Author: Tom Evslin

ISBN: 0977464601

The following interview was conducted by: NORM GOLDMAN:  Editor of Bookpleasures. CLICK TO VIEW  Norm Goldman's Reviews  

To read Norm's Review of hackoff.com CLICK HERE

Thanks Tom for participating in our interview.

Norm:

Tom, could you tell us something about yourself and how did hackoff.com come about?

Tom:

I am a serial startup guy and CEO (retired).  The final company my wife and I founded was the wholesale VoIP carrier ITXC in 1997.  It went public at the height of the late great Internet bubble in 1999.  Our stock soared to over ten times the offering price and then plunged with the rest of the market.  We were the object of a hostile takeover attempt (rebuffed); we lived with investment bankers; I got to see the greed, fear, and exuberance of the bubble from the inside.

I promised myself that someday I would write a book about the strange world I got to know so intimately. When we sold the company, I had time to do that.  The book is hackoff.com.

Norm:

What happened to your company?

Tom:

ITXC was acquired by the former Canadian international carrier which had itself been bought out of bankruptcy by Cerberus (nice name!), an investment firm.  Last year the former Indian monopoly VSNL bought Teleglobe so now ITXC is the Internet part of VSNL.

Norm:

How much real-life did you put into hackoff.com? Is there much “you” in there?

Tom:

Hackoff.com is fiction: it starts with a dead CEO and I’m alive to tell the story.  But you can only write what you know.  There is some of me in the obnoxious CEO Larry Lazard; some of me in super nerd and hacker Dom Montain.

The meetings with investment bankers, the roadshow in the corporate jet, the heady days at World Economic Forum in Davos, the hostile takeover attempt are all things I experienced if not exactly the way they’re told in the book.

Norm:

How did you choose the title hackoff.com?

Tom:

Hackoff.com is an anti-hacker software company – NOT the business I was in.  Hackoff also has an unusual business plan of accepting equity in its customers instead of cash in payment for its product so its fortunes soar doubly with the Internet bubble.

There’s a pun in the title, of course.

I had to buy the URL hackoff.com from a porno site so I could make the pseudo company website which goes with the book.  A problem I didn’t anticipate was that many company filters blocked hackoff.com because of its history as a porno site.  Lots of people wanted to read the Internet serialization of the book at work so had to work hard to get the URL cleared. 

Norm:

Initially, did you have a difficult time fleshing out your characters?

Tom:

To my surprise and delight, they fleshed themselves out. A good day of writing was almost like taking dictation.  I wanted to tell the characters “slow down! I can’t type that fast.”

Sometimes the characters developed in ways I hadn’t anticipated so I had to go back and revise the plot – it is a murder mystery, after all – to make it consistent with the characters.

Norm:

Since the dot.com burst, have the security laws changed and if so how? Would you like to see any further changes that would protect investors?

Tom:

The biggest change in the security laws has been Sarbanes-Oxley.  Parts of it codified what most people would assume is true anyway – that a CEO and CFO are personally responsible for what their company reports. Probably was necessary to write that into law looking at recent history.

Parts of Sarbanes-Oxley are overkill which actually results in making it harder for startups to compete with incumbents.  A few million dollars a year in extra accounting fees is nothing to AT&T.  It can be and often is enough to prevent a competitor with a better product from tapping public financing.

Interestingly, the successful prosecutions of abuses like the Enron case or the backdating of stock option grants are under law that already existed.  The important thing is to enforce that law.

I don’t think abuses by investment bankers – especially the conflict of interest between their analysts and those who market stock offerings – have been fully cured.  This doesn’t take new law in my judgment but does require very complex law enforcement.

Norm:

What challenges or obstacles did you encounter while writing your book? How did you overcome these challenges?

Tom:

F. Scott Fitzgerald said you have to write so many pages a day.  I wrote four. This turns into a book pretty soon.

My father Bernard Evslin, who was a writer, said that “writer’s block” comes from trying to think of a good first sentence.  But no one says you have to write the first sentence first.  Just write.  Sometimes you’ll throw most of it away but just write.  You can do the opening sentence last – probably should. I took his advice.

Hemingway said always stop writing each day when you know what comes next so it’ll be easy to start the next day.

Norm:

You write with a very vivid and descriptive style. Do you use any particular techniques to help with your writing or to help flesh out descriptive imagery? Are there any writers you admire or look to for inspiration?

