Broken Fact: Lane Sharman's Business Practice

The Original Story:
While enjoying a nice, and perhaps romantic, relationship with her boss Lane Sharman, Fu Ping nonetheless despised the latter's business practice of frequent and outrageous over-billing of their clients. On Pages 64-65 of Drifting Bottle, she detailed her dilemma and hurt in the face of the questionable ethics:

On my first service job, I behaved like an honest fool. That night, a secretary at a law firm called, crying for help. None of their computers was working. She was preparing briefs for the next day. I took off with my toolbox and found out it was an issue of power supply. Once replaced, computers were working again. 

I reported to Lan the next day. Unexpectedly, he got very angry. He did not say a word but walked away. I only learned from other coworkers that I was not supposed to have told the truth to the secretary. The smart consultant would pretend to examine everything, send the secretary home, and then fix the machines by morning. Then we would be able to issue a bill of $1,000 to the firm. The way I fixed it, we would only get $100. 

This kind of job was terrible to me. But I had to do what the boss told us to do for survival. If the company could not make money, it would also be our misfortune. 

... 

More and more, Lan becomes happy with my work. But whenever he was the happiest, I was in the most pain. Those clients who paid high fees were mostly kind, trustful, or ignorant. I could not feel the happiness of success dealing with them, but only guilty and shame. Lan told me that I did not know how to separate work from feelings, which meant that I did not know how to enjoy life. Maybe he was right. 

第一次出门，我就做了一个诚实的大傻瓜。那天深夜，一个律师事务所的秘书带着哭腔打来电话，事务所里的计算机全都不工作了，她正在为第二天出庭准备材料。我马上带着工具赶到事务所，一查是电源线的问题。换上一根，计算机马上恢复正常。 

第二天向蓝汇报工作，谁知他满脸乌云。欲言又止，一句好话没说，掉脸走了。向别的员工打听才知道，我是不该告诉律师的秘书实情的。聪明的顾问会假装东摸西摸，把秘书打发回家，第二天早上机器修好了，便可寄一张一千美元的账单给律师。像我这样半个小时就修好的只能收一百美元。 

这种工作对我太不适合了。为了生存又无法不按照老板的规矩去做。公司挣不到钱，也是我们员工的不幸。 

…… 

蓝对我的工作越来越满意。他最高兴的时候总是我最痛苦的时候。那些多付了很多费用的顾客，大多是善良、轻信或无知的顾客。和他们做生意，我无法感到成功的喜悦，有的只是内疚与惭愧。蓝说我不懂得如何分离工作与感情，这说明我不懂得如何享受生活。也许他是对的，我太多情。

The Debunking:
On April 4, 2013, Lane Sharman himself entered a comment on the NYT blog site:

Everyone, 

This is Lane Sharman. 

I have to confess that I am very saddened to be accused of promoting dishonesty.
I have a long record of developing trusted relationships with people across all types of business. I practice the golden rule. 

I can defend myself on the basis of a long record of fair dealings with all people, from all walks of life and from all ethnicities. 

Thank you,
Lane

To which Fu Ping responded on April 10:

Lane, I am sorry your integrity is questioned by people who don't know you or me. Let me state publicly here. Lane is one of my heros and I love him dearly. My success today was significantly influenced by learning from him and by his compassion and support of me when I was a struggling new immigrant and a student.  

Taking content out of context from a Chinese book with censorship in China, disregard what I wrote in Bend, Not Break, to attack Lane's integrity is wrong.

I wrote the Chinese book, which is a collection of essays, using material of first 10 years of my life and observations in America in early 90s. The book was heavily controlled and edited by a Chinese state owned publication house and I was limited to what I can write. Anything not allowed in China then was deleted or altered.  

In Bend, Not Break, I openly admitted my ignorance and poked fun of myself for what I wrote in the Chinese book: (p131-132) 

If there is anything in the Chinese book that can be read as questioning Lane's integrity or honesty, that is entirely my fault. I was clueless about business and entrepreneurship at that time and I carried imprint by years of brain washing during CR. It only illustrates my ignorance.  

Lane is one of the most outstanding people who I had the fortune to work for long time ago, I learned a lot from him. His integrity and kindness are self-evident through what I wrote in Bend, Not Break and from people who know him.  

