COMPUTERBUCKS!!!
“I bet Elon and Thiel are crying in their beers!!”
Garith liked the way emails could capture Mike’s characteristic excited chatter.
“But really though, we actually have a real shot at this… Online payment is the future of commerce and we’ll be the ones printing the money. E-commerce will be huge!!! Great job in there today. NOW. LET’S. GO. MAKE. BIG. BILSKI!!”
Garith wanted to be excited. He WAS excited, but also more nervous than he’d ever been. The prototype he had pitched yesterday had been a bit of a sleight of hand. He had pre-loaded the shredder cache so that the machine didn’t actually have to shred the BUCKS as they fed in.
Shredding, of course, was easy enough, and worked perfectly well in his other prototypes. But for this demo, Mike had insisted on using the design mock as the prototype, saying that we had to show a product no bigger than a CD-ROM drive. Otherwise, he said, they wouldn’t be able to visualize how it would slot neatly into a Compaq Presario Desktop. He outfitted the prototype with a light servomotor to feed in the bill, and when the cache door opened, it looked like it had been shredded. He was sure he could figure out how to fit a durable shredder in by the time they shipped in six months.
Maybe he could, maybe he couldn’t — it would sell anyway. A paper slot on your computer that would allow you to pay for online items with REAL* paper money? Who cared how big it was?
*well, paper COMPUTERBUCKS fiat currency that could be purchased at any Walmart or Sam’s Club nationwide…
He kicked back in his chair and allowed himself a moment to dream as he reacquainted with their original product vision.
- Families huddled around a desktop, eagerly shoving BUCKS into their computer to play arcade games…
- Senior citizens smiling dentureless with delight at how well the COMPUTERBUCKS cash slot was able to read the crumpled up BUCKS they liked to keep in their shoes.
- His wife sitting in their home computer room, looking glamorous with her sun hat and shades on, pushing COMPUTER BUCKS into the BUCKS slot on a luxurious cyber-shopping excursion.
And all without the risk of identity theft, which, as Mike had stated in his investor pitch, was estimated to be 98% likely for any given online credit card transaction.
A new name came to mind as he mused — THE CYBERBUCK??
