This is the story of the unexpected implosion of Scribe Media, and its incredible rise from the ashes. 

If you were involved or watched it happen, then this piece should fill information gaps and give you a more complete picture of what happened. 

If you don’t know the story, in short: Scribe Media was on top of the publishing world in 2021, the founders left in 2022, and by May 2023 it was bankrupt and collapsing. Over a hundred full time employees were laid off without warning, almost 500 part time and freelance employees were not paid for work, and hundreds of authors–many of whom had paid in full–got nothing back, and investors were scammed out of millions. 

It’s been more than a year since. I’m telling this story now for a few reasons: 

1. I couldn’t tell this story as it was happening, because I was on the outside and had very little direct knowledge of events. Enough facts have surfaced to give a (somewhat) complete account.
2. I’ve had many people reach out and ask for answers, and I want to write this for them, especially the authors and ex-employees of Scribe.
3. Most people do not have an understanding as to why some of the major players made the decisions they did, especially JeVon McCormick, whose lies, mismanagement, and fraud almost single-handedly caused the issues. 

Because of my position–co-founder of Scribe and the person who hired and worked with JeVon for years–I believe I can shed light on motivations that will explain not just what happened, but why.

So if you’ve ever wondered ‘What happened to Scribe,’ this post should give you (most of) the answers you’ve been looking for.

November 2021 – January 2022

By the end of 2021, JeVon McCormick (the CEO), Zach Obront and I (co-founders) got the company to $21 million in gross sales. We’d totally revolutionized the professional book publishing services space, and got famous for publishing the massive bestseller Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. 

This was the peak of the company. We had a great team, everyone was bought in, everyone was working hard, and we had amazing plans to scale to $100m a year and beyond. 

The future was bright. 

The future was so bright, Zach and I could step back from day to day operational work at Scribe, and focus on building other companies. 

The plan was that Zach and I would each build whole new companies related to Scribe, that the three of us would own in the partnership, but not be part of Scribe the company.

We were on that path. I was building our traditional publishing arm (called Libra Press) when Zach decided that he wanted to leave the partnership to focus on blockchain tech. It was a shocking reversal, as Zach was very close to leading the launch of a new division of our company and raising tens of millions in VC money. 

I understood. He was 24 when we started Scribe, and after spending the last 7 years killing himself to build the company, was ready to start a new chapter. I was sad Zach was leaving, but ultimately happy for him.

JeVon was not. I can’t put this any other way: he was enraged, and freaked the fuck out. 

I need to explain in detail why he did this, because understanding the relationship between JeVon, Zach and I is the KEY to making sense of what happened over the next 2.5 years. 

We hired JeVon in August of 2016. I wrote about it here. Our relationship grew very deep from that moment on, was cemented during Covid, and we all three were committed to each other well beyond just business.

Only a year or so earlier, JeVon had gotten a lot of external job offers (or at least he claimed he did). We obviously wanted him to stay, so we drew up a package to keep him involved and reward him for the great job he’d done so far. A part of it was us committing to each other for the next decade (not in a strict legal sense, but in a “friend promise” sense). 

To JeVon, this was not a company, and we were not just business partners. We had many, many long and deep conversations, were incredibly vulnerable with each other, cared about each other, knew each other’s families. There was a time where I considered JeVon one of my best friends on earth (Zach is still a dear friend, that’s not changed). We were a brotherhood. We were the family he never had, the brothers he wanted but never got. 

I believe JeVon could not get past his own deep emotional issues around Zach leaving. He felt, on a deep level, Zach had betrayed and abandoned him. 

A quick note about JeVon’s past: he had a father who was a literal pimp, and his mom was one of his dad’s prostitutes. His dad literally abandoned him, and his mom did too at different times. This was deeply scarring and he wrote about this extensively in his memoir. 

Zach leaving the partnership really triggered JeVon in ways he could barely admit, much less emotionally explore. I assured him I was not going anywhere, and he eventually calmed down. 

But he wasn’t the same after that.

With the benefit of hindsight, I should have insisted that we find a broker and sell the company then. The company was very strong, it was a great market and we would have gotten top dollar. 

The signs were there that JeVon would not handle this well–I probably spent 50-100 hours talking about this with him, and in effect, being his therapist through this period. 

But I didn’t really recognize them or believe them to be that bad, so I ignored them and convinced myself everything would be fine.

March 2022

Things settled down, and the new company I was building was doing great…and then JeVon’s mom died.

The most important person to JeVon was his mom. In fact, she was the most important top 5 people in his life. His wife was sixth, then his kids, then probably me. 

He and I had talked about his mom dying and what that would be like for him for years, and he knew it was going to be a big deal, and yet…it was even worse than anyone could have seen for him when it happened.

I have to take some blame here: I KNEW this was going to be devastating to him, and had he taken time off to deeply grieve, I think everything might have ended up fine. 

But he did the exact worst possible thing: 

He said he was fine, pushed all his emotions away, recommitted himself to work and dove into his job. 

Again, looking back, this was a MAJOR red flag. I knew JeVon well, and I know that the way he dealt with hard emotions was to run from them and focus on work. Which was exactly what he was doing. 

But he was very convincing, he insisted he was fine, and at the end of the day–I couldn’t make him take time. 

