Like me, the men on the Solutions team wanted nothing more than to stand in the CEO’s light. Even if we rarely saw it, he had a great smile; it was thrilling to make him laugh, to crack the veneer. We’d seen him happy. We knew he had good friends, many of whom had been founders in his cohort at the startup accelerator. We’d all celebrated the company’s fifth birthday on the roof deck of his apartment building, where he fed cake to the technical cofounder as the technical cofounder fed him. We were fascinated by his psychology. We wanted to figure him out.

“If I had to guess,” a sales engineer said over drinks one evening, “he had a childhood where people were not particularly nice to him. I wouldn’t have been nice to him. But because he never felt included, he’s really distrusting of people’s motivations, and really defensive of whatever authority he’s able to gain.”

“I don’t think he likes seeing people suffer,” an account manager said, “but he knows producing suffering in people is productive.”