Portrait of the Venture Capitalist as a Young Man

A friend from high school – Martin Schwab – passed away several months ago, but I didn’t learn about it until relatively recently. This belated eulogy adds to the chorus of his kin and friends’ laments.

I only knew Martin for about five years – high school – because we fell mostly out of touch thereafter: maintaining friendships is one of my “core incompetencies”. Most of his constellation of friends won’t have known him back then, so here are three moments that punctuate my memories of him.

I got to know Martin in the first weeks of grade 8 science. We worked in teams of 2 for lab reports, and I’d received a 7.5/10. There were whispers someone had gotten a 9.5, and, thinking it might be Martin, I introduced myself and we did our second lab report of the term together. It turned out he'd gotten a 7.5 like me. [The early overachiever turned out to be a fellow named Solomon Wong.]

It was in grade 8 gym class where I realized Martin had a canny eye for openings – no doubt it served him well in his investing career. The teacher had us play a dodgeball kind of game, and each team had a medic who could “heal” downed players by touching them.

Martin argued that our medic should be the smallest player on our side (Erick Wong, who had skipped two grades) and that he, our biggest player, should stand in front of Erick at all times and block all incoming balls. Being a human shield would have finished him off quick – but by holding Erick’s hand at all times, Martin was invulnerable because he would be instanteously revived. He’d spend the entire of the game swatting away balls like Super Mario after getting a gold star. Genius.

Martin and I were high school debate partners in grade 10, and I credit him for my one trip to the provincial debating finals. The resolution was to the effect that “be it resolved that professional athletes deserve to earn as much money as they do”.

Alone in the region and probably the province, Martin saw the opportunity in the resolution. Instead of preparing arguments for  “yes, they deserve it” and “no, they don’t”, he proposed that we put opposition teams off-balance. We would prepare arguments for “yes, they deserve to earn that much” and “no, they deserve to earn a lot more”. Not only would we stun opponents, we only had to do half the work! 😂

It was brilliant.

When our opponents argued that athletes deserved their earnings, all of their arguments worked in our favour. We embraced everything they said … and ran the ball further downfield.

One team spent part of their rebuttals saying we were cheating (the judges disagreed) and the other switched which set of index cards they were reading from, partway through the debate. The judges wound up adjudicating a debate which where the pro-side argued “professional athletes deserve what they earn … but not a penny more” while the anti-side argued  “professional athletes don’t deserve what they earn … because they deserve more”.

At lunch we were asked if we were “that crazy Churchill team which uses the same argument whether they’re arguing for or against”, a compliment/complaint I shall treasure forever.

I remain convinced that the judges awarded us bonus points (chutzpah points?) for Martin’s Einsteinian insight, on which basis we made it to the provincial finals that one year.

In the summer after Grade 10 the NHL held its 1990 draft in Vancouver. Martin asked if I wanted to go with him, and I readily agreed. Each season ticket holder received two priority admission tickets; the general public would be allowed in next, space permitting. Hoping to get to the front of the first-come, first-served line, we arrived a couple of hours early. As did seemingly half of Vancouver.

An hour into the marathon-of-standing I’d resigned myself to, somewhere in the middle-third of wannabe attendees, Martin appeared out of the drizzle and grabbed me, saying “I got tickets! Let’s go!”, and we ran straight in.

While I’d accepted my fate, Martin had set up camp just outside the entrance turnstiles. At one point, two season ticket holders appeared … with two priority admissions apiece. One of them had turned to ask if any of front-of-line plebs wanted a couple of priority admissions.

Defying all of our phys ed teachers’ feedback, Martin leapt forward with mongoose-like reflexes and plucked them. He’d maneuvered himself into the right place at the right time – as the saying goes, you have to good to be lucky – and got us access to the season ticket holders’ exclusive zone. I got future NHL superstar Jaromir Jagr’s autograph on the cover of a 1988-89 NHL statistical yearbook … which has long since been pulped and hopefully recycled.

Bound by the rigid rule-following of a youth ruled by maladaptive obsessions and compulsions (emphasis “disorder”) I stayed obediently within the greener pastures of the season ticket holders’ exclusive zone.

Martin, meanwhile, repeatedly bluffed his way into the restricted area limited to NHL coaches, staff and media, venturing back repeatedly, encouraging and pleading me to join him. Like many, I worry about overprescribing medications to youths, but in a world where I was diagnosed and in counselling, with pharmaceutically moderated impulses, I would have loved to have joined him.

I’ll choose to think that whenever it is I venture to the other side – hopefully in decades, not years – Martin, with his scintillating mind and preternatural ingenuity, will welcome me at the threshold of a gate unfathomably grander than that one marked “NHL staff and media”.

Miscellany:

I'd posted this essay to LinkedIn on August 7. By mathematical coincidence or Jungian synchronicity that would have been Martin's 52nd birthday.

A few years back I used "Portrait of the Con Artist as a Stung Man" as the title of a write-up on Elon Musk. It was a pseudonymous piece; his hype machine was at its apex at the time.