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Failures Escalate
Milburn constantly had to reboot servers, occasionally in the middle of the night. During work hours, it became hard for DiPasquale to get Milburn on the phone because he always seemed preoccupied fixing something. Tempers at work flared more often.
“Everybody started to wonder what they were doing wrong on a personal level,” DiPasquale says, adding that because Milburn couldn’t trace the source of the network problems, it became hard to sort out who was to blame or why. “Things got very tense.”
One thing was clear: the technology that ran Milburn’s company was no longer solely under his control.
In March 2010, a staccato of text message alarms woke him in the middle of the night, signalling that his servers were all shutting down. He hurriedly drove the four-mile winding road to the office to find that his commercial-grade SonicWALL firewall had failed, taking his entire network off line. He spent a good part of the next day on the phone with the manufacturer, who was stumped.
“Those things are like old carburetor engines, they never quit,” Milburn says.
Through Cobwebs
After his e-mail servers crashed during an exchange with his attorneys, he crawled under the large house that serves as the company’s headquarters in search of a device that someone might have physically planted. Pawing through cobwebs with a flashlight, he spent an hour opening utility boxes and eyeing the fiber-optic cable. He found nothing.
Milburn says he was riding “that fine line between ultra-caution and paranoia.”
Born in Santa Monica, Milburn didn’t graduate from high school, but he has a relentlessly autodidactic drive that is common in early tech entrepreneurs. He taught himself how to write code, and eventually mastered complex Internet software protocols.
Laura Milburn, 63, his wife of 21 years, calls him “brilliant” but also “incredibly stubborn.” A few years earlier she watched him in a legal tussle with a neighbor who had built a deck four feet over what they thought was their property line. Milburn ended up spending more than $100,000 in a year-long fight just so they could split the difference, with each side getting two feet, she says.