On the last Monday in August, Mike Rothenberg — millennial venture capitalist, virtual reality check-writer, unhappy title-holder of “The Valley’s Party Animal” — called an emergency meeting with his investors. More than one hundred limited partners in his venture funds showed up; they were invited to dial in by phone, but many flew in for the meeting, including his dad. Forty people crowded into the firm’s offices above a pizza shop in San Francisco’s SoMa district, passing the sign detailing a three-part plan to “Build Awesome Startups” and “Profit.”

Rothenberg, 32, greeted them with the confidence that comes from accomplishing significant things at a young age. A sandy-haired smiler with a firm handshake, he’d rocketed to prominence on a pedigree that touched all the bases in tech. He paired an Ivy League-endorsed intelligence with a star-studded network of college friends, many of whom had already started companies worth millions. When he founded Rothenberg Ventures in 2012, he leaned on this network for both investors and companies to invest in. He set out to bolster his new firm with spectacular events: BBQs with tutu-ed ponies or luau dancers, puppy parties, luxury boxes at Warriors and Giants games, a sponsored race car, and an all-day founder-and-investor soiree that involved renting out the Giants stadium every year. To keep his culture of “awesome” — a favorite adjective — he hired scores of millennials for sometimes below-market paychecks, once doling out VR headsets instead of bonuses, and relied on his instincts, aided by his team’s diligence, to get equity in companies with auspicious projections. To a degree, the strategy seemed to be working. The firm’s 100-company investment portfolio includes stakes in promising companies Robinhood, SpaceX, and Revel Systems.

Rothenberg Ventures

But by this summer, Rothenberg Ventures’ culture of awesome evaporated as it apparently ran out of operating money and came under federal scrutiny. The future of the firm — and the $50 million it has under management — is now up in the air as his investors wonder if he has lost control of his business. Rothenberg’s finance director quit in February. In late August, her replacement filed a lawsuit alleging that Rothenberg had asked him to charge business expenses on his personal AmEx — and then refused to reimburse him for charges totaling $109,000. The SEC is investigating the firm, triggering an exodus of employees. In mid-August, Rothenberg put every remaining employee except his lawyer on unpaid leave. On September 12 the firm dropped Rothenberg’s name from its title, replacing it with Frontier Tech Venture Capital.

Most troublesome are questions about how Rothenberg managed investors’ money. Specifically, in 2015 he founded a virtual reality production company called River Studios to create virtual reality videos for the likes of Coldplay and Björk, funding it with $5 million from Rothenberg Ventures. Many investors say they did not know — nor was it disclosed in annual reports — that he was founding and funding his own business with their dollars, despite the fact that the investment was roughly 50 times the size of the seed investments the firm normally makes.

Rothenberg insists that his accounting is in order, and he has hired an outside auditing firm to help him back up this claim. As for the mismanagement, he concedes, he wasn’t a very good manager. “I was overextended,” he said in one of three interviews with Backchannel. “I was putting too much focus on our portfolio companies and connecting the companies with our advisors and LPs, and not enough internally. I didn’t have the right controls. I didn’t hire and fire well.”

For all of the concerns that have been raised, Rothenberg kept his investor meeting to just 30 minutes, and did not invite people listening by phone to ask questions. He sketched out a plan for how he hoped to address the turmoil. “We have a portfolio we’re proud of, and there’s a better future,” he says that he told them. He also offered the rankled investors a VR demo if they were interested, a moment one person present described as “surreal” — “like you’re in a divorce court and they’re like, we should get a big family picture.”

Left: River Studios team gives VR demos at SXSW 2016 Frontier Tech Ranch (hosted by Rothenberg Ventures). Right: A person immersed in VR. Rothenberg Ventures

Rothenberg’s investors, many of them shaken by the events in August, are weighing their next moves, as is he. To understand how he rose to fame as a prominent backer of virtual reality startups before becoming mired in allegations of fraud and mismanagement, Backchannel interviewed more than two dozen former employees, limited partners, portfolio company CEOs, and other people who knew and worked with Rothenberg.

