quickly, succinctly, eloquently. Increasing the information ratio of his words.
The man was positively delightful.
I could hear him smile over the phone.
“Look, Nate, we’ll come in with a sweet offer. We’ll say, drop the charges. We’ll apologize. We’ll promise not to do it again. No harm, no foul. Let’s say they press, which would be stupid, but let’s say they’re stupid. Well, we’ll say your claims are baseless. Your TOCs are fraudulent. And the lawsuit is a sham. We’ll force you to pay all the legal fees. And we’ll force a rewrite of your TOC. Shutting down the site during the redraft. At that point they’ll agree. $339,000 for talking to a couple of their users. It’s bullshit.”
They dropped the charges. And within a year, they were defunct. Almost all their users migrated to StartPlaying. Not because we convinced them. Not because we talked to them. Nor through some malicious practice. We just built a better product, and sometimes product is king.
All told the incident cost $10k in legal fees, 20cc’s of cortisol injected directly into my CNS, and one canceled Power Word Update.
The next day Devon and I retro’d the episode and invented a new phrase: Autopsy Posthumously, which basically means save the I-told-you-so‘s until after the crisis.
We walked away from Devon’s studio, past restaurants and coffee shops until Devon stopped, and opened a pair of saloon doors. The bartender greeted him like an old friend because Devon was an old friend. He knew practically everyone in SF.
He ordered two beers. After looking at me for a second and remembering my distaste of alcohol, ordered one beer, one hard cider, and two fernets. Fernet tastes like a liquorice stick melted in a thimble of mouthwash that admittedly no one likes.
“Trust me you’ll love it,” Devon lied.
I was all nerves. I demurred, “Devon, I don’t really drink.”
“Nate, just have a sip.”
The cider was cold. I gave it a delicate sip. It was sweet. Sweet was nice. I immediately felt warm and calm. It was going to be all right. We’d make it through this crises and any others yet to come.
Devon looked over at me and smiled. “So, Nate, did you learn your lesson?”
I smiled back. “Yeah, when you’re feeling bad, alcohol helps.”