Happy Friday, and this is the seventh installment of Maybe It Was Destiny.
Preface and Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 IF YOU FAIL TO PLAN, BLAH BLAH BLAH This was the last part of my personal plan, answering Dr. Anthony's last question, "I will keep what mental attitude throughout?" This is goofy and rah-rah, I know. But then and in the coming years, I would look at this meditation during the periodic dark times of Casa Integration. It would typically bring on tears, but good and inspirational ones.
Because the worst was mostly over, and that's due to two people. They began to help me fill in the hammer-and-nail stuff I was lacking. IT WAS DAVID AND DAVID Like the company's clients, I will return with more on the Men of Casa Integration. But at this critical time, two former colleagues, one from Epigraphx and one from Charles Schwab, pitched in and taught me the ropes. The home contractor ropes - the ones I so blithely had ignored needing.
Oh, and they made me realize that virtually all installations require two people.
All of this turned out to be so important that David Rusconi and David Federico - along with my wife - were foundational to the success of Casa Integration. To keep it simple, I will refer to them mostly as R and F.
The fact that it was R was something because I had mentored him over 10 years ago at Epigraphx, a company I co-founded in the early 1990s. He had gone on to far greater things, including running massive teams at Microsoft, but he had left there and was now hanging around and had time on his hands.
Thank fucking God.
Tim Guleri, then as now a big-deal venture capitalist, had received one of my direct mail pieces and given me a call. He described an exciting project: He wanted to transform his pool house into a proper front-projection theater, with serious surround sound.
By this time, in 2005, my confidence was growing, so I wasn't that intimidated by the work. And by then I had already seen some fairly stunning homes, so I wasn't too impressed when a servant buzzed in me through the driveway gate. Let's call the neighborhood Not Quite Atherton.
In later years when I'd return, I had grown sophisticated enough to recognize that the build quality of Guleri's home was lacking. It was an impressive place, but the finish work wasn't what it should have been.
Tim was a perfectly nice enough guy, but as many in his position do, he knew what he wanted. In this case, what he wanted was to supply a lot of his own gear - I vividly remember going to a fancy stereo shop in San Mateo and picking up a gorgeous Classé preamp and amplifier, which Tim had already bought. But he did need a projector, a projection screen, and a control system, all of which I could now properly procure. And the installation work. It was a large project, especially for the nascent Casa Integration.
And holy shit, he wanted a motorized projection screen and he wanted the thing recessed into the ceiling. In his pool house.
The cool thing about David Rusconi was that he was almost as into the A/V and techno-geek side of the business as I was. And he was brilliant, AND he knew his way around jobsites - and Home Depot.
By this time, R had done a few smaller projects with me - mostly helping hoist TVs into place and holy shit were flatscreen TVs heavy at their inception.
But it was on the Guleri install that he revealed his real chops. After some on-site study, he knew just how to install the ginormous motorized screen housing into a ceiling. A quick trip to the soon-to-be-reviled Home Depot, and we were off. It took about 8 hours, but it was done.
But it also involved my first extended visit of many to hot, sweaty attics. Because that's where the screen and projector's cabling had to go. So we did, too.
I found out a lot of what I was going to do took place in attics. Which can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.
Tim had also purchased an A/V rack, the first one I had ever used. Another teaching moment, as I didn't even know they existed. How embarrassing, although I pretended I knew all about them. I did a lot of that then.
The electronics went into the rack and after several hours of other necessary work, it was time. I pushed the virtual On button on the first touchscreen control system I had ever programmed, one just like this.
It mostly worked, astoundingly. The screen came down, the projector turned on, and soon, the razor-sharp image from the new-fangled DVD player was onscreen. I couldn't believe it, nor could I believe the gonzo sound - it was the best I had heard in a home to date.
I hadn't done it - it was the gear. But yet?
There was immense satisfaction in completing this install: you're in a luxe pool house in one of the nicest neighborhoods in America, cranking gear you had worked your ass off to properly implement, and envisioning the years of pleasure that work had created.
I will return to this subject as completing Soup-to-Nuts projects in the world's finest homes was better than any drug high. Because it was Maslow and self-actualization come to life, and I couldn't get enough.
But a problem that would repeat itself for at least the next 5 years first reared up here, in Tim Guleri's pool house: There was some kind of electronic interference that made the wireless touchscreen pictured above less-than-perfectly dependable when doing things like changing channels or controlling volume.
Tim was as patient as anyone else in the previous chapter's Clients section. A good thing, because although I was able to get the touchscreen to be mostly reliable, it was never perfect. Even in the earliest days, that shit drove me crazy; I wanted it fucking right.
Keep that in mind as we go forward because once I had mostly licked the control system problem, on came HDMI, and . . . well, we'll get there.
In a scene that repeats itself with others throughout this story, I practically begged R to become my full partner. "Let's do this together. We're both white-collar guys that enjoy the blue-collar stuff, and the customers are all hardcore white-collar, so they'll like us."
But David Rusconi had grown up in near poverty on San Francisco's Peninsula. Now, with his impressive CV, he was poised to make the leap to salary hyperspace, and he told me so.
"Look, I fucking love this. I can see the money we can make. I can see the need, and holy fuck is it great not being in an office, and in sick homes instead. But when I was a kid, I would walk by HP and dream of being there. Making a great living. With a nice place and some kids.