So, things kept going.

May 2022

The next major event was he and I deciding to begin the process of selling Scribe and all its assets. 

This was inevitable once his mom died, I can see that now. But it took me two months to emotionally get there and push it to happen.

The next major mistake: JeVon was emphatic about him handling the entire process, not hiring a broker that he said would take too high a fee and slow things down, and so…Zach and I let JeVon handle the sale process himself.  

If there was a single critical decision that contributed the most to the Scribe collapse, this was it. 

It’s so easy to say now that I should have hired the broker and been in on every part of the process. Of course I should’ve. 

But Zach and I still trusted JeVon, still believed he was our brother and that he was working our best interests, especially because they were his interests too.

And JeVon played every card he had with me and Zach to keep control of everything, he promised us the world…and we let him be in charge. 

I’d just moved to a ranch, I had 4 young kids, I had lots of other things going on. Zach wanted to go do other things. 

It was easy to say yes, and I wanted him to do the work and be done with it…so I chose the easy path, to believe and trust him and let him control everything.

June through November 2022

The first thing JeVon did was get an outside appraisal of the company. The appraiser said it was worth between $52m and $65m. If we could get the high end price (which is no guarantee of course), that meant that my share would be worth about $20m. 

After that, he updated me constantly with stories about all kinds of offers, deals, people he was talking to, etc. It was an entire season of the best business drama anyone could ever make up. I ate it up at the moment. 

Were his stories true? 

I’m going to quote the lawsuit against him filed by Jawad Ahsan and John Kim (two investors he screwed over), the bolding is mine:

“During discussions with Ahsan and Kim and until well after their investments were

completed, McCormick made repeated misrepresentations to Scribe employees and investors (including Ahsan and Kim) that Scribe was on the verge of being acquired by another company. 

For example, in the fall of 2022, McCormick represented that Scribe was going to be acquired for $47 million by AffiniPay, an Austin-based financial technology company. 

McCormick represented to investors and employees that the deal fell through as a result of the Internal Revenue Service walking into the meeting during which a letter of intent with AffiniPay was purportedly being signed that day, thereby scaring away the AffiniPay team. 

McCormick also represented that Scribe was going to be acquired for $35 million by Podium Audio, a leading publisher for audiobooks and ebooks. McCormick also mentioned possible acquisitions by Scribd, a subscription service for audiobooks and ebooks, and even a Saudi Arabian prince. 

In addition, McCormick claimed to have had “70+ calls with eager investors” about investing in Scribe. 

All of these representations were false.“

Here are some more of the other major things that were going on at Scribe during the second half of 2022, I’ve heard from people who have left since:

• • The entire culture manual and process–the one authored by Zach and I and that won us dozens of awards, attracted tons of people to come work there and built the company–was wholesale replaced by JeVon and the executive team. It was made much worse (as you will see below).
  • Jevon stopped focusing on growing Scribe sales and customer experience, and instead began spending all his time promoting his “Modern Leader” brand, and none promoting books, Scribe or anything that produced revenue for the company.
  • JeVon during this time tripled the office space, spending a huge amount on building out a very expensive new office. 
  • When we left we told JeVon to be watchful of Meghan McCracken. She replaced me as the effective “Head of Product,” and she was smart and hard working–but she has deep “spreadsheet brain” tendencies, and would get caught up in the process instead of worrying about people. He turned her loose to run the company, and she was not ready for this responsibility. She possibly did more to destroy the profitability of the company than he did over the next 18 months. 
  • Some examples of things Meghan did, all taken from conversations I have recently had with former Scribe employees who were there during this period:

• “Tucker, you created amazing internal processes and training and they worked. Meghan dismantled every internal process in favor of her own processes that made no sense. She got rid of Publishing Managers, implemented “book teams”, which were wildly disorganized, and took almost ALL of the personalization/emotional support out of what we were doing with authors.”

• “One of the major issues was Scribes drastic overhiring, and this was driven by Meghan creating a whole new process as well as hiring an in-house manuscript creative team, which was a huge waste.”

• “When Meghan made changes, she was always in a panic and created a mess. She would stay up all night, come in with a COMPLETELY new system, and make everyone adhere to it.” 

• “Remember how open the culture was to improvement and criticism? That was gone. She absolutely COULD NOT hear that she was wrong, and the people who pointed out OBVIOUS issues lost their jobs. It happened a lot.”

• “Meghan publicly scolded and shamed people for asking basic questions about failing systems and made examples out of people who challenged her.” 

• “I really can’t emphasize enough what an iron fist she ruled with, pretty much everyone who had a close working relationship with her came away with some sort of emotional baggage, and many went on mini-leaves. Or even quit.”

• “After the layoff happened, she personally asked the Sales team to continue to sell. When they refused because they didn’t know if these people would ever actually produce a book with us or get their money back, Meghan told them to kick the can down the road and said it would be new ownership’s problem. They left.”

• • I asked a person who I knew well why they didn’t tell JeVon. Her answer:
    • “It slowly got worse in 2022, and then got really bad in 2023. Tucker, we rallied everyone together, even most of the Executive Team, and we all went to JeVon and laid this out in clear terms. We brought the receipts. He acknowledged all of our complaints, and even made her take a leave of absence. But he refused to make her change her behavior or get rid of her. I guess because she was such an enabler for him? I don’t know why. She’s why I left.”

