Our Origin Story

Deus ex Machina: a tip of the hat to the God from the Machine

Written by Vicki Henry, Co-founder of LeverLab

I was dropping off paperwork one day, at a beautiful house in a beautiful Denver neighborhood. A landscaper in the midst of planting a row of bushes wiped his brow, leaned on his shovel and said to the lady of the house who’d come to the door: "This is a beautiful home.  What does your husband do?”

Because she interpreted his query as a question about how in the world she deserved this bounty, she bristled with defensiveness.  “He works very hard!”  I knew her husband was in the financial industry, and I’m sure he had worked very hard.  Hard on his education.  Hard to find that first internship or job.  Hard to make the connections needed for such a career to be a success.  Hard for the long hours it had taken to build up his practice.  

But.  The landscaper was working very hard too, yes?  Have you dug holes and planted 20 spirea bushes on a hot summer day?  And the next day, and the next, and the next?

His essential question was actually “How is a home like this even possible? What secret must I discover to achieve such success?”  And her answer was completely inadequate.  Because it’s never just “hard work” that gets you the goodies in this world — it’s all the scaffolding beneath you: it’s the pulleys and the levers and the gears and the wedges that helped you navigate to the next level, and then the next.  The right answer in this case might have been “We got so many lucky breaks!  My husband’s family paid for his education, so he graduated without debt and we were able to use our money to invest in a small home.  And then the housing market boomed, and we made money when we sold it, and we managed to eke out a loan for the next move, and then we were so fortunate when our investments hit it big in the tech boom and…”   That answer, at least, would have told the landscaper something true about the world.

I think we hide — even from ourselves — all the help we get on our climb upwards.

But we all stand on someone else’s shoulders.

This foundation — LeverLab — was truly made possible by my father, Jack Henry, a brilliant man who spent most of his youth trying to figure out how to make some money that lasted beyond the next round of bills, sometimes working three jobs at once, trying one entrepreneurial job after another (and some of them were so doomed to failure from the start that they have become treasured family legend), just hoping that someday, he’d hit on the right idea and actually “get ahead.”  

The idea that finally got him there, but not until his forties, was banking software.  But before that, he worked 70-hour weeks as an accountant, while keeping up sidelines to make ends meet. He built audio speakers in our basement (the smell of wood stain permeated the whole house).  He tied fishing flies (each one took hours, and sold for about $3).  He flipped burgers.  I remember him always sitting after a day’s work holding a yellow legal pad and a pen.  His mind was usually far away, plotting his big ideas and “what-if-ing.”

Even when he finally landed on the idea of creating banking software for small community banks and credit unions (helping them to compete against the huge chains who were automated), his first office was in an old machine shop, a door atop sawhorses serving as his desk, and a long long chain of extension cords snaking out the alley to bring electricity to an old borrowed IBM computer so he could “work this out.” 

It worked out.  

For awhile, Jack Henry & Associates still rented the machine shop for $40 a month.  He couldn’t afford office furniture, but (I am not making this up) found himself some inflatable chairs so he could invite people in for meetings.  Can you visualize that?  Bankers coming to visit and sitting on blow-up chairs!  Oh, Dad.  But then business actually took off, and people came aboard, and suddenly, there was a real office, and a new computer that wasn’t borrowed, and in 1985, the company went public, and then it was named a “Hot 100” business by Inc. Magazine.  In 2018, it employs over 6000 people, and is #12 on the Forbes List of America’s Best Employers (#2 in the IT, Internet, Software, and Services category).

When success happened for him,  I was proud to realize the “money” part of it wasn’t what gave him the biggest satisfaction.  When he planned for the generational protection of that wealth, I remember him sharing with Chris and me what he’d put in place for us, for our children, and for the generations to come.  He wrote a few numbers on paper and slid it over to us.  “That’s what it is right now, but it’s invested and will continue to grow,” he explained.  Then his face got that far-away look again.  “It’s not enough to ruin you two.  And it’s probably not enough to ruin your kids.  But someday, it might be enough to ruin someone.”