Tom:

Thanks.

Someone, I think it was Guy de Maupassant, said to throw away all the adjectives and adverbs.  I often went back and took them out in favor of precise and direct nouns and verbs.

I wrote in the present tense because the bubble was a “now” time.  Also let my characters speak for themselves and never got into their heads. I didn’t write “he thought” or “she thought”.  I might write another book differently but these were the main rules for this one.  Characters reveal themselves (or lie) in dialog.

Besides the writers I mentioned, I particularly like John Updike, Scott Turow, Howard Frank Mosher, and P. D. James as modern fiction writers.  Andy Kessler writes non-fiction but his dialog is great.

Norm:

Does hackoff.com have a broader objective than simply entertaining or storytelling? If so, can you talk more about that mission and what you hope readers will take away from reading your book?

Tom:

I wrote the book because I wanted to tell a story.  My father said we come from a long line of village story tellers but, since he was story teller himself, I can’t be sure.  I saw amazing things.  I wrote what I saw.

People tell me they are fascinated to know what “really” happened inside the bubble.  Some say they’ll be wiser investors next time after reading hackoff.com.

Norm:

What would you say is Larry Lazard’s biggest strength? His greatest weakness?

Tom:

Larry’s greatest strength is his conviction that every problem has a cure, that every setback is an opportunity.  He turned a jail term into a business.

His weaknesses are that he is a bully so people don’t tell him the truth, his obsession with stock price.  Can’t tell more without giving away too much of the plot.

Norm:

It is said that if you want to write a good story or novel you need to create struggles of powerful descriptive individuals and not just issues. Through their accomplishments and travail, we very much comprehend the issues? Do you agree with this and how does it apply in the case of Larry Lazard?  

Tom:

I do agree.

I wrote the book as an historical mystery because I like to read historical mysteries.  For me, it’s fun to learn about a time which shapes characters in the context of trying to figure out who dunnit.

Larry and the other characters are shaped by the times they live in; they are creatures of the bubble and rubble.

Norm:

Did you do any additional research when writing this book, aside from your experiences and journals, records, etc?

Tom:

I used Wikipedia extensively to research both mushrooms (a reader will see why) and the exact events of 9/11 which are a pivot for the book.  I checked Wikipedia against the 9/11 commission report.

I use Google almost automatically when I write and used it extensively in writing hackoff for everything from street addresses to newspaper stories.

Also spent a fair amount of time on the website of the SEC.

Norm:

When writing your book, did you ever have it in the back of your mind that you could turn it into a movie or television project?

Tom:

Yes.  There has been some interest.  We’ll see what happens.

Norm:

How have you used the Internet to market your book and how successful has it been?

Tom:

The Internet has been the main marketing vehicle for hackoff.com.  I serialized both the book and the podcast of the book free on the Internet as a “blook” – a term I helped popularize – before releasing the hard cover edition.  Tens of thousand of people have read and/or listened to it online at hackoff.com.  hackoff.com was a finalist for lulu.com’s blooker award.

It is hard for a debut novelist to get attention. Making the book available online helped with that problem.  I already had many readers for my non-fiction blog Fractals of Change (blog.tomevslin.com) and many of them became readers of my fiction as well.  Fellow bloggers have been very generous in reviewing and mentioning my book.

Norm:

Did you have any downfalls or negative experiences working with a publisher/agent, such as rejection letters? If so, how did you handle it?

Tom:

I decided to self-publish so I could start on the Internet the way I wanted to and didn’t submit hackoff.com to any traditional publishers.  So no rejection slips.

A disappointment but not a surprise is that main stream critics don’t review books that don’t come from established publishers.  A few years ago that would have meant that the publishers were all powerful gatekeepers.

But not today.

Blogger mentions attract readers in the same way that main stream reviews would have – perhaps better.  People can try the book online before buying.  It’s easy to get Amazon to sell your book although somewhat harder (but doable) to get distribution to book stores.

Sites like BookPleasures.com are very important.

As Chris Anderson writes in The Long Tail, a book – or a song or a movie – doesn’t have to be an instant hit or even a hit at all to find its audience today.  Amazon essentially has an unlimited book shelf.

Readers and writers find each other online without the intermediation of traditional gatekeepers.

Norm:

Is there anything else you wish to add that we have not covered?

Tom:

You’ve been very thorough.  Thanks.

Thanks once again and good luck with hackoff.com