• The Meghan examples could go on for tens of thousands of words. There’s more in this same vein, and you can read it on the old Scribe Glassdoor reviews or in this Reddit thread. 

• I didn’t publish those because I can’t confirm the person writing is legit (even though most sound legit), whereas I can confirm the above quotes because they came from people I hired, trained and knew personally who were at Scribe during this period.

• Neither Zach nor I knew this at the time–because JeVon was hiding this from us–but in October, JeVon took an “investment” from an investor for $1 million dollars. This was without telling me or Zach, which he had a duty to do. 

• In Early December of 22, JeVon also took out a loan from John Kim for $500k. This was also without telling Tucker or Zach.

December 2022

This is where it all came to a head. And the IRS triggered it. 

I owed the IRS a six figure sum in taxes (over an investment payout I had, nothing to do with Scribe), but they also owed me some in a refund that was years old. So I was trying to negotiate with them to apply the refund to what I owed in taxes. 

I heard nothing from them for 8 months, then a specific revenue agent decided to come hard at me, put a lien on my ranch, and pursue aggressive collections. But even though none of this had to do with Scribe, this triggered me to push JeVon on the Scribe sale. 

As I stated above, Zach and I knew NOTHING about the money issues Scribe was having, because JeVon was lying to us. 

Looking back in hindsight at the situation with all the information I have now, I can see that the problems would have been fixable with courageous leadership–he clearly needed to fire 50% of the staff, make other cuts, and drive sales hard, all things we had done in the past and could do again–but JeVon was long past being a courageous leader. 

This put JeVon in a serious corner: he had to produce a buyer, both for me and for Scribe. 

He came to us with a deal that valued the company at approximately $15m, instead of $65m the company was valued at less than a year ago. 

Of course, this was a SHOCK to both Zach and I. It took me days to deal with this. I was expecting to get an 8 figure payout. I had put my life into this company for a decade, and I was going to get very little for it, relative to the value created. 

He’d been telling Zach and I stories about so many deals on the table, with prices ranging from $30m to $60m, and so we were expecting something in that range. 

This offer made it clear he wasn’t telling us everything. 

When we confronted him about this obvious problem, he went full on defensive, yelling at us, obfuscating, prevaricating, and throwing literally every single textbook malignant narcissist gaslighting and distraction technique in the book at us. It was impossible to get a straight answer from him. 

At that point, I thought he was trying to cover up for the fact that he screwed up the sale in some other way we didn’t know about. 

I would learn later that his betrayal was far worse than I knew then, but even at that point, I realized the basic fact: he was not telling me the whole truth. 

This was a soul crushing realization for me. The CEO of my company, my trusted friend, my sworn brother, the man who asked me to take care of his kids if anything happened to him–that guy had been lying to me. 

I honestly spent days in a deep depression. It’s still so hard, I don’t even feel ready to write fully about my emotions then, almost two years later (I’ll go deeper on my personal experience here in my next memoir, which I’m writing now). 

Zach was not sad, he was furious. He and JeVon fought and argued for days and weeks. The drama that occurred over the last three weeks of December could literally be its own season of a Netflix series. Five different times I thought the whole thing would come crashing down, or that Zach or JeVon would sue each other, or any number of other calamities would come about.

It all ended when Zach and I realized that we really had only one choice: we had to sell, regardless of this terrible price. 

After the initial shock and horror and pain, I was pretty calm about this. Zach was confused how I could be so calm when I was losing more money than anyone.

I’d thought about it a lot. And as much as it pained me to admit it, IO missed a lot of signs, that, had I really looked and really paid attention, where there.

For example, when we hired him he was literally in the middle of leaving his old company, or being pushed out, we still don’t really know the truth, but it was sketchy.

He did things like show us the thumb drive he said was all of his companies secrets, in case they tried to sue him.

And one of his previous jobs he told us he was one of the ones who created the mortgage crisis in Texas by having his team at Wachovia write so many bad loans, and it led to Wachovia eventually going bankrupt? He was never accused of any crime, but he was right in the middle of that.

And at Scribe, we saw him ruthlessly manipulate people so many times in ways that helped us. Never anything illegal, but always very sketchy.

And that exactly what he did to us at this period.

He made a bunch of bad decisions he won’t own, he didn’t tell us everything, he painted himself into a corner and so he tried to figure out a way to manipulate our emotions to get out of this situation.

He’s not being honest and trying to figure out how to solve the problem. He only cares about manipulating how we feel.

We knew from the beginning we were dealing with a dude who is really good at his job…but does not have impeccable integrity.

Of course we had no idea he would be this bad, but man, when you pick up a snake, no matter how nice it might seem, it’s only a matter of time before it bites you. We got bit.

I know that doesn’t make me look good, but it’s the painful truth. 

Here’s possibly the CRAZIEST part: as he was telling us his set of lies, he was telling the guys he wanted to invest in Scribe a whole different set of lies. 