"Dude, everything has aligned for that, and they just made me an offer."
I completely understood and respected his decision. But I was still bummed. R was gone.
Yet it was David Federico that came much closer to becoming a partner. He was able to moonlight a bit from Schwab, and he ended up doing that quite often over the better part of one year; his involvement overlapped with R's, but I don't think they met until well after Rusconi had left for HP.
F was invaluable, and he knew even more about residential construction than R had. He and I would go on to do several projects together, and he taught me much about working on construction sites.
I will bring this to life with something of which I remain quite proud: What follows comes from a photo book a client (Bryan Hansen) made as a gift to me after our installation. That's F holding the ladder, and as I will describe soon, this is called a retrofit. In this case, that meant running cabling from the AV cabinet, over the roof, and to the location for a new arm-mounted 50" plasma TV and new-for-the-time speaker bar. F figured this all out, but alas, being my company, I had to do the climbing and roof work. I still drive by this home today and chuckle. The work in the cabinet took hours. There were the sources for the flatscreen TV, and 4 zones of audio (in English, 4 rooms with speakers that could play music). The client liked the finished product.
I have a vivid vision of finishing another day of work here, and Bryan and his pretty wife exiting their bedroom all dolled up. They were going to a newly-opened and supposedly posh steak house in our neighborhood.
After a couple of years of not making any money, it was fun looking at them knowing I was beginning to be able to go out to dinner again. Like them.
We had a lot of fun and did some cool installs. As such, F came quite close to leaving Schwab and becoming my partner. But in the end, it wasn't in the cards and he stayed put. I don't think David F was entrepreneurial, and as I wrote earlier, that matters.
Which was scary because now, I had nobody I could depend upon, just as things were starting to happen.
Enter one Mr. Larry. But not without an explanation of what "a project" or "an install" was and what it meant.
THE REAL WORK BEGINS Projects fell intotwo categories: Retrofits and New Construction.
The photos above tell you a lot of what you need to know about retrofits. Many of those that I did over the coming 12 or so years would involve some or all of what you see: Challenging wire runs; putting old and new gear in old or new cabinets or racks; mounting TVs; installing speakers, and providing and programming one remote control to run it all.
But Julie, me, and those who worked with me for any time would come to know them by another name: Bread & Butter. That's because these typically one- or two-day projects would typically net a gross profit of $1,000 or more - sometimes quite a bit more. They became my proverbial bread and butter because it was these projects that put food on our table. And also paid our rent.
I honestly don't know how many of these I and we did. I know it was a lot.
But the fact is, those projects can suck, big-time, for any of the reasons you're imagining and many others you can't. Like, have you ever been in the crawl space under a house only to learn an earthquake had occurred at the same time elsewhere in the Bay Area? While you were in the dirty and dank crawlspace?
Which is why I was only too happy to start getting more and more new construction projects. These were new homes where Casa Integration would specify and install all of the technology. Wiring, WiFi, surveillance cameras, intercoms, speakers, TVs, and controls for it all; if it wasn't high-voltage electrical or an alarm system, we'd likely take it on. This would cost clients anywhere from $25,000 to well over $100,000, and were lucrative endeavors for me, to say the least. While I had known nothing about the specific business, I did know to keep overhead close to zero, and billing $75/hour (later, $100, and in the last couple of years, $125/hour) for days on end adds up in that environment.
So like the Bread & Butter gigs, a name was given to these highly desirable projects: Soup-to-Nuts. But one doesn't land this relatively glamourous work from the get-go: You prove yourself in the industry by doing retrofits.
Indeed, my first real, honest-to-God new home installation didn't occur until late 2005 and went into 2006. That was the Charles Semba project, in a beautiful new home in Palo Alto, and do you remember the picture of a fat me in Tuscany in 2006 from the preface?
Doing Charlie Semba's Soup-to-Nuts project enabled it.
That included flying business class to and from - but more on that perk later. For now, here's a picture of the completed home several years later, compliments of Google Maps. I bet Tina Semba gets a kick out of being captured carrying in the family groceries. She, and Charlie, were beyond nice people; what a lovely family. But I still had a lot more retrofits to do, and learning, too: A project at this time would take me to the emergency room, not Tuscany, the result of not knowing what clothes to wear.
Next: RETROFITS IN REDWOOD ATTICS
FROM THE UNWASHED MASSES
We spent a classic SF afternoon and early evening last night with André Aurich, of the Tiburon Aurich's. We popped into Diamond CertifiedSF MoMA so André could see the absolutely stunning and soon-to-close exhibit Art of Noise. In fact, it is so bad-ass, I will be featuring it in an upcoming post.
But that wasn't all that happened; André described a domestic student exchange program that intrigued me. Kids from rural Texas towns go to urban LA, and vice versa. He was kind enough to share news of its success, and this article, from The Los Angeles Times.
Yes! KLUF for the win! Perfectly titled, Killer, and a major bonus: Its song "These Are The Fables" was used to test virtually every sound system I installed from this point forward, including Charlie Semba's. Here are New Pornographers (yes, again) and 2005's Twin Cinema. Why that song? Listen to the drums (timpani?), and the Neko Case vocal.