The story of how Rothenberg built, nearly destroyed, and now hopes to save the startup that, until recently, bore his name is a morality tale for this generation of Silicon Valley’s investors and entrepreneurs. Money remains cheap. Founding a company has become the stuff of entrepreneurial myth in which everyone ends up a billionaire. And the very gifts that enabled Rothenberg to start his fund and carve out a name for himself in the crowded valley venture scene — his youth, his Stanford and Harvard degrees, and his dense social network and splashy events — may have set the course for his fiasco.

The question before Rothenberg now is whether he can restore the faith of his investors—or whether he will botch his chance to make things right, leaving him to stare at the company’s former logo he had inscribed in his home bathroom’s tile.

A picture in a recent Fortune shows Mark Zuckerberg at a Stanford frat BBQ surrounded by Fritos, Budweiser cans, and a canoodling couple. It’s 2006, around the time Zuck has come to Stanford to speak to aspiring entrepreneurs. To his side sits his host, a bro of mid-aughts vintage — peroxided tips, Lacoste polo, wraparound shades — chatting on a flip phone as if he were mid-way through a deal.

Robyn Twomey

It’s Mike Rothenberg.

By the time Rothenberg hosted Zuck at Sigma Nu, he was already a master networker at Stanford — he calls that time “the foundational experience of my life.” He introduced his frat brother Kevin Systrom to Zuckerberg years before Facebook acquired Systrom’s Instagram for $1 billion. He headed up a lecture series of startup founders that brought not only Zuck but also Reid Hoffman and Marissa Mayer to campus — and ran a tutoring business on the side to help pay his tuition.

Rothenberg had grown up in a tight-knit Jehovah’s Witness family in Georgetown, Texas, an Austin suburb best known for being one of the filming sites for the high school football flick “Varsity Blues.” He’d later tell staff that his loving-yet-strict parents — a residential real estate agent father and a mother who taught math at his high school — edited PG-13 VHS movies for him and his three siblings to watch. In high school, Rothenberg was one of 30 students invited to the 2001 Math Olympiad in Washington, DC. At Stanford, he earned the nickname (unbeknownst to him, he says) “the Machine,” for his workaholic drive as much as his stiff demeanor back then.

After getting a bachelor’s and master’s in management science and engineering, Rothenberg consulted at Bain & Company, one of a series of finance-related jobs he held before enrolling at Harvard Business School. At Harvard, a professor noted that Rothenberg already had a 10-year record of identifying talent — 50 of his friends had companies of their own worth $50 to $100 million each, Rothenberg says. So, the summer before his final year of business school, Rothenberg couch-surfed across the country, recruiting 14 limited partners from among his network of professors, family, and friends to invest a total of $5 million in his first fund. At summer’s end, Rothenberg says the only money he had was the fund money. He couldn’t afford a trademark, he said in a speech he’d later give at Stanford, but found out he could name the company after himself for free.

Upon graduation in 2013, Rothenberg opened his San Francisco office, determined to make Silicon Valley believe in him as a late 20-something head of a venture capital firm: not just a young imitation of the mature firms along Sand Hill Road, but something he considered different. In a Harvard Business School case study about his firm, he explained it this way: “What if you could combine the service-model approach of Andreessen Horowitz, and the founder-first community building offline and online approach of First Round Capital, with the processing power and reach of Silicon Valley Angels, and the discretion of Floodgate and the judgment of Sequoia? No one else can make the claim that they are even building those pieces. That’s what we’re doing.”

A critical component of this model, it turned out, was swagger. That summer, he invited his early staffers to have an office “Mad Men Day.” Members of his staff donned their ’60s finest, and gathered to reenact a cast picture from the show, one of Rothenberg’s favorites. In the resulting photo, Rothenberg was no longer the unnamed dude to the side of Mark Zuckerberg.

