Fishbowl (13 page)

16

IT WAS HAMER'S
first time at Yao's. He could see that the waiters knew Andrei well. Chris ordered kung pao chicken. Andrei didn't even need to say that he wanted the chicken and shrimp fried noodles.

‘I'm running what appears to be a large and growing business,' said Andrei matter-of-factly as soon as the orders were taken. ‘I'm twenty-one years old and I'm well aware that I have no experience that prepares me for this.'

Chris nodded. He was impressed both by Andrei's insight and his honesty. At the same age, still in college and running his own first start-up, he had messed things up precisely because he had lacked both. He was also interested in the way Andrei had made a statement of apparent humility come out more as an assertion of control. Chris had seen a lot of guys running start-ups. The more he saw of Andrei Koss, the more interested in Fishbowll he became.

‘It's not that easy to find disinterested advice,' said Andrei.

‘And you think I'll offer it to you?'

‘You're the first guy I've met who hasn't tried to buy my company.'

Chris laughed. ‘Full disclosure. You know I'm an investor.'

Andrei nodded.

‘OK,' said Chris. ‘Well, let me see how I can help you. What do you want to know?'

‘I want to know what I'm not doing that I should be doing. I want to know what I am doing that I shouldn't be.'

‘Good questions. I had to go through two start-ups before I learned those lessons.'

‘I'll pay you for your time,' said Andrei quickly.

Chris laughed again.

‘I don't expect any favours.'

Chris leaned forward. ‘Andrei, you'll be doing me the favour. But I need to know some numbers. I need to get some sense of the scale of what you're doing. How many users have you got?' He saw Andrei hesitate. ‘It's confidential, I promise. But, full disclosure again, I may use the numbers myself to decide whether to make you an offer of some cash. I won't divulge anything to anyone else.'

Andrei hesitated a little longer. ‘OK,' he said. ‘Thirty-two million.'

‘How long have you been running?'

‘Eight months, more or less.'

‘That's good.'

‘They have an extraordinarily high usage rate. And we have an exceptional geographic and demographic diversity, which generates a lot of demands. I've got a thousand things people are asking for.'

‘And the things you want to do?'

‘I've got a thousand of those as well.'

Their dishes arrived.

‘Tell me your vision,' said Chris, digging into his kung pao chicken.

‘It's there on the website.'

‘Tell me in your own words.'

‘They are my words.'

‘Andrei, just tell me.'

‘Connectedness,' said Andrei. ‘Most social networks put you in touch with people you know, and if you're lucky, through them you might connect with other people. That's still a relatively contained and insulated subset of the total group you may want to connect with. Group pages and chatrooms are full of people
who get attracted to something momentarily and aren't committed. I want