The Monk and the Riddle

Komisar was a Silicon Valley executive and venture partner who described his role as virtual chief executive officer, working with several startups at once without running any of them. The book combines a fictional narrative, in which he advises a founder pitching an online funeral services business, with reflections on what he learned from LucasArts, Claris, WebTV and TiVo.

The central concept is what he calls the deferred life plan, meaning the arrangement in which a person does work they do not care about in order to earn the position to do what they want later. Komisar argues that this trade rarely completes, that the first stage consumes the years and forms habits that make the second stage unreachable, and that founders in particular adopt it in the specific form of building a company they do not care about in order to become wealthy enough to do something they do.

The business content concerns what makes a startup worth building. Komisar pushes the fictional founder from a business plan optimised for exit toward a proposition he actually cares about, on the argument that the difficulty of building a company exceeds what a purely financial motive will sustain. He also covers the differences between the chief executive, the founder and the investor roles, and what a company actually needs from each.

The book is short and the fictional device is thin. It comes from the 1998 to 2000 period and the specific market conditions are gone. It offers no method and is closer to an argument about motivation. The deferred life plan is the concept that has persisted and it applies well beyond startups.