He’d moved to the center of the frame, posing, naturally, as Don Draper.

In the firm’s early days of 2013 and early 2014, staffers saw Rothenberg as an earnest and boot-strapping leader. For a period before getting its Folsom Street HQ, the team worked out of Rothenberg’s new three-bedroom live-work condo, which he shared with colleagues. To secure more operating capital for a firm just getting on its feet with a relatively small first fund, Rothenberg decided on an unusual measure: he would take a one-time 17.75 percent management fee upfront, instead of the industry’s standard of a two percent annual fee over a typical 10-year fund. This gave him the capital to get started, but not the annual revenue that would allow him to sustain his operations — locking him into the time-consuming process of raising money for a new fund every year he has been in business. (The management fees have descended with each fund to land at two percent in the 2016 fund.)

Founders appreciated that Rothenberg — the chief (and only) investment officer — liked to act fast. Kegan Schouwenburg cold-called Rothenberg to invest in her New York-based startup SOLS, a 3D printer of custom shoe insoles. One 30-minute phone conversation and an hour-long meetup later, she had $100,000. “It’s so much work to go from the initial stage of nothing to something, and to have someone who was like, ‘I’m not going to waste your time, I’ll make a decision,’” was crucial, she says.

By 2014, Rothenberg had trained the firm’s energy on virtual reality and other emerging areas he calls “frontier technologies.” It was a strategic decision. “Early-stage venture capital is not a good business; the returns are close to zero,” he says now, looking back. “If you’re going to beat the market, you have to be different. Did I have more experience than others? No. Did I have more money? No. Do I have a bigger network? No. So I had to choose a different group of companies. That’s why I chose frontier technologies.” The firm launched an accelerator called River: companies would receive a $100,000 investment, workspace in Rothenberg Ventures’ 8,000-square-foot headquarters, and the opportunity to get mentored by industry experts, all culminating in a swank demo day.

Earlier that year, Rothenberg had also held his first Founder Field Day — renting out AT&T park so founders and VCs could hit balls from home plate while drones zoomed overhead in a day of keynotes and networking, race car rides through Soma, and a private concert that evening at the Fillmore by Third Eye Blind. It was an audacious event, later parodied by HBO’s Silicon Valley, intended to drum up attention, networking, and investments. Rothenberg says he never got to hit a baseball because he was so busy doing business. And he stresses that all the costs were covered by sponsors that contributed around $25,000 each, give or take.

As Rothenberg’s public stature grew, some of his earliest employees, who recall their early months with him fondly, became restless. They describe him as a demanding boss who needed to sign off on all decisions including investments, yet rarely made himself available to do so. He had set a goal of hosting 100 networking events a year. By the end of the year, much of the core group that had produced Founder Field Day had left.

Rothenberg chalks up the staff departures to his inability to compete on salary with bigger companies, and his employees’ age: “It is somewhat well-known that millennials don’t stay in a job for more than like 18 months or something,” he says. He sees himself as giving them a first toehold in venture capital. “If you were to ask them whether they would have gotten so far so fast without Rothenberg Ventures, I would hope they would answer you truthfully.”

