IV. William

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One might say that William was one of the lucky kids. His distant memories were not perceived as any kind of drag on his current life, nor accompanied by a sense of guilt. On the contrary, he felt empowered by what he knew about his past life and used it to provide direction in his current one. For William, life was like a fruit tree. The name of the game was to pick and eat as much of the juicy, sweet fruit as possible before it all fell to the ground and spoiled.

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Growing up, William showed all the classic signs of a child who had distant memories. He held a fascination for a certain time and place and had intimate knowledge of certain people and events. To William, the past wasn’t some “distant memory,” but a reality, as if it still existed untouched and intact somewhere—maybe just up the street or the next town over. It was like Jack, who believed that Uncle Alden and Auntie Iris still lived next door—perhaps hiding in the neighbor’s attic or under the stairwell—and that they would come knocking any moment now, inviting him over for a slice of apple pie with cheese on top.

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But what was different in William’s case was the way he described his past with such confidence—and, well, hubris. From the age of five, he would tell anyone that would bother to listen that he was a very wealthy man, owned several properties, had a collection of automobiles, and had been married multiple times. Sometimes he would even strike up a conversation with strangers, who would play along, not realizing that little William was every bit serious and was simply taking the opportunity to brag more about his many past achievements.

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“So, how did you make all your money, William?” his dentist once inquired, playing along. “I mean, all those houses and cars and wives must’ve cost you a fortune, young man!”

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“I was an oilman,” the young boy replied matter-of-factly. “But these days, my interest lies in tech.”

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And so it was. As William grew older, he studied the ways of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others. He also began a lifetime fascination with company pitch decks, those rather drab slide presentations full of hyperbole that start-ups use to sell their ideas to investors. But to William, PowerPoint wasn’t boring; it was an art form—the subtle art of persuasion. He collected pitch decks like trading cards. He would study each presentation’s flow, use of language, and style of graphics. And when he wasn’t studying pitch decks, he was engrossed in one TED Talk or another to further his education on the craft.

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Although he was fond of his past successes, William understood early on that tech was where the opportunity was now, not fossil fuels—an industry mostly dominated by lobbyists and entrenched multinationals who would, he predicted, be cannibalizing each other in the years to come once “Joe Plumber installs solar panels on his roof and begins to drive an electric pickup.” However, he also knew that he was late to the game, and that today’s equivalent of yesterday’s oil barons had already been anointed and crowned. There was the Duke of Amazon, the Marquess of Meta, and the Earl of Tesla, among others.

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No, for him, the future was AI, and all the other areas of interest it would soon spawn, including natural language processing, biometrics, machine learning, and robotic process automation, just to name a few. But even before his interests in AI, he was already thinking like someone who would someday build a wildly successful company and take home his first million before turning thirty.

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He did quite well while in school, not only because he was clever, but because he believed everything was negotiable—and it was. When he received anything less than an “A,” he would argue with the teacher until the bitter end, trying to persuade him or her that the grade was unjust and that he deserved better. For William, it was always “win at all costs,” and he usually got his way, even if it meant doing an extra-credit assignment.

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Throughout school, William thrived on competition. He always wanted to be the smartest person in the room, and teachers would frequently have to ask him to give others a chance to answer questions. When it was pizza day at the school cafeteria, he was always the first in line. When it was picture day, he always sat front and center. Even on the playground, William always made sure that he and his band of brothers had a ball to play with. When there weren’t enough to go around, he would strategize on ways to steal another game’s ball, using his lackeys to do the dirty work for him. Later he would swoop in, appear to take control of the situation, and then claim to have played no part in the sacking.

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Later, in high school, he joined the computer science club, not for the love of coding—which to him was only a means to an end—but to recruit anyone who shared his vision to monetize what he referred to as “the new digital bio.” The concept was so obvious, so painfully simple, that when news came out that his company, LinkVine, had gone public, you could hear the collective thump! of a thousand entrepreneurs banging their heads against their MacBooks.

