The Broken Window

“Hello, Tony,” he said to a janitor, who was emptying the contents of shredded documents into a large plastic bag. “Did you see the game?”

“No, Andrew, I missed it. Had too much to do.”

“Maybe we should start three-day weekends,” Sterling joked.

“I’d vote for that, Andrew.”

And they continued down the hall.

Sachs didn’t think she knew as many in the NYPD as Sterling said hello to in their five-minute walk.

The decor of the company was minimal: some small, tasteful photographs and sketches-none in color-overwhelmed by the spotless white walls. The furniture, also black or white, was simple-expensive Ikea. It was a statement of some kind, she guessed, but she found it bleak.

As they walked, she ran through what she’d learned last night, after saying good night to Pam. The man’s bio, patched together from the Web, was sparse. He was an intensely reclusive man-a Howard Hughes, not a Bill Gates. His early life was a mystery. She’d found no references at all to his childhood, or his parents. A few sketchy pieces in the press had put him on the radar at age seventeen, when he’d had his first jobs, mostly in sales, working door-to-door and telemarketing, moving up to bigger, more expensive products. Finally computers. For a kid with “7/8 of a bachelor’s degree from a night school,” Sterling told the press, he found himself a successful salesman. He’d gone back to college, finishing the last one-eighth of the degree and completing a master’s in computer science and engineering in short order. The stories were all very Horatio Alger and included only details that boosted his savvy and status as a businessman.

Then, in his twenties, had come the “great awakening,” he said, sounding like a Chinese communist dictator. Sterling was selling a lot of computers but not enough to satisfy him. Why wasn’t he more successful? He wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t stupid.

Then he realized the problem: He was inefficient.

And so were a lot of other salesmen.

So Sterling learned computer programming and spent weeks of eighteen-hour days, in a dark room, writing software. He hocked everything and started a company, one based on a concept that was either foolish or brilliant: Its most valuable asset wouldn’t be owned by his company but by millions of other people, much of it free for the taking-information about themselves. Sterling began compiling a database that included potential customers in a number of service and manufacturing markets, the demographics of the area in which they were located, their income, marital status, the good or bad news about their financial and legal and tax situations, and as much other information-personal and professional-as he could buy, steal or otherwise find. “If there’s a fact out there, I want it,” he was quoted as saying.

The software he wrote, the early version of the Watchtower database management system, was revolutionary at the time, an exponential leap over the famed SQL-pronounced “sequel,” Sachs had learned-program. In minutes Watchtower would decide which customers would be worthwhile to call on and how to seduce them, and which weren’t worth the effort (but whose names might be sold to other companies for their own pitches).

The company grew like a monster in a science fiction film. Sterling changed the name to SSD, moved it to Manhattan and began to collect smaller companies in the information business to add to his empire. Though unpopular with privacy rights organizations, there’d never been a hint of a scandal at SSD, à la Enron. Employees had to earn their salaries-no one received obscenely high Wall Street bonuses-but if the company profited, so did they. SSD offered tuition and home-purchasing assistance, internships for children, and parents were given a year of maternity or paternity leave. The company was known for the familial way it treated its workers and Sterling encouraged hiring spouses, parents and children. Every month he sponsored motivational and team-building retreats.

The CEO was secretive about his personal life, though Sachs learned that he didn’t smoke or drink and that no one had ever heard him utter an obscenity. He lived modestly, took a surprisingly small salary and kept his wealth in SSD stock. He shunned the New York social scene. No fast cars, no private jets. Despite his respect for the family unit among SSD employees, Sterling was twice divorced and unmarried at the moment. There were conflicting reports about children he’d fathered in his youth. He had several residences but he kept their whereabouts out of the public record. Perhaps because he knew the power of data, Andrew Sterling appreciated its dangers too.