At Kitchensurfing, Booking a Chef and a Story

She served him and his three guests a boiling yah hawn, a Cambodian hot pot, and returned to the kitchen, standing idly by — until the friends invited her to join them.

As they dipped raw meat into the hot broth, Lany Phlong told her story: She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand 32 years ago. Her parents had escaped the Khmer Rouge. And last year, tired of her career in marketing, she had flown to Cambodia for the first time to meet her grandparents and to learn to cook Cambodian cuisine authentically. Yah hawn was a recipe she brought back.

She described ingredients to them. “This is morning glory, a common green in Cambodia,” she recalled explaining. “And these are quail eggs — you can get them at this street in Chinatown.”

This spontaneous cultural and culinary encounter was brought about by Kitchensurfing, a start-up business trying to make it as easy to find a private chef online as it is to book a room or order a book. The dinner’s host arranged the meal by browsing Kitchensurfing’s database of profiled chefs, who range from slick, credentialed professionals with years of restaurant experience to self-taught cooks like Ms. Phlong.

The site actively seeks out such homegrown chefs, posting fliers — “Do you like to Cook Tibetan & Nepali Food, Use the Internet, & Enjoy Making $$$?” — in ethnic neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Queens, and in the lobbies of English-language schools. It also scours Craigslist postings and social media.

Bookings are all-inclusive: payment is up front and includes tip. Cooks do the shopping and, as Ms. Phlong did that night, clean up before they leave.

Kitchensurfing started in May and now receives several bookings a day in New York and Berlin, where two of the founders used to live. On the second floor of its town house headquarters in Gowanus, Brooklyn, seven employees quietly tap away on laptops, embodying the image of a scrappy, caffeinated start-up at work. The boyish-looking 30-year-old sitting behind a large computer screen is Chris Muscarella, the site’s chief executive.

Mr. Muscarella, originally from Framingham, Mass., has led a textured life. He was a precocious teenager with a knack for programming and landed his first job as a software engineer at age 18. He held off on college to live in Beijing and study meditation and martial arts. And he spent his 20s in the start-up world, including helping to found Mobile Commons, a mobile marketing and text-messaging platform used by businesses, nonprofits and political campaigns.

By 2009, though, Mr. Muscarella thought he was burned out from the technology business, and in 2011, he helped open Rucola, a Northern Italian restaurant in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

He was startled by what he saw of the grind of kitchen life and the low compensation of cooks. “I feel confident enough saying this,” he said. “You’re probably statistically more likely to make it to the N.B.A. than you are to be a chef that makes $100,000 a year or more.” Around this time he hired a private chef to cater a dinner at his home, and his entrepreneurial mind clicked.

Most private chefs earn more than those who work in restaurants, he said, but finding clients can be challenging. So why not create an outlet for them? Conversely, what consumer wouldn’t be attracted to the idea of having a private chef — if the luxury could be made accessible?

He then met Lars Kluge, 30, a programmer, and Borahm Cho, 28, a designer, both from Germany, who had been mulling over similar notions, and they founded Kitchensurfing together.

Their company follows a wave of start-ups trying to create peer-to-peer marketplaces for common services. Airbnb has become a household name and achieved a multibillion-dollar valuation by connecting people who need a place to stay with people who have an extra room or apartment to let out. Uber, a smartphone app, allows users to summon a town car with the touch of a screen.

Mr. Muscarella acknowledged a debt to such innovators but said his company’s ambitions were different. “It’s more meaningful,” he said. “It’s cool to get a cab like it was a magic wand, but you’re not going to be talking about that for two weeks. You will still be talking about the amazing eating experience you had.”

In Pursuit of John McAfee, Media Are Part of Story

Years earlier, Mr. McAfee had relocated to a Colonel Kurtz-like compound in the jungles of Belize, surrounding himself with armed guards and multiple young lovers. Then, with reports that he was a “person of interest” in the death of a neighbor, Mr. McAfee had gone on the lam. Last Monday, after several days of surreptitious travel, Mr. Castoro and Mr. King posted their first dispatch. It bore the smirking headline, “We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers.”

The gloating was short-lived, however. Within minutes, a reader noticed that the photograph posted with the story still contained GPS location data embedded by the iPhone 4S that took it, and sent out a message via Twitter: “Check the metadata in the photo. Oooops ...” Vice quickly replaced the image, but it was too late. “Oops! Did Vice Just Give Away John McAfee’s Location With Photo Metadata?” a Wired.com headline asked. The article included a Google Earth view of the exact spot the picture had been taken — poolside at the Hotel & Marina Nana Juana in Izabal, Guatemala.

Soon, the Guatemalan police were with John McAfee. This weekend, he is in their custody and is expected to be extradited to Belize, where he faces questioning in connection with the murder of Gregory Faull, a 52-year-old American who was his neighbor. Mr. McAfee’s lawyers are appealing his extradition.