Rothenberg quickly made a name for his firm in the field, investing in more VR companies than any other outfit. But he wanted to do even more. So, in May 2015, Rothenberg announced River Studios, a virtual reality production house that would film content in the new medium. From the start, he says, the point of River Studios was to provide support for the portfolio VR companies. “The studio model of building content was symbiotic with the accelerator. If a company asks, ‘What’s the best VR player for us to have?’” he says, referring to the headset viewer, “I have no idea, but we have the people here who could build it for us. That’s how the idea was born.” The $5 million that went into launching River Studios came from Rothenberg Ventures’ second and third funds. It was a significant figure for a firm that on average invested $100,000 per company. (The combined total of Rothenberg Ventures’ second and third funds was $36.32 million according to SEC filings, so $5 million represented 14 percent of the total capital raised.) Yet no mention of the investment was made in the 2014 or 2015 annual reports shared with investors that listed the firm’s portfolio companies. One LP says that in a phone call with investors in August after Rothenberg had told them about the River Studios investment in an email, one grilled him on why River Studios wasn’t in the annual reports, and says Rothenberg responded that he was still getting around to the disclosures. Rothenberg’s employees also say they were kept in the dark. Two former employees tell Backchannel that when they asked Rothenberg how River Studios was funded, he told them only that there were outside investors. Another recalls Rothenberg saying he paid for it himself. Rothenberg disputes this, saying that all investors had been made aware, adding, “We’ve been very public about it.”

River Studio’s sponsored race car. Lauren Smiley

In order to build up River — “the brand for everything awesome,” as Rothenberg put it in his Stanford speech — he hired several people to help him land corporate sponsorships. One such person was Collete Davis, a pro race car driver who came on in February 2015, initially to land sponsorships. Soon after, her role flipped; Rothenberg made her the driver of a River Studios-sponsored race car, which River Studios transported around the country to Global Rallycross meets. Rothenberg Ventures employees would sometimes fly to the races to give VR demos. “Both founders and investors like being at race tracks and being in race cars,” Rothenberg told Stanford students, “and it helps us be awesome and engage our community.” (Rothenberg directed Backchannel to interview Davis, but she didn’t respond to emails.)

Several former Rothenberg Ventures and River Studios employees now say they didn’t understand why River Studios was green-lit. One former employee noted that River Studios also competed for clients and market share with at least two of Rothenberg Ventures’ portfolio companies that were already in VR film production, Triggar and vantage.tv. (Triggar didn’t respond to requests for comment, and vantage.tv’s CEO Juan Santillan wrote in an email, “I don’t agree with many of the things that were going on at RV…” but added, “RV[’s] extended team has been great to us.”)

What’s more, Rothenberg had no experience building or running a content studio, and the early days of River Studios were marked by a series of rookie mishaps. River Studios’ first contract was a project with Birchbox, a subscription home delivery service for lifestyle goods. The studio would produce VR content for the studio’s own app and give away a VR-viewing cardboard phone holder in Birchbox boxes. Yet the team lacked competency on the new equipment, spending weeks filming only to end up with useless footage, says one person on the project. They had to ask Triggar to bail them out and complete the project. Rothenberg has a different take on this, saying that River Studios helped Triggar because it created work for the company. In general, Rothenberg wanted to work with big names over big paychecks, says one former River Studios worker: “We’d pick the sexier projects over the paying ones.”

Though River has produced VR content for an impressive lineup of gigs — Coldplay, Björk, the Denver Broncos, and the Sacramento Kings — it’s not clear how the River Studios business is doing. River paid for a team of engineers in Canada, and a production team in Los Angeles. In an August 23 email to investors warming up to the emergency meeting, Rothenberg wrote that he’d tried to open a Series A fundraising round for River Studios specifically — but said the bad press had slowed it down. He defended moving the fund’s money into his production company: “I invested $5m into River Studios on your behalf. I believe River Studios still has the potential to be the largest driver of returns for you.”

And while he told them he was amenable to stepping aside from management of the firm, Rothenberg was gunning to head River Studios. “I am willing to lead this charge to make sure the River Studios investment is protected for the LPs, and ultimately the largest driver for success. The alternative is to avoid action and allow this investment to disappear unnecessarily,” he wrote.

Rothenberg said in his email that River received a buyout offer for $94 million from a company earlier this year, but it was contingent on him being hired on full time, which was a nonstarter for him. A former employee with knowledge of the company’s finances said that more recently, River Studios has not been profitable, and that when he left the company, the studio was at least two months behind on the $29,000 rent it pays for its office.

