He had lived at his parents’ house for a year and had gone without regular paychecks while pursuing deals with companies like Microsoft and AOL, only to watch them invariably fall through. ‘Imagine hearing “no” a hundred times a day for six years straight,’ he told me years later. ‘At some point even your friends are like, “Dude, you need to do something else.” To keep going in the face of that can be a lonely existence.’