The Vice debacle was just one colorful twist in the relationship between the press, which is always willing to indulge a colorful subject, and Mr. McAfee, who was always eager to bend news coverage to his often inscrutable ends. I first wrote about Mr. McAfee five years before, when he was merely a colorful software pioneer — an apparently clean-living citizen who courted the press mainly to promote his favorite pastime, flying ultralight aircraft. Since then, his life had taken several darker turns. I had only just published a long piece about his purported connections with Belizean drug gangs on the Web site Gizmodo when I received a curt e-mail from a police official in Belize on Nov. 11, “It may interest you to know that there was a murder yesterday in San Pedro Town, Ambergris Caye and McAfee is the prime suspect.”

I passed the information along on Twitter and on Gizmodo and the news took on a life of its own. “It was on all kinds of Tumblr sites, people were talking about it on Twitter, and that fueled a lot of the professional media to say, ‘O.K., everyone’s talking about this, we should have a story on it, too,’ ” said Mat Honan, a senior writer at Wired who has written about the case.

Mr. McAfee went into hiding with a 20-year-old girlfriend, but it was hiding of a uniquely visible kind. Within 36 hours, he began an aggressive campaign to court and spin coverage of his story. He started by calling Joshua Davis, a Wired writer who had spent the summer reporting on a profile for the magazine’s January issue, and fed him fresh details of life on the run every few hours. Mr. Davis passed along his minute-by-minute updates via Twitter and daily blog posts.

News media around the world were rapt: it wasn’t just that Mr. McAfee’s name was stubbornly familiar, a relic of the early days when computer users installed his software to keep viruses away. “A tech millionaire, an exotic Central American locale, murder, the possibility of drugs — the story just has everything,” says Nathalie Malinarich, world editor of the BBC News Web site.

Wired had a problem, though. The murder and Mr. McAfee’s flight had made Mr. Davis’s print article obsolete before it could even hit newsstands. Wired and Mr. Davis updated the material and repackaged it into an e-book that has sold more than 22,000 copies, at one point reaching No. 1 on the Nonfiction Kindle Singles list.

Mr. Davis’s exclusives did not last long. As the week went on, Mr. McAfee granted phone interviews to more reporters (though none to me, with whom he’s declined to communicate since my first Gizmodo piece). Then he set out to spread his message across new electronic platforms. He started a Twitter account and, with the help of a cartoonist he had befriended in Seattle, a blog. To keep the story fresh, Mr. McAfee kept upping his media exposure and the outrageousness of the tales he told. He arranged face-to-face interviews— a Financial Times journalist first, followed by CNN’s Martin Savidge. (Both were told to wait in public places and then were driven to meet Mr. McAfee in locations unknown to them.) Then, in the ultimate act of bravado, he invited Vice’s journalists to tag along.

For reporters, a McAfee exclusive guaranteed a rich share of readers and viewers and social-networking interest. But many found the favor an ambiguous blessing. Mr. McAfee seemed to understand the dynamics of journalism well enough to know which assertions reporters would pass along without double-checking or qualifying — like his claim that he had eluded the police by burying himself in sand and positioning a box over his head — even as his self-created narrative veered ever further into the surreal.

“As soon as reporters start to think, ‘Wait a minute, we’re sort of jeopardizing our objectivity and reputation for this guy,’ he’ll just burn them, and go to the next one,” says the Gizmodo writer Joel Johnson, who found himself cut off after publishing an article Mr. McAfee did not like. “That’s what he did to me, that’s what he’s done to a lot of journalists, and he’s going to do it to the Vice guys, if he hasn’t done it already.”

Vice seemed to remain in Mr. McAfee’s good graces even after the freedom-endangering gaffe. After the secret of his location spread across the Internet, Mr. McAfee quickly went online to claim that the data leak was in fact an intentional piece of misdirection. Mr. King, the Vice photographer, supported the claim on social media. This amounted to following up an “egregiously stupid action with a far worse one,” Mr. Honan wrote in a Wired post later last week, “King apparently lied on his Facebook page and Twitter in order to protect McAfee.”

In a statement, Vice said it would not comment about its reporting in the McAfee case.

“The flight we chronicled was from the start filled with misinformation, rumors, social-media-fed myths, outright lies and overall total weirdness,” the magazine said. “Despite many media outlets’ obvious glee in damning us immediately, Vice has decided to wait and talk to the people on our team who were actually on the ground and who could therefore tell us what actually went down and not just buy into the same rumors, myths and madness that this story has consisted of from the start.”

Indeed, while Mr. McAfee seems determined to drag out his drama as long as he can, some of the journalists who have covered him say they have had enough. “People try to behave ethically,” said Mr. Johnson, who wrote his final post on Mr. McAfee three weeks ago. “And he milks that out of them until they get to the point where they’re like, ‘You know what, you’re just nuts.’ ” He adds, “I know as a journalist I can’t say that, so I’ve got to get out of this story.”