This is directly from the lawsuit against him (the bolding is mine):

“On December 22, 2022, McCormick provided Ahsan with financial statements and financial projections for Scribe, which Ahsan later discovered from Scribe’s executive team were false and had been altered by McCormick. 

McCormick also provided Ahsan and other investors with falsified personal financial information in order to convince Ahsan and other investors that they would be repaid if Scribe was unable to do so. 

On January 3, 2023, just one week before the closing of Ahsan’s initial $5 million investment, McCormick sent Ahsan an email with a screenshot of his bank statement, which purported to have an account balance of $31,933,947.16.” 

The lawsuit claims that JeVon changed the Scribe financial numbers in photoshop and sent them to Jawad to get him to invest in Scribe. Again from the lawsuit:

“In addition to providing falsified bank account information to Ahsan to induce him into making his initial investment, McCormick sent Ahsan falsified financial statements to reflect a $2.6 million profit in 2022 (instead of the $2.2 million loss the company had suffered in the same year).”

What JeVon had done was run Scribe into the ground, and lie to everyone to cover it up and get more investment in the hope he would eventually sell it and cash out, and no one would figure out his lies. 

And it would have worked. 

The problem was that he didn’t sell it before his lies caught up with him.

May-August 2023

Looking back at the true financials, and knowing the core team at Scribe and the situation, I still believe that had JeVon been courageous and taken the hard path, even starting as late as January 2023, he could have turned Scribe around and either sold it or made it profitable. It would have been hard, because he spent all of 2022 squandering the huge lead that Zach and I handed him–but it was still possible. 

He didn’t take the courageous path. Once Jawad put his money in it appears that JeVon doubled down on his bullshit, and in May 2023 JeVon’s house of cards fell. 

I was not involved at all with Scribe when it imploded, so I had no firsthand visibility into anything, so from legal docs and people who were there, this is the basic timeline:

• April 12, Scribe couldn’t make payroll, and JeVon talked Jawad into loaning the company $775k to make payroll. 
• May 15, Scribe was unable to make payroll again, and JeVon induced John Kim to invest more money into Scribe, to help him make payroll. 
  • A former Scribe employee told me, and another confirmed, “On one of these late payrolls JeVon claimed that an investor had reneged a payment, and that JeVon was covering our pay personally from his own accounts. And we fucking thanked him for it.”
• I have also learned that during this period (not sure on exact date), JeVon took a $250k loan from an EMPLOYEE of Scribe to make payroll. Multiple previous Scribe employees have told me this is accurate.
• May 18, Jawad confronted JeVon about his lies. JeVon resigned as President and CEO of Scribe. It says in the lawsuit: 
  • “McCormick did not dispute the allegations of fraud and wrongdoing when confronted about them. Instead, McCormick agreed to reimburse Ahsan for his $5,775,000 investment in Scribe. McCormick, however, was allegedly unable to secure the funding to make the payment, citing as a reason that the trustee of his family trust refused to release the funds.”
  • As a side note, this is a very common JeVon tactic–when confronted with truth, he will say anything to get away, then make up a lie to get out of it later. He used his “trustee won’t let me” lie for years and for various reasons with Zach and I.
• UPDATE: Sometime in this period, JeVon tried to scam AT LEAST one other investor. I did not know about this until I released this story, and got this message:
  •  “When I found out Scribe was in trouble, I reached out to JeVon and offered to facilitate an investment group. I had a group of Scribe Alums willing to help.
    

    He called me several times and ended up saying something to the effect of “You need to put $1m in an offshore bank account so that the Board knows you are serious with your intentions. Then they will show you the financials and how things aren’t really as bad as they seem. I’ll make sure you win the bid if you do this.”

     

    He had account numbers ready for me to copy. I audibly gasped and said “I’m not doing that, good luck with any party willing to do that.”
    
    Later that day (a Sunday), the General Counsel called and said “We are announcing a deal on Tuesday, it’s been signed. JeVon knows this and has been told the has no authority to negotiate on behalf of the company. Please tell me you didn’t send the money because it is gone if you did.”
    
    I always thought that if he had those accounts at the ready then there must be funds somewhere.“