Chris and I were poor enough at that juncture to laugh at money ruining anything!  We were entrepreneurial ourselves and had already dreamed up a couple of business ideas that pretty much drained our bank account and left us grateful for garage sales so we could dress our firstborn in used clothes instead of from Baby Gap (fun story: we scored one outfit from a garage sale that was so big on her we started calling her David Byrne, because of the oversized suits he wore in early Talking Heads videos).  But throughout all our screwball startups, our favorite person to talk things out with was my dad.  He considered all our harebrained ideas seriously.  He’d sometimes listen to our newest idea, nod his head solemnly, offer nothing for a day or two, and then come back to us with ideas sketched out on his yellow legal pad, suggesting “What if you did it this way?” or “How about turning it upside down and trying this?”  He loaned us money for our kooky plans.  He traveled with us to sell our wonky creations.  He came through with a loan for the 30% down payment for our first house because we were self-employed and didn’t qualify for a traditional bank loan.  And yes, we bought that house during the housing downturn in 1987 and stayed long enough to make a hefty profit that let us get our next, bigger house (see how those levers and scaffolds work?).

Chris and I kept dreaming up business start-ups, and finally landed on one that kept the bills paid and the kids fed.  Then we started another.  And another.  Our daughter even scored a store-bought outfit now and then.  Eventually, she and her brother got great educations and other nice stuff.  You’re welcome for the scaffolding, kids!  Meanwhile, the money dad had so generously set aside for us and for our kids did indeed continue to grow, as the stock from his company — after first making a nervous run to near-zero — began an impressive climb on NASDAQ.  We began to think, ourselves, of trusts and financial provisions for our kids and for their kids after them.  We never forgot Dad’s warning that “the money might be enough, some day, to ruin someone,” and so we began to form a framework that would serve as a bulwark against ruin.  We dreamed of a foundation, funded by some of that money, which could help others.  For us, creating LeverLab is a commitment to being good stewards and continuing a philosophy he always held for staying humble and helping others.  The company he created still has as its guiding principle a four-word statement he constantly made back in 1976: “Do the right thing.”  This is our “right thing:” leveraging what we have to help someone else… helping others leverage their hard work into something bigger.  It is the opposite of ruin: it is renewal.

So this whole thing — this LeverLab family foundation — is built on scaffolding, and if you look closely, you’ll see all the levers and pulleys and gears that made it possible.  Someone had one idea out of hundreds that actually worked.  Someone got a loan at the right time to let them grow.  Someone reached down and pulled someone else up.  Someone lifted a younger person onto his shoulders so she could reach the next rung of the ladder.  It was never just hard work.  It was also a kind of deus ex machina*:  God from the machine.  

I guess that’s why I love the Chinese proverb about one generation planting the trees and the next generation getting the shade.  My father did it both figuratively… and literally.  He loved trees, and planted hundreds in and around his hometown.  After his funeral, people planted so many more in his honor.  He’d often quote the Greek saying that “it’s good for a man’s character to plant a tree when he’ll never sit in its shade.” If you’ve ever planted trees, you know how scrawny and small those baby saplings are.  It’s a long time before you get the kind  of shade you dream of.  Dad’s been gone a decade; I miss him all the time.  He only got to see the early beginnings of LeverLab (back then it was called Chanan: a Hebrew word that means “to bend down in kindness and help someone up”).  Today, we’re LeverLab, but we still feel the same way about bending down to pull someone else up the scaffolding.  Dad got to see the first green shoots of our work here, but not the full shade.  That’s OK, though.  He knew how it worked.

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*The New Latin term deus ex machina is a translation of a Greek phrase and means literally "a god from a machine." It dates from at least the 5th century, when in theater, Aeschylus and Euripides used a machine to bring actors playing gods onto the stage.  The machine could be either a crane (lowering actors from above) or a riser (bringing actors up through a trapdoor). Since the late 1600s, deus ex machina has been applied in English to unlikely saviors and improbable events that bring order out of chaos in sudden and surprising ways.