It was Rothenberg’s turn as neophyte producer, with his new access to celebrities and the world of show business, that caused him to lose his way, according to many people who worked or invested with him. “The turning point,” one former staffer says, “was him getting hooked up with the fucking Hollywood people.”

Just this summer, Rothenberg suggested that River Studios start an official River Club to invite investors, athletes, musicians, and celebrities to company seats at iconic stadiums and Rothenberg events. (It didn’t come to pass.) The idea seemed to many like the crystallization of what he’d already been doing informally. In addition to traveling to some of Davis’s car races, Rothenberg kept a growing calendar of events that his employees sometimes joined, but if not, watched on the social media streams of their often-absent boss: the Golden Globes, Sundance, Warriors, Giants and Stanford games from a luxury box. At Gossip Girl star Chace Crawford’s 30th birthday party, River Studios gave away 10 Samsung Gear VR headsets with accompanying phones (around $800 a pop). It was all enough to get Rothenberg labeled “The Valley’s Party Animal” in a 2015 Bloomberg story.

“You’re out spending this money trying to impress all these people,” a former employee said of his boss. “We could have gotten investments without all this shit.”

But what looked to annoyed employees and outsiders as Rothenberg wanting the totems of a successful #FounderLife, Rothenberg defends as building community and attention around a nascent industry, and marketing that would eventually have a positive return on investment. As Rothenberg tells it, at the 2014 Founder Field Day, SF-based online recruiter 1-Page met Rick Marini, a Rothenberg Ventures LP; later that year, 1-Page acquired Marini’s startup, BranchOut. The Golden Globes tickets were provided by InStyleMagazine so River Studios could shoot a VR piece there. Rothenberg wrote to investors that they’d experimented with a private company car to see if it would be less expensive than everyone hailing Ubers.

Not all LPs see it that way: “He definitely was very enthused and excited about the fact he could do a 360 degree video shoot with Coldplay, but it was a big distraction to what limited partners would want you to do: find big companies, and not build VR content,” said one investor.

Rothenberg was getting overextended. While staffers say he was almost always tardy to meetings, other times he’d simply flake. For example, he was supposed to go with an intern to pitch Coldplay’s reps, but Rothenberg never arrived — leaving the college student to step up and conduct the meeting herself.

But the biggest issues were always over money. The firm had several moneymaking strategies apart from the management fees in the funds: Rothenberg says it landed hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorship and partnership revenue annually. In an unusual move, Rothenberg sold a “small percent of shares” of Rothenberg Ventures’ future profit in the funds — or “carry” in venture lingo — to finance its operations. The firm rented out desks in the coworking space of its Folsom Street building. And ex-staffers say Rothenberg was relentless in negotiating deals on anything from TVs to office accoutrement—Rothenberg told his investors in an email that he got his Super Bowl suite the week of the event for 80 percent off, and then filled it with Warriors players and celebrities. For a period in early 2016, Rothenberg created a policy that all the staff’s expenses must be pre-approved by him via text: from a $3.15 gas reimbursement to run an errand or a $5 Uber to a $25 keyboard. (“We were treated like children,” says one employee who was there at the time.)

Meanwhile, the fundraising for the funds themselves often fell short of goals stated on SEC filings. In 2015, Rothenberg had a goal of raising $60 million. By May of that year, he’d only raised $5 million. By July, Rothenberg called a “War Room.” He says it wasn’t distinct from other times the staff buckled down to reach a goal. Yet according to two staffers there, this one had a different flavor — they had the sense they might lose their jobs if it didn’t succeed. Rothenberg had his assistants fill the conference room with fake pirate swords, coins, and a gong to bong each time they brought in money. For 15 days, Rothenberg called on the staff to stay after a regular workday to put in a second shift until 10:30 at night, some staying as late as 1:00 am. Staffers who didn’t know how to fundraise instead hit up their friends to like the firm’s Facebook page, according to three people present, since they said Rothenberg was irked they had fewer social media followers than other firms. “I’d be embarrassed to tell my friends about it,” says one person put to the task. Come fall, Rothenberg made three separate trips to fundraise, among other things, in Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Those efforts fell short as well. By May 2016, they’d accumulated $24.6 million for the 2015 fund — enough to keep people on staff, but far below the original $60 million goal.

