Building a Corporate Culture

Many of those drawn to Living PlanIT, whether mechanical engineer or programmer, reported that traditional labels never captured their identity. "I never really thought of myself as a mechanical engineer," said one. "In that sense I have never really identified with my colleagues until now." He reported meeting Lewis for "one and a half minutes" before deciding to join him, another story one hears frequently at Living PlanIT. "This was a chance to do something that had never been done before, something really important," he explained. "It was something I couldn't have imagined until that point in my life: a wireless sensor network so big, the possibility of completely changing the way cities are made. This was not just about technology; this was about changing people's quality of life. Here was a company with an endless set of challenges—no possibility for boredom."

Shortly after the rally, Lewis decamped to Portugal with Johanna Weigelt, who was fast becoming a core member of the growing team. Weigelt, slender, blonde, and petite, with a serious-beyond-her-years expression, met Lewis before the car rally, and he invited her to come along. Born in Bratislava, the capitol of Slovakia, Weigelt had moved with her family to the United States at the age of seven. After college she contemplated law school but decided it would not give her the tools she needed to have the effect she wanted to have on the world, not to mention the downsides of the nine-to-five office lifestyle. She recalls that as an assistant for a lawyer in Massachusetts, she grew tired of working on evictions and foreclosures. Is this, she wondered, what my life is going to be?

Like so many who fell into Lewis's orbit in the early years, Weigelt followed him to London and began working for Living PlanIT. "Everyone thought I was crazy," she said, "but it was the best decision I ever made. This is a practical education, but it's also work and play combined. I've seen how a startup is built. I've been exposed to the financial, legal, and human resource aspects of that process."

Soon after Living PlanIT arrived in Portugal, Weigelt, almost 25 at the time, found herself in charge of human resources and legal affairs, a kind of glorified den mother for new employees, a solver of practical life problems for the growing team. This new role included everything from waiting for furniture to arrive to hosting meetings with executives from Cisco and other corporate partners. Weigelt was part of Lewis's trusted inner circle.

Family Dynamics

Weigelt was also the keeper of the company archives, including dozens of inside jokes still in play years after their initial delivery. The fact that Rodrigues, whose life has been spent in automobiles, had run out of gas three times in the company's brief history, for example, or that Silva's informal title is CPO—cut and paste officer—would not be easily forgotten if Weigelt had anything to say about it, even as the company shifted into a different gear. It wasn't hard, at this point in the company's development, to see the team as a growing family.

Living PlanIT, like all new businesses, was weaving a company culture. In those early days, it seemed as if everyone spoke the same language. Rodrigues had little patience with skeptics. "We are changing the world," he told us, talking about PlanIT Valley on a sunny spring morning in a café outside the Hotel Central Parque. "If I don't have a clear mind about what I want to do, I don't do it."

Like the 18-year-old who beat cancer, in the difficult times that followed Lewis remained uninterested in worriers and naysayers. His recurring positive predictions irritated some employees and partners. The money was always coming "in two weeks." The check was permanently in the mail. The more people clamored to be paid, the more Lewis backed into a virtual reality, with no loss of enthusiasm. But employees couldn't eat shares or pay rent with them.

In late 2009 Lewis, Weigelt, and others moved out of the Hotel Central Parque and into a quinta, or farmhouse, in the countryside not too far from Maia. Rosemary Lokhorst (everyone called her Rosy), one of Simas's colleagues from Microsoft's Switzerland office, joined the team, moving into a room in the quinta. "It took me four days, with the help of my best friend, to decide to say yes," she told us. Why? Because, she said, "It was like playing SimCity but in real life."

In 2011 several members of the team moved into condos on the Vale Pisão resort property. The new location was close to Rodrigues and not far from Ferreira's offices in Paredes. Visitors and new members of the team would often camp out with Lewis and Weigelt in the quinta.

Becoming Multilingual

Living PlanIT and its contemporaries (startups and corporate initiatives alike) would need to learn to speak the languages of architecture, planning, real estate, construction, and government. By 2012, one member of the team, Chrysanthos Chrysanthou, who joined from Cisco in 2011 as chief operating officer, described Living PlanIT as "a technology company enabling the development of innovative, intelligent, sustainable urban-scale environments." He explained that it brought together "people, industry, and educational institutions" to test new technologies.

Chrysanthou's description, while compelling, downplays the challenge that lay ahead. Teaming with people and companies from different professional backgrounds, who brought very different priorities, time lines, and expectations—Big Teaming, that is—would prove more difficult than anyone anticipated.

In the meantime the first wave of media stories, some skeptical, some supportive, trickled in. Lewis reported that people were stopping him in airports and restaurants to say thank you for his work and to express excitement about the potential of future buildings and cities. To a man building his legacy, this meant a great deal.

The honeymoon would not last forever. Many of the original players moved on, as we will see, with varying levels of camaraderie and disenchantment. Miguel Rodrigues called his years with Living PlanIT "the best MBA in the world." In many ways those early years were the fun part. The challenge would be to keep the essence of the original vision alive as the company, of necessity, changed.

The following five chapters explore, in turn, each of the industry domains whose expertise, commitment, and visionary leaps of faith would be essential to realizing the Living PlanIT vision.