Ping

It's rather puzzling how Chinese censorship would have played a role in the paragraphs Fu Ping wrote in that book. Was Fu Ping claiming that the Chinese government made her do it?!

Questionable Fact: Lane Sharman's Romantic Interest in Fu Ping

The Original Story:
In her earlier auto-biography Drifting Bottle, Fu Ping told a slightly different version of her relationship with her first employer, Lane Sharman. She affectionately called him "Lan(蓝)" in Chinese, meaning "blue." The chapter is titled "Blue Feeling, Blue Dream".

When they first met, Fu Ping commented that Lane's eyes are "blue like the ocean water." (P. 61) After her job interview at Lane's office the next day, Lane made a point to tell her, "I am a married man." (P. 63) They enjoyed frequent lunch dates by the seaside. (P. 70)

The Debunking:
These material, which clearly indicated a romantic interest between Lane Sharman and Fu Ping, did not show up in Bend, Not Break, which by itself is rather curious.

Sexual harassment at work place had not yet become a hot issue in 1986. In a small company like Lane Sharman's, it's hard to say what could be going on. But a male boss telling a female job candidate his marriage status seems to be out of line regardless.

What is more shocking is, of course, this "romance" happened around the exact same time that Fu Ping entered a secret marriage, giving more credence that the marriage was probably a sham.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Missed Opportunity of Getting Rich

The Original Story:
When Fu Ping was graduating from UCSD, she decided to leave her job with Lane Sharman and pursue opportunities in big cooperation. On Pages 69-70 of Bend, Not Break, she recalled:

Lane did everything he could to talk me out of my decision, including warning me that big companies aren't nearly as interesting places to work as start-ups. When I refused to reconsider, he said, "If you stay, I'll give you 5 percent of the company." I had no idea what a generous offer this was. Above all, given how hard I had worked to put myself through school, I felt I simply couldn't refuse the Bell Labs opportunity because it had offered to pay for my PhD. Lane and I parted on the best of terms. 

Six months later, Lane called. He had sold his company to AT&T, the parent company of Bell Labs. I finally understood what 5 percent meant: millions.

The Earlier Story:
In Drifting Bottle, however, Fu Ping said Lane Sharman's offer was five percent of the company's profit. (P. 80)

The Debunking:
If 5 percent meant millions, the simple math tells us that Lane Sharman's company was sold for at least 40 millions.

Shockingly, that was news to Lane Sharman himself. In an email to Albert Wang, he stated:

Factually, I did not sell Resource System Group and earn millions! I wish! 

I sold and licensed software and made some very modest income from my work as a software engineer.

Lane Sharman's version is more credible with Fu Ping's own description of the job and company in her book. It is impossible to believe that his company could be worth tens of millions. In comparison, decades later, Fu Ping's own and much celebrated company, Geomagic, was reportedly sold for $55 millions.

If Lane Sharman were already selling his company or at least had that intention at the time, it would make no business sense to pay such a hefty price to retain an employee. Non-business considerations might have played a role. But the more reasonable explanation is that the five-percent was not worth that much.

Questionable Fact: Fu Ping's Employment Income at San Diego

The Original Story:
Some time around the summer of 1986, Fu Ping decided to drop out the University of New Mexico and move to San Diego. When she failed to enroll into UCSD upon arrival there, she happened upon Lane Sharman, an entrepreneur who offered her first "real job." She told the story on Pages 67-70 in Bend, Not Break:

A handsome, thirty-something man walking along the sand approached me and asked if I'd like to walk with him. I said yes... 

...He introduced himself as Lane Sharman, and explained that he was the owner of a computer software company, Resources Systems Group. He gave me his card and told me to stop by if I needed a job. 

...He offered me a job as a computer programmer at fifteen dollars an hour. I enthusiastically accepted. 

... 

Lane asked one day if any of us would be willing to work nights. We would earn double our usual hourly rate, he said, and get paid for every hour that we were on call, regardless of whether a service request came in. I immediately volunteered... 

For the next two years, I answered calls in the middle of the night, mostly from legal clerks working at law firms that handled time-critical court cases. I would drive to the clients' offices during the wee hours and fix their hardware or software problems, which sometimes meant simply rebooting their system. By the time I graduated, I was earning close to eighty thousand dollars a year.