Rothenberg admits in his interview with Backchannel that by then he was having trouble keeping all the plates spinning: “We’d gotten well into more than 100 active portfolio companies and I’m the sole GP [general partner]. I’ve been overstretched for more than a couple months.” Yet come late spring of this year, Rothenberg had registered even more offshoots of River in the state of California, including River Enterprises, which was meant to salvage failing startups to return some money to investors. It kept growing: in June, the company announced they had rented space at The Culver Studios, the iconic production facility where “Citizen Kane” and “Gone With the Wind” were filmed, and paperwork was filed for yet another wing of River, the River Institute, a purported think tank. At a July all-office meeting, many members of the San Francisco staff were stunned to see how big the ranks of RV and River had become as some 80 people entered the headquarters who worked in some capacity for Rothenberg, either as contractors or employees.

Operating capital was short. According to a lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, a new chief financial officer started in April — David Haase — who had overlapped with Rothenberg at Stanford. In May, Rothenberg asked him to open an American Express card in Haase’s name for business expenses, which would be relayed to him by one of Rothenberg’s three executive assistants. Rothenberg paid him back for a $140,000 bill. Haase says he then racked up another $109,352 in business expenses — and he’s still waiting for the payment. Haase claims that the expenses for Rothenberg Ventures and River Ventures were commingled, and that Rothenberg “treated such accounts as personal accounts, to such an extent that such business entities were in fact his alter ego.” (Rothenberg wouldn’t speak to the specifics of the suit but responded, “Rothenberg has always reimbursed our staff for legitimate, approved business expenses.”)

Haase isn’t the only one complaining about money owed to him. In August and September, three former employees filed unpaid wage claims with the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement against various Rothenberg business entities. The highest claim for more than $70,000 was filed by Ewan Johnson, the former creative director of River Studios, asking for unpaid wages since March, as well as unpaid vacation days, and unpaid business expenses. (All three employees have been assigned a conference date in the upcoming months overseen by a deputy labor commissioner. One says that he has since received a wire transfer of his final check amount.)

While Rothenberg had been able to wave off specifics about financials to staff, his wall of silence started crumbling after a whistleblower complaint was made to the SEC in July. (The SEC does not comment on investigations.) The agency sent a request for documentation to the firm, according to an email Rothenberg sent to investors. Rothenberg had always held financial details away from his staffers. But in July, Rothenberg began to open up to top employees, including revealing how River Studios had been paid for, and the exodus began. “A lot of people left because they felt he lied to them,” says a former top-level employee who had knowledge of the company’s financial situation. “Other executives felt it was inappropriate, and the third group left because he couldn’t pay them.”

TechCrunch wrote about the exodus and the SEC complaint, and Rothenberg Ventures’ website stopped working soon after. Rothenberg put all staff on “unpaid leave.” A week later, a simpler website was back up in its place — featuring no employees, but hosting an application for River’s fall 2016 accelerator and a video produced two years earlier, with soaring music and endorsements from founders the firm had backed, with one saying, “Failure’s not failure; it’s just thinking about it a different way.”

With the unsavory press, Rothenberg’s emails to his investors took on the us-versus-them tone of a bunker news reel: “We are in the unfortunate position of having people who are trying to take us down, and they’re doing a good job. Juicy gossip sells clicks, and this is your update letter #2 this week,” he wrote in an August 23 email. He blamed many of his woes on all the shit-talking employees and the press that talked to them: “I have not taken adequate time to offboard employees, leaving open the possibility for disgruntled employees and then brutal press attacks.” Remarking on the SEC inquiry, he told investors: “It is in the best interest of you as LPs to let the SEC know that this is an internal accounting issue that we are handling so that we can take the time necessary to sort everything out.” Rothenberg Ventures’ drama has had little impact on the companies in its portfolio — they received their investments upfront. Rothenberg’s mismanagement has hurt the company he built, his employees, and himself for sure.