• On May 24, Scribe was forced to lay off 86 employees. 
  • There are details of the chaos of the layoff process here.
• As Jawad dug into the company details, it got worse. From the lawsuit: 
  • “Ahsan and Kim learned that Scribe’s cash flow problem was not just a result of McCormick’s reckless mismanagement of the company, but also a result of McCormick using Scribe as his personal piggy bank. Ahsan and Kim learned that McCormick used the company credit card to fund a $30,000 trip to Disney World with his family only weeks after Ahsan’s investment in the company. Around the same time, McCormick also used company funds to buy an approximately $15,000 Louis Vuitton bag and employ a personal driver for himself. In addition, Ahsan and Kim discovered that McCormick made a $125,000 distribution to himself from the funds invested by Ahsan, in Violation of several covenants restricting McCormick from doing so. McCormick made all of these expenditures during a time when Scribe was in financial distress.”
  • Obviously he never did anything like this when Zach and I were there. Zach especially was on the financials like a hawk before he left. 
• Right after this, Scribe defaulted on two loans that ABC Bank had made to Scribe. ABC Bank took possession of Scribe’s assets and took operating control of the company, as was their right as senior creditor.
  • This was another wonderful surprise lie–we knew about the ABC loans, but JeVon had sworn that he was the ONLY guarantor on those ABC loans. Turns out, he made me and Zach personal guarantors as well, and lied to us about that (and I believe lied to the bank as well). The way he did it was a very sophisticated trick. There’s no shock quite like realizing not only is your old company bankrupt and you won’t get your money, but that you might end up OWING money to the bank because of your “friend’s” fraud. 
• The minute the layoff happened, these problems became public. Rumors started flying online, and authors started calling to see what was happening at Scribe. 
• One of those authors was Eric Jorgenson, who published a book with Scribe in 2020 (The Almanac Of Naval Ravikant, a huge hit), and had another one in progress. Seeing that Scribe was in financial distress and needing new owners or investment, he started calling potential investors to try to save the company. He connected with Sieva and Xavier. 
• Sieva Kozinsky and Xavier Helgesen, founders of a firm called Enduring Ventures (a long-term private holding company), flew to Austin to meet with the team and the bank, and assess the situation.
• The second day Sieva and Xavier were there, the landlord put a padlock on the door and claimed everything left in the office as payment for rent they were owed.
• Mid-June 2023, they started a new company called Bond Financial, and hired the majority of remaining Scribe team members, keeping them paid to support authors, continue to publish books, and prevent the situation from worsening. 
• Sieva Kozinsky steps in as interim operating CEO to navigate the crisis and communicate with authors. 
• On July 7th, Sieva broke the hard news to authors that their past payments to Scribe had been squandered by JeVon, and they would not be getting the work they had paid for. In order to continue working on their books, the team at this new company would need some additional payment to cover costs. Authors were pissed. 
• In early August, the new company owned by Enduring Ventures finalized the purchase of certain assets of Old Scribe (namely, the Scribe logo and website) from the bank and assumed the bank’s loan liability from Old Scribe.
• In late August, Eric Jorgenson invested in the new Scribe and joined as CEO.
• In August 2023, Bond Financial (the new company) started working on author projects and publishing books again. Though they had no obligation to do so, the team worked at-cost for all previous Scribe authors trying to help them finish their books.

The Common Questions I Get

How did JeVon fool so many people?

JeVon didn’t fool a few people. He fooled (almost) EVERYONE he came in contact with. 

He fooled everyone at Scribe, including Zach and I. 

He fooled multiple billionaires, including John Mackay, the billionaire founder of Whole Foods, who put him onto the Board of Directors of Conscious Capitalism (no, seriously). 

He fooled Jawad Ahsan, John Kim, and other investors, who are each very smart and very successful and do not get fooled by people. 

How could someone do that? 

Well, first off, he’s actually good at his job. I wrote about his managerial ability here, and it’s still true. He is a skilled dude–at certain things–and you cannot fake that over a long period of time. He can deliver when he wants to.

And along with that, he’s an INCREDIBLE manipulator. Some of the things I have seen him do to people were, quite frankly, breathtaking. 

For example, we had a running joke that we never fired anyone at Scribe, no matter how bad their performance was. It seemed like they always “chose” to leave right before we had to fire them. 

You know why? 

Because JeVon would have a meeting with them, and like some hypnotist Svengali, convince people that they didn’t want to be at Scribe and should leave “on their own.” 

He did this so many times, to people who had NO INTENTION of leaving, that it was legendary. He took pride in his ability to get anyone to do anything he wanted them to do. 

One more thing he can do that all great manipulators can do: he would convince himself of his lie before he tried to convince you. And when he believed something, he was very convincing. 

So the only way you could hold the center with him was to have a very clear handle on the facts independent of him, and a strong sense of self. 

How many people do you know like that? 

Probably the thing he could do the best is find the thing you wanted the most, and then promise to deliver it. 

It’s a really powerful technique. He did that to me, and it worked. I needed someone to help me scale my company, and he already was that in most ways. 

The problem comes when you keep promising bigger things to fool people more, but you can’t deliver anymore. 

Don’t get me wrong, JeVon has the air of a bullshitter about him, and plenty of people saw that–including my wife. 

Even Zach and I saw the potential for it from the beginning. When we first hired him as he was leaving his old job as President of a software company, we structured the deal so that he couldn’t fuck us. The only way he could succeed would be to make us money as well. We tied his success to ours, and thought this would protect us. 

The thing we did not foresee at all was his willingness to COMPLETELY BLOW UP HIS OWN LIFE. 

That’s the most confusing thing about this: he didn’t set up a master theft and disappear with the money to Belize or something. 

You could make a good argument that he got the worst result from this debacle!

His career is ruined. His reputation is shattered. His wife took his kids and left him. He has MULTIPLE FEDERAL LAWSUITS pending against him for millions of dollars!!

He’s in his mid-50s, and every day he has to live with the knowledge that everyone he said he loved and cared about wants nothing to do with anymore, and the only person responsible for that is…him. 

Why would he do that? That’s the next question.

Why would JeVon do this? 

JeVon was called a lot of things as this went down: evil, sociopath, psychopath, incompetent, etc, etc. Most of the labels were not accurate, but one fit perfectly: malignant narcissist. 

It’s easy to say that JeVon was a malignant narcissist, but what does that actually mean? 