The Debunking:
The income of eighty thousand dollars a year, for an undergraduate student in 1986, is a pretty impressive sum. For an hourly job, it roughly translates to $40 an hour pay rate for a 40 hour per week full time job. Fu Ping was however a full time student who worked part-time.

But her figure may not be totally out of line. She could be paid double (with a rate of $20 per hour) for every hour at night, assuming that she has the on call job all by herself almost every night. It is just very unusual for a small company willing to pay such a high salary to an essentially intern job.

Fu Ping as Inc. Entrepreneur of the Year

In 2005, Inc. selected Fu Ping as its Entrepreneur of the Year and published a comprehensive report on her work and life. This lengthy profile, written by John Brant, was perhaps the very first time Fu Ping told the current version of her story and served a nice prelude to her book Bend, Not Break.

The highlights in this Inc. story:

1. Fu Ping "attended no school at all between the ages of 7 and 18." "she was educated through torture, exile, and imprisonment..." 
2. "In February 1981, without a trial or even a formal charge, the Chinese government locked 23-year-old Ping Fu in solitary confinement, in a wing of Nanjing prison reserved for political criminals..."
3. "When Ping was 7 years old and her sister, Hong, 3, the two little girls were taken from their home in Shanghai and delivered to a dormitory for the children of so-called "capitalist-road" parents in Nanjing. It was 1965, the dawn of the Cultural Revolution."
4. "Ping was forced to watch the Red Guards tie a kindergarten teacher to four horses. The Guard members -- just teenagers themselves -- then startled the horses."
5. "Ping was forced to watch another teacher be dropped head-first down a dry well."
6. "She watched the Red Guard scald her little sister with boiling water because one day Hong made too much noise as she played."
7. "Another day, the Red Guard threw Hong into a river for the fun of watching her drown. Ping jumped into the river and dragged her out. The enraged Guard members then beat the girls, and raped Ping."
8. "Ping entered the university in Suzhou. She hoped to study business or engineering, following in the footsteps of her engineer father and accountant mother, but the Party directed her to study English as a second language."
9. "For two years she traveled through rural China, visiting hundreds of towns and villages, interviewing hospital staffers, barefoot doctors, and citizens..." to investigate the rumored epidemic of infanticide.
10. "In 1980, she delivered her findings to her professor. A few months later, in January 1981, Shanghai's largest newspaper published a report based on Ping's research. The report was widely praised, although credit, of course, accrued to senior government officials. The story was subsequently published nationwide in People's Daily, then picked up by the international media... The global community was outraged. The United Nations imposed sanctions on China."
11. "'You must never say a word about your involvement in this project,' the official told her. 'You are forbidden to engage in any political activity. You will never return to China, but your family remains here. If in any way you disobey these instructions, your family will suffer the consequences. Have I made myself clear, Comrade?... she was being deported to the United States."
12. "Two weeks later, Ping boarded a United Airlines flight from Shanghai to San Francisco."
13. "She was being sent to the University of New Mexico -- she didn't know why New Mexico."
14. "Ping knew three shreds of English: please, thank you, and help."
15. "Officials had issued her the ticket to San Francisco, and $80 in traveler's checks to get her to Albuquerque."
16. "She spent the 12-hour flight alternatively staring out the window and pouring out her thoughts by scribbling notes on paper napkins. She didn't have writing paper and did not know how to ask for any. When the flight attendant offered her food or drink, Ping shook her head no, and pointed to the stack of cocktail napkins."
17. A lengthy description of the bizarre Vietnamese-American kidnapping tale 
18. A lengthy description of how Fu Ping met Lan Sharman who offered her a part-time job with a six-figure annual income. Sharman even offered her a 5% stake in his company to keep her from leaving, which she declined.
19. "She was Andreessen's boss as he developed the Mosaic Internet Browser that blossomed into Netscape -- she says she suggested that he work on a browser."
20. [Before she met and eventually married Herbert Edelsbrunner] "She had made many friends in America, but no intimate ones, and had allowed no man to get close to her. Outwardly warm and exuberant, Ping felt frozen inside."
21. "In 1968, when Ping was 10, her mother was permitted to return to Nanjing. (Her father was retained in the camp.) The homecoming, however, was far from the tender reunion that Ping had fantasized. Rather than comfort her daughter, the woman, half-crazed by her own exile and suffering, persecuted her."