The effect on the limited partners is still hanging in the balance. They are anxious to find out what happens next. Some investors say they are pleased with the information they have received about how their investments were doing — Rothenberg approximated the fund’s successes in his emails: “Rothenberg Ventures has invested $33.2m in over 100 startups with current market value of $56.0m, based on our internal data tracking system, excluding the Fund’s River Studios investments.” Rothenberg went on to tell investors that $1.6 million had been distributed to them from successful exits already.

One limited partner reported feeling confident Rothenberg would sort things out. “I went into this knowing that VC funds over past decades typically don’t return that much to investors,” said the investor, who was made available to Backchannel through Rothenberg, and who was not authorized by his employer to speak on the record. “I wasn’t expecting five-to-ten times guaranteed returns. I was expecting something better than what the average VC would do out there.”

But others grow more concerned each day that they wait for the firm’s future management structure to be determined. Says one investor, “LPs are getting very antsy. I’m getting very antsy.” And they question how Rothenberg spent their money — specifically the $5 million invested in River Studios, apparently without explicitly telling them.

Even if there was no wrongdoing, it’s clear Rothenberg’s strengths don’t lie in management. All of the limited partners with whom we spoke said they’d rather see the day-to-day operations of the firm handed over to someone else.

Left: River Studios Team creating VR content during Founder Field Day 2016. Center, Right: Equipment stored at Rothenberg Ventures offices. Rothenberg Ventures

And then there’s Rothenberg — framing all the tumult as a typical hiccup in startup life, offering VR demos at his emergency LP meeting, signing off the email in which he tells staffers they’re getting put on unpaid leave with “Thank you again!” At one point in an interview with Backchannel, he quoted one of the valley’s more successful venture capitalists: “Mike Maples once said that he had never seen a successful startup without a near-death experience,” he said. “Expect that and then continue to push through. And listen to advisors and supporters and keep giving it your all.”

At 6:30 on a recent Wednesday night, Rothenberg offered to give one of Backchannel’s reporters, Lauren Smiley, a tour of his Folsom Street office. I rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. An inbox check yielded an email just then from Rothenberg’s crisis communications flack: “Mike just called me and is slammed with some deadlines. He’d love to show you the office but overcommitted himself.” Soon after, an executive assistant I recognized from LinkedIn answered the door, and asked if I had an appointment. She showed me upstairs to the lobby. Rothenberg came out briefly in office casual to politely say he was on a call with an investor, and retreated to his corner office. The assistant gave me a quick tour of their compact main office space — there was the gong in the conference room the ex-staffers had told me about, there were Polaroids of the team pinned up on a tackboard. All the work stations at three desk islands seemed to be empty except for the assistant’s and one standing desk, where another young woman was working quietly.

Waiting for Rothenberg to get off the phone, the assistant handed me a HTC Vive VR headset, and cued a video by Wevr, one of the fund’s portfolio companies. Fitting it over my head, I found myself undersea in an underwater cage, surrounded by fish. I turned my head slightly and…jumped. A blue whale’s eye looked right at me. Its gigantic body stretched out to my left as I looked to the side — giving a real sense of its intimidating, hulking mass. As it turned to swim away, its gigantic tail swooshed near enough to pique a jolt of adrenaline. I realized it was the first time I actually had enjoyed VR.

I took the headset off, and was back in a nearly abandoned Rothenberg office, where I told the assistant I’d show myself out. Rothenberg remained behind his office door, talking away.

Creative Art Direction: Redindhi Studio