A psychiatrist once told me you can understand narcissism as an addiction to external adoration and reflected self-image, as a replacement for the love one never received as a child. In essence, someone creates a false self-image, then creates a reality around them that supports it–and they become addicted to the image itself. 

I did not understand that when she told me. 

I understand it now, because addiction is the best frame with which to understand JeVon’s behavior.

If you think of him like an addict, you can understand everything that he did. All his behavior, all his decisions, everything makes sense if you understand that he is addicted to his self-image, and will sacrifice everything–including himself and his family–in order to continue to think of himself as a perfect and brilliant CEO that didn’t need anyone, and could fool everyone and get his way out of any bind, regardless of the facts.

This is why he destroyed Scribe, the company he invested his life in building with us. 

Why he betrayed his best friends. 

Why he broke up his family. 

Why he ruined his career and reputation. 

Why he lost everything he valued in the world. 

Because he was addicted to an identity, and focused on retaining the image of that identity over doing the hard work needed to actually BE that person. 

I cannot speak to what story he tells himself about why Scribe collapsed today. I can tell you that as this whole thing was going down, he came to me for sympathy, and tried to tell me (and the world) a story of how he made a few isolated mistakes that snowballed, and subtly shifted blame to others.

He even wrote a Linkedin post about this, but it ended up with hundreds of comments from the people he laid off at Scribe, coming at him with the receipts, displaying his lies to his face (he posted that on his personal page and deleted that one, because the comments were vicious, though true). 

What does a narcissist do when their facade begins to break down? 

They attack and shame everyone who questions it, and double down hard on whatever lie is needed to reinforce the image.

This is exactly what JeVon (and Meghan) did after Zach and I left, and his decisions started to hurt the company. 

What does a narcissist do when the facade finally breaks and everyone knows the truth?

They convince themselves everyone else is wrong, and go into hiding. 

Which is what he’s doing now.

Are you upset/hurt/mad about this whole thing?

Yeah of course. 

A lot of people asked me if it was hard to watch something I created and built fall apart. Yeah, I mean, that was sad I guess, but honestly, I don’t care about “brands.” I care about people. 

What really hurt was watching all those people at Scribe that Zach and I hired, trained, worked with and loved get hurt by a man that we brought in and we vouched for. 

And the authors. So many of whom signed with Scribe because of me, and got screwed out of money. And many got nothing. 

Thankfully everyone understood we were not involved, that we would never have let that happen if we’d have been there…but I still was so sad that it happened at all. 

I know I’m going to sound cliche, but it’s true: I am now thankful that this occurred, at least to me. 

No, I’m not thankful that anyone else was hurt by his actions, of course not. 

But the fact is, I clearly had a LOT of lessons I needed to learn, and I obviously wasn’t learning them the easy way. I lost (potentially) $20 million dollars to learn the lessons, and that sucks, but the truth is: it could have been far worse. 

I still have my family. I have my ranch. I have my health, my reputation and my friends. All the things that matter, I still have. Most of them are better now than when I was at Scribe.

I could have paid a lot more for these lessons, if I’d been truly stubborn. 

I could have ended up like JeVon. 

So yes, this sucks, but I’m appreciative of the lesson, and appreciative that it wasn’t as expensive as it could have been for me. 

Why did you pick JeVon, and what lessons did you learn from this?

For me personally, these two questions are the most important ones.

If I look at myself honestly and take the right lessons and internalize them, then this whole event–as painful as it was–is not wasted.

I hate to do this to you, but I’m not going in depth into why I was drawn to him initially and the lessons I eventually learned. A few reasons: 

1. This piece is primarily about what happened at Scribe and why. What I learned is a different piece altogether, and this is already at 9k words.
2. I hate the spammy listicle “7 Lessons I Learned From Losing My Family To Murder” posts, where people try to take extremely emotional events and distill them to intellectualized data. I’m not going to do that. 
3. The basic lesson is a pretty obvious one: I didn’t want to see what I saw. He filled a role for me in my life, and I wanted the role filled more than wanted to recognize the yellow and red flags.

   The honest truth is I’m not quite ready to write about them in depth. I’m currently writing my next memoir, and I promise I will deeply explore the lessons I learned and how I felt about them in that book. 

Did you get out in time? How much did you actually get from the sale?

I know a lot of people thought I “got out just in time.” They assumed I took my money and ran. I heard that a lot. 

The truth is, I lost more money than anyone (maybe, Jawad might have lost a little more). 

I should have gotten around $20 million for the company had we sold when we started the process. OK fine, that money never existed, but the deal I eventually agreed to was $6.75 million, to be paid to me in 4 installments over the next 2 years. 

I only got the first payment, which was about 12% of the total, before Scribe went under. 

For a decade of effort building a company that did almost $100 million in topline sales in 9 years, I ended up with less than a million dollars in payment. 

I hope this is clear: I’m not looking for sympathy. I brought JeVon in, and I worked with him, this was the result and consequence.

Why didn’t you and Zach sue JeVon?

Oh man, we talked about it. A lot. 

We have a GREAT case, and we would’ve won. There are a lot more details I didn’t put in, and JeVon even admitted to both Zach and I at different times after this all came out–and on recorded calls–that he lied to us and defrauded us.