Off the Shelf: ‘Exposure,’ the Story of a British Whistle-Blower in Japan

Barely a year later, Mr. Woodford, a Briton who spent his career rising through Olympus’s ranks, has produced a memoir of the scandal, “Exposure — Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I Went From C.E.O. to Whistle-Blower” (Portfolio, $27.95).

One could be forgiven for meager expectations. This book was written quickly, and by a chief executive with no professional writing experience and no co-author. Yet “Exposure” is a cut above many C.E.O. memoirs, and is at least equal to most business-scandal books you are likely to find. It is also a harsh indictment of the clubby and unquestioning ways that still flourish in some quarters of the Japanese corporate world.

At its best, especially in the first half of the book, Mr. Woodford’s story is as suspenseful as a minor John Grisham novel. It begins last year, barely four months after his elevation to president when, after a long day of meetings at Olympus’s European headquarters in Hamburg, he opens an e-mail sent by one of his aides in Tokyo. It contains an article from a Japanese business magazine called Facta, contending that Olympus had been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on questionable and money-losing acquisitions.

When Mr. Woodford rushes back to Tokyo, he expects to find the company in an uproar. What he finds instead is business as usual. He asks two executives if they have seen the article. Yes, they acknowledge, they have. Then why, he asks, hadn’t they told him about it sooner? Because Olympus’s chairman, Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, told them not to, they answer. When Mr. Woodford confronts the imperious Mr. Kikukawa about the matter, Mr. Kikukawa brushes off the whole matter as insignificant and unworthy of his attention.

Though the two men had been close, Mr. Woodford paints a devastating portrait of Mr. Kikukawa as vainglorious and ignorant of product details.

“While it was often patently obvious he didn’t understand what he was talking about, my colleagues never dared expose this,” he writes. “I quickly learned that no one ever asked why the emperor wasn’t wearing clothes.” When the two men were photographed together for a corporate portrait, Mr. Kikukawa stood on a box to minimize the obvious height differential.

It turns out that no one at Olympus wants to explain to Mr. Woodford the first thing about the acquisitions in question, much less dig into the Facta allegations. Alarmed, Mr. Woodford brings in Ernst & Young to investigate.

At a subsequent board meeting, one Japanese director criticizes him about bringing “outsiders” in. Mr. Woodford writes: “His message was clear to me: Olympus was a family, and families require loyalty.”

The author adds: “It reminded me of the speech Michael Corleone delivered to his hapless brother Fredo when he disagreed with him in front of the Las Vegas crowd in ‘The Godfather.’ ”

Three days later, a nattily dressed Mr. Kikukawa calls another board meeting, at which point Mr. Woodford is fired. “I stared at Kikukawa: at the cut of his expensive suit, at the precision of the knot in that silk tie, at the curt, pinched smile that played beneath his nose,” the author writes. “He struck me as a ludicrous figure, and so delusional. He resembled little more than the captain of a sinking ship who believed that by throwing out the dead weight, his vessel would suddenly right itself and resume its calm drift toward the horizon.”

Mr. Woodford is escorted from the building, at which point he decides to go public, igniting a storm of controversy. He holds news conferences and appears on news programs in New York, London and Tokyo, coming away with a new appreciation for the Fourth Estate. The Olympus board tries to fight back, and here one sees vividly the ways that some sectors of corporate Japan are still firmly mired in the last century — well, make that the 19th century. In such circles, executives may have little sense of how transparency has transformed international business.

The books loses much of its energy about two-thirds of the way through, when the $1.7 billion cover-up is finally and fully explained; after that, the writing is on the wall. It turns out that after a currency devaluation in the 1980s, Olympus, like any number of Japanese corporations, found ways to hide the resulting losses. Looking to right itself, Olympus engaged in risky derivative trades that its senior executives barely understood, leading to still larger losses.

Eventually, a complex scheme was devised to inflate the purchase price of three nonsensical acquisitions; the extra money was then channeled back to Olympus — in one case, via a titanic $687 million “advisory fee” — erasing the hidden losses.

This fall, Mr. Kikukawa and two other former executives pleaded guilty over charges related to the accounting cover-up.

MR. WOODFORD has emerged as a hero, named by at least one British newspaper as its 2011 executive of the year. And rightly so. His gift for candor, so evident as a whistle-blower, serves him well as a memoirist. He acknowledges that at the depths of the scandal, he took to self-medicating with alcohol; he wakes up with a bad hangover more than once in this book’s pages.

About the worst one can say about “Exposure” is that Mr. Woodford can come off as preachy and a tad self-righteous at times. But after all that Olympus and its board put him through, it’s probably fair to say he deserves a bit of time on his soapbox.