“I will kill you if you repeat this conversation,” Shlomo told me.

“I think this web thing is

going to be big.” This was 1995.

“I want to undercut all of the stores on the street and sell diamonds direct to people at
cheaper prices.” Shlomo was the wholesaler to all the retail shops in NYC’s diamond
district. “But my name can’t be anywhere on the site at all or else these guys here,” and he
waved his hand around his head, “will kill me”

I had $0 in the bank. I knew nothing about diamonds.

He showed me the “4 Cs”, he showed me what a GIA certificate was. He showed me his
spreadsheet of all the diamonds he had.

I told him we could make a website where people could search on price, any of the 4Cs, and
then I would generate a GIA certificate that would look like the diamond and people would
be able to buy directly.

I w“How long will it take?”

“About a month,” I said. But I had no clue. I had no idea how I was going to do this. If I did
this in C or C++ it would take me too much time.

At the time there were no tools for making websites. No Wordpress. No Python. No MySQL.
Nothing.

Everything had to be created from scratch.

And I had no idea how to generate graphics, like the certificate, on the fly.

But I had been living in New York for over a year and I was living on a foam futon in Astoria,
Queens with no other belongings and I wanted to make some money.

He was going to pay me $17,500 cash. I would be rich.

When I got to NYC I had an undergrad degree in Computer Science and had spent two years
in grad school for Computer Science.

After I got kicked out of grad school (another story) I then spent three years as a
programmer.

I had put in my 10,000 hours of programming.

I thought I was good.

When I got a job offer at HBO to work as a “junior analyst programmer” for $40,000 a year, I
took it! I was so happy.

HBO felt like the real world. New York City felt like the real world. I bought a suit. I wanted
my co-workers to like me so I would go down and talk when they took their cigarette breaks.
But I was awful at my job. I couldn’t do anything. It was so much harder than an academic
environment.

Whenever I asked “how can I do this?” my boss would say, “if you want to work here you
have to learn how to figure things out without asking.”

One time, only about a week after I started, he came into my cubicle. I had an 8x8 cubicle.
He breathed loudly and took up the entire cubicle.

My boss, Ken, spoke loudly enough so that everyone could hear. I turned red almost
instantly. I was hoping he would quiet down.

He said, “You are not doing well. But we want to give you a chance. We want you tp take a
month or two of remedial programming classes.” He gave me a pamphlet and told me to
sign up.

Everyone in the cubicles around me had all quieted down. Nobody was moving. I knew
everyone was listening.

I could’ve reached over right then and grabbed Ken’s neck and twisted it until he died. I
thought about doing it while he was talking.

If I were in prison I’d have an 10x10 cell and my own toilet. Here I was stuck in my 8x8
cubicle and I was being punished.

ould also make the content explaining the 4Cs and why each was important.