A Million Little Pixels

With the man who answered the door serving as interpreter, Flowers spoke with the teacher. "I said something that apparently impressed him," he says. Flowers received an invitation to spend a month in the temple. Gretchen and Case returned to the States.

Flowers says the teacher gave him the arduous task of grinding pepper with a mortar and pestle. His eyes watered, and his skin blistered. "I did that for hours every day," Flowers says. "It was brutal."

Using broken Thai, Flowers was eventually able to communicate with the teacher, who, he says, was "a fairly well-known Buddhist monk." When he was not grinding pepper or taking walks with the monk, Flowers meditated. He discovered that he wasn't very good at meditating. "Sort of on the dirt floor, staring at the white wall, that's when I decided, 'You know what, I think I have another company in me.'"

He says he was back in the United States for only 30 days before convincing investors to fund Kozoru.

As for the Thailand story, Flowers agreed last week to show his passport after a Pitch reporter asked for evidence of the journey. But as of press time, he had produced nothing.

Mike Peck met John Flowers in the spring of 2004. Peck was serving as the fund manager at the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation (KTEC). A state economic-development agency, KTEC has the authority to make direct investments in promising Kansas tech companies. With his stories of raising seven figures in investments and his journey in Thailand, Flowers left quite an impression on Peck.

Peck is no rube. He received an MBA from Northwestern University and worked at C-Tribe, a failed San Francisco dot-com of the late '90s. He spent time with Flowers as KTEC considered investing in Kozoru. Peck sat in as Flowers made a presentation to venture capitalists on the West Coast. Eventually, KTEC invested $500,000 — double the size of any of the agency's previous investments. Additionally, KTEC has awarded $372,000 in tax credits to private investors in Kozoru.

"From the first meeting with John Flowers, it was pretty apparent that he was an exceptional individual and had an exceptional vision," Peck told the Pitch in 2004. Peck said Kozoru was a "perfect storm" of an outstanding board, management and idea. Now a partner in the private-equity fund Open Prairie Equity Partners, Peck subleases office space from Kozoru. Today, Peck calls the KTEC investment in Kozoru the right opportunity at the right time.

KTEC has $6.8 million invested in Kansas companies and funds, according to its most recent annual report. Tracking the performance of the investments is difficult. Of the 15 companies KTEC helped in 1998, 10 had either closed or had failed to grow beyond nonfamily employees, according to a 2003 state audit. KTEC President Tracy Taylor tells the Pitch that his staff does due diligence when looking at possible investments. "[It's] good governance and good partnering rather than just giving somebody money," he says.

On paper, Kozoru looked like the kind of company that Kansas — with only two Fortune 500 companies — should recruit. In addition to Flowers, Kozoru had two prominent Bay Area board members: David Warthen and Ridgely Evers. Warthen was a co-founder of Ask Jeeves. Evers conceived QuickBooks accounting software.

Though associated with recognizable products, Warthen and Evers were not exactly ascendant figures at the time they joined the Kozoru board. Ask Jeeves had raised $42 million in its initial public offering in 1999. But the company failed to deliver on the promise of a question-based search. Ask Jeeves acquired new technology in 2001, and the site now looks and feels very much like Google.

Warthen left Ask Jeeves and stayed mostly out of the news until 2004. That year, Warthen married Cristina Schultz — who, federal prosecutors claim, paid her way through Stanford Law School by working as a high-priced call girl under the name "Brazil." Schultz made headlines in the Bay Area when the federal government seized $61,000 from her that prosecutors say she earned as a prostitute.

Warthen later stepped in to claim that the money was his, not proceeds from unlawful activity. Warthen gave the money to Schultz to hold prior to their marriage, his attorney, Doug Schwartz, says. "Of course, they were going to use it for vacations, weddings and/or a honeymoon, to be precise," Schwartz tells the Pitch.

The case is still being fought in federal court. Warthen declined to comment to the Pitch about the incident. But he spoke highly of Flowers, who he said is always full of ideas. "He has not only a very strong technical knowledge, but he is a very creative thinker," he said.