The boardroom reeks of cigar smoke and the sweat of desperation. Opened cartons of Chinese takeout are strewed on the table. Sleeves rolled up and ties loosened, your team has been trying to think of something to do with the IPs that your company’s recently acquired.

A naive voice perks up from the corner of the room. “What if we tried to market some sort of plastic figurine?”, asks Simmons, who’s only been at his position for 3 months.

“We tried that already,” you groan. “The metal we bought for our molds is too brittle to make anything detailed enough to serve as either a collectible item or with enough articulate limbs to make an action figure.”

You throw one of the botched prototypes onto the meeting table. “Look at this: the plastic fucking overflowed, and now the eyes and head are enormous and misshapen!”

“Well, why don’t we just keep making those?”, Simmons replies, only half-joking.

Your superior, Mr. Quimbleton, grunts in appreciation. “How’s that?”, he demands.

Without batting an eye, Simmons dutifully explains. “With all due respect, Mr. Quimbleton, we could just continue to make these defective non-toy non-collectible barely-figurines and sell them for up to 20 dollars apiece.” Your colleagues mumble. Simmons is really pushing his luck now; from where you’re standing, it seems like he’s intentionally trying to get fired without due reason in some kind of scheme to collect his severance pay early. He chuckles, feigning stupidity. “Hey, we could even call them Funko Pops after how they make the molds crack and pop!”

Mr. Quimbleton curiously mutters something to himself, obviously drunk off his ass on whiskey highballs.

Several months later, Simmons gets promoted to head of R&D. Funko Corp has now acquired countless numbers of IPs to make defective figurines with, millions of which are now being produced and sold per year. The exponential factor by which Simmons’ dumb luck has trumped your years of sweat and toil has left your proverbial mouth agape, and one late summer afternoon, drove you to put the barrel of a Smith and Wesson Model 36 up your real one.

Simmons was also fucking your wife behind your back.