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The idea had come to him on the first day of his freshman year. People were meeting each other for the first time on a new campus, and everyone was hooking up online. At the time, he overheard a group of girls complain about how difficult it was to share all their social handles. What they really needed, they thought, was a single link that would show their Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. all in one place. This struck William as a great business idea, which had him immediately studying up on SaaS (Software as a Service) business models, and how he might create a subscription service that would charge users a small monthly fee for hosting a single page displaying all their social media links. For the paid version, users would be able to not only display links to all their social media, website, etc., but also to customize the page with themes and backgrounds, as well as track user interaction—for example, how many people opened their page, and which links they clicked on.

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Next, he dedicated himself to filing as a new company, which he would eventually do with the help of his dad (who was something of a budding entrepreneur himself, having started a small online business selling houseplants during the COVID-19 pandemic). It would take William months to design and build the marketing website, create a pitch deck, and recruit team members—mostly programmers from the nearby junior college and online job boards, who would work for nothing in exchange for equity in the company. When he realized that his overhead was growing to be more than he could afford or ask from his parents, he began to contact potential investors—mostly family and friends of the family willing to throw in a few thousand dollars as seed money.

The rest is history.

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The company’s turning point came when Kim Kardashian’s sister, Kylie Jenner, published a LinkVine link in her Instagram bio after William randomly DM’ed her about his company. Soon everyone felt the need to have a personalized LinkVine bio. When the company went public two years later, William was only twenty-one and already worth over thirty-five million dollars.

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For William, it was destiny. For his employees, however, it was a form of cruel punishment. During those early years of late nights and lost weekends, William earned the reputation of being a ruthless dictator who wasn’t afraid to fire people on the spot or shame his best friends in front of their subordinates. William could be intimidating and wouldn’t take no for an answer. When he didn’t get his way, he would sometimes even resort to throwing things at people. He once sent his chief technology officer to the emergency room after picking up his keyboard and hitting him over the head with it.

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William was also not to be trusted with other people’s ideas. Nondisclosure agreements, to William, were always unidirectional. “What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine,” he liked to say. He also liked to pontificate, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal” (a quote he apparently stole from Picasso). In other words, craftiness, to William, was a virtue, not a vice. To him, it was all fair game. Rules were for little people too weak and afraid to break them. In the rare chance he did get into any serious trouble, he knew there was always a fix. This he had learned from certain politicians in recent years who never went to prison, despite all their bad behavior and multiple indictments.

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Like many ruthless businessmen, William was fearless and not afraid to gamble. He was good at winning, but more importantly, he wasn’t afraid of losing—not even life itself. “What’s the worst that can happen to you?” he would brazenly say. “Because if it’s dying, well, I’ve done that. You just come back and go another round!”

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After the acquisition of his company, William took his millions, walked away, and vied for a lead position in the upcoming AI world. “I skate where the puck is going,” he would say. At the same time, William was trying to emulate the life he’d previously had—the lavish parties, real estate, cars, boats, wardrobe, and escorts. There was plenty of ripe fruit to be picked, and he would eat it with such relish that you could almost see it dripping down his chin.

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But despite his playboy lifestyle, he worked hard, built an extensive network of connections, found himself on some important company boards, and made his own investments in what he saw as the future. Some of his investments paid back handsomely, while others were a complete loss. Later, having burned too many bridges at home because of his petulant ways, he would do some consulting for the Chinese, who were always grappling for insider knowledge to give them an edge on the global stage. Eventually, William would get involved in some pretty shading dealings. Once, he even had the FBI knocking on his door.

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Some years later, thrice married and thrice divorced, living in a small, rented apartment by himself, William agreed to do an interview with a young journalist who was doing a Where are they now? piece about entrepreneurs who had made it big while still in their twenties. At the end of the interview, the journalist asked if there was anything he would have done differently in his career.

“Nope, not really,” he answered defiantly. “Life for me is just a bowl of fruit, which, it seems, I have eaten all up. But there’s always next season. There’s always another.”

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Continue to Part V: Jayden

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