I can’t speak for Zach precisely, but here’s why I decided not to sue: 

1. I honestly didn’t think I would collect much of anything. JeVon is very good at hiding his assets. He constantly bragged to Zach and I about his money that he’d moved offshore (I do believe he *might* have moved some Scribe or Libra money offshore, but neither Zach nor I could not find any definitive proof of this). 
2. I didn’t want to be emotionally entwined with him anymore. I decided to forgive him and move on.

It wasn’t worth the money or time. I’d rather pay the price, learn the lesson, and move on with my life. I can make more money elsewhere, and honestly, not even $20 million is worth years of my life trying to track him down and make him face justice. 

Also, for me PERSONALLY, I felt like suing him would be, in a way, trying to blame him for everything. It’s easier for me to blame someone else than recognize how I betrayed myself, how I denied the signs, and how I kept going with what was not working because of my own issues. 

All this being said, I’m glad that Jawad Ahsan and John Kim sued him, and I hope they win and are able to collect from him.

What’s going to happen to JeVon?

I don’t know. The last time I talked to him was in 2023 as this was going down. He was calling me for sympathy and emotional support. 

Literally as my old friends at Scribe were scrambling to pay their bills after the layoff, as authors I knew were asking me what was going on, he was asking me to be on his side. 

I told him to not call me again until he had solved the problem that he put me (and them) in. 

He hasn’t called since. 

The story isn’t over though. 

He still has two pending federal lawsuits against him for many millions of dollars.

He is not in the clear on criminal charges either. I don’t have any specific knowledge, but I am confident that, given the right circumstances, those could happen. He committed serious crimes that have prison time as the punishment. 

What’s crazy is that I believe JeVon could still turn this around and make things right. 

JeVon is very religious and very serious about his relationship with God. He prays, goes to church, and being a “God guy” is a core part of his identity. 

There is no definition of “God guy” that can include his actions in 2022 and 2023. He is living a lie there as well. If he decided to take that seriously, he’d realize that the only way back to God begins with truth. 

That means being totally honest about everything he did, taking FULL responsibility for his actions, making restitution, and sincerely asking forgiveness. 

He would have to pay back Jawad Ahsan, John Kim, Zach, me, the Scribe Authors that paid for work they didn’t receive, and the Scribe employees who were left in a lurch by mass layoffs. 

I have not discussed this with any of them, but I believe that if he approached each person in sincerity, took full responsibility for what he did, apologized, and offered a fair amount to make them whole–I think almost everyone would accept it.

That being said, I can’t imagine what it would take for him to convince me he was being sincere and telling the truth after all of this–but who knows?

It’s not too late and it’s not impossible. It’s just hard.

By my calculations, making real restitution would be somewhere between $20 and $30 million in total.

JeVon LOVED talking about the tens of millions he had in his trading account. Was he telling the truth? I don’t know. 

But if he has that money, and wants his life back, he could start there. It’d be an amazing redemption story.

One of the worst parts of this is that I truly do not believe JeVon is just a horrible bad guy and did this out of malice. A lot of people think he’s a psychopath. I don’t.

I believe there’s plenty of good in him. He just didn’t let the good part win. He let the bad guy win this round.

The good guy in him could still come out on top, eventually. JeVon is such a fast learner, maybe he can learn this lesson, do his healing, truly repent, and make things right.

I hope it happens, even though I am not counting on it. 

[A note here on forgiveness: I’ve forgiven JeVon, but that forgiveness is for me, not him. It’s so I can let go of my emotions around this and move on with my life. Forgiveness does not mean justification or validation. What he did to me and others was wrong, pure and simple. And even if he truly repented and made things right, I would be appreciative and accept it and wish him well, but he cannot come back in my life. 

If he does the hard work in front of him, he deserves grace and acceptance, and he will get it from God, but not me.] 

What happened to you after Scribe? What are you doing now?

Financially, it was not fun to go from looking at flying private, to having to scramble to ensure we have enough to cover our monthly family spend. There was a month or two last year where things got tight, but we’re thankfully in a good enough position that we managed and are fine now. 

As I said, I was in a financial position to be able to survive this.

And all the things that matter most, are still here and doing great. 

Emotionally, it was far harder to deal with, and given that there are still places I’m not ready to write about means the healing is still on going to some extent. 

Two really good things came out of this though: 

1. I get serious about writing my next memoir. I’m tentatively calling it Feelings I Didn’t Want To Feel. It will be about how I went from the guy that wrote I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell to who I am now; husband, father of 4, homesteader, etc. It’s a pretty intense story, and people ask me how I did this all the time. Even Tucker Carlson had me on his show to talk about it.  
2. I launched a memoir coaching company, Tell Your Story. I have a very different and very compelling approach to writing a memoir. I started it with Emily Gindlesparger (the woman who helped me build the book coaching program at Scribe), and it’s going great. We’ve got amazing clients who are doing incredible work, and I am writing my memoir alongside them, showing them my rough drafts, etc. It’s the most fun I have had writing or teaching in a long time. 

What happened to the authors that JeVon screwed over? 

Well, at first, they were totally screwed. They got nothing. Scribe Media almost ended in May 2023.

But the story’s not over!

There were hundreds of authors JeVon screwed over by hiding the truth until the very last minute. Hundreds of authors had paid tens of thousands of dollars for work. The sudden bankruptcy left them with nothing. No refund, no work, and no recourse. The money was gone.

But a few people on the Scribe team stayed at their desks. Think of the people who stay at their desks through a dumpster fire like that. They are the most dedicated to authors, to the mission, and to each other. Heroes in my opinion.

They kept working through this chaos, not knowing if anyone would pay them for this work. 

Authors needed files, needed guidance, or just needed someone to talk to (or scream at). This team carried the burden of someone else’s mistakes. But they kept moving.

They started a new company and many of the authors who got screwed over by JeVon signed on with the new Scribe. The new Scribe – though they did not have to – offered to complete every affected author’s book at-cost. 

Yes, they had to pay more and that sucks. But look at the reality of the situation: you can’t hold them responsible for the fraud of another person. 

There is no easy fix for a catastrophe like this. There isn’t even a true fix. There is no secret pot of gold to pull from to make people whole (well, not until JeVon’s “trustee” opens it). Everyone is worse off. 

But getting a group of Scribe veterans to work at-cost to finish your book is the best solution in existence right now, given the constraints of the situation.

I think there are more than one hundred of those authors who have published or are in progress now with the new Scribe, and from what I hear and see, things are going well. 

JeVon created a shitty situation where there are no perfect solutions. Unless he comes out of his own pocket, no one will be truly made whole. But without this team picking up and carrying on, doing what they can, things would be a lot worse for a lot more people. 

What’s going on with Scribe now?

One of the encouraging parts of this story is the rise of the new Scribe. 

Enduring Ventures, Eric, and the rest of the team have been killing themselves to pick up the pieces and build a new version of Scribe.

I call it a “new Scribe,” because it is a whole new legal entity, with entirely new owners, and a new CEO.

But it’s a very unusual case, because it’s also got a bunch of old Scribe employees–some of the very best people we hired and trained and worked with–and all the old IP and all of my content and processes that Zach and I created.

Zach and I recently spent two days with the current Scribe team. I can’t say enough good stuff about the new CEO Eric Jorgenson, the new exec team (and of course my old peeps from Scribe). They seem great together and are very sharp and caring. 

Like me, Eric was an author before he started at Scribe. I can’t emphasize enough how rare this is. Most people who work in publishing don’t write books, or at least don’t write real, successful books that sell a lot of copies. 

My favorite part of what they doing is going back to the fundamentals of what made Scribe great:

• They went back to authors having one point of contact (seems obvious, but Meghan set it up so Authors had multiple points of contact, which was a disaster). 
• They changed back to a simple project management tool (they’d moved to a large, slow, and expensive headache). 
• They went back to understanding each author’s needs individually and making the process fit the author, as opposed to forcing the author to fit the process. 
• They are back to a small, tight knit, and nimble team, getting rid of a layer of management that were not involved in making the author’s experience great or publishing books.
• They have the financial controls and stability that JeVon so carefully avoided: A CFO, regular board meetings, and honest accounting. 

The team at the new Scribe has gone back to what made Scribe great – putting the author’s experience and book quality front and center.

Some of my favorite people are back and doing the same great work they did while I was there: Mark Chait, our first full time employee. Ian Claudius who’s worked with me for over 15 years. Erica Hoffman, Ellie Cole, Andrew Lovell, Emily Sisto, Lezeth Alfaro, Rachael Brandenburg and Emily Ellis all worked at Scribe for years before Zach and I left, and were key members of what made Scribe great. 

And of course, Rikki Jump is back doing sales. I hired her and she sat next to me for 6 months learning exactly what Scribe does, why it matters, how to understand what authors need and to always approach sales from a service mindset. I know her and trust her–she will always tell you the truth. If she’s working in sales, you can guarantee that things are going well and being run with high integrity. 

I used to happily guarantee that Scribe would produce a great book, because I was there and I could make damn sure it happened.

I’m not there now, and I can’t guarantee anything, but I can say I am really impressed with them, and I happily refer people to them again. 

It’s so great to see, because this is a company that must exist. It does so much good in the world. I spent 8 years there working with authors every day. We helped 2,000 people publish their books, each for their own reasons. Some people made millions of dollars, some saved lives. Some authors left a legacy, and some truly understood themselves for the first time. Those author’s stories are all here. 

When we started Scribe, we changed the publishing industry. We put a credible stake in the ground with the opposite of what every traditional publisher does. They take control, we give freedom. They dangle an advance, we charge for our work. They take royalties, we take nothing. 

Scribe needs to exist because authors need a way to publish high-quality books while controlling their own book, their own rights, and their own finances. We can’t have 10 people in New York deciding who get to publish books. 

I’m glad our original vision for Scribe lives on in this new company. 

The “good guys” are back in charge at Scribe, and I’m optimistic about their future. 

If you are a good fit to work with them, in my opinion, I believe you can do it safely knowing that they do a great job and ensure you are taken care of.

.
NOTE: Obviously I received no compensation from Scribe for this, of course, I just want to be clear about that. I own no part of that company, get no referral fee from them if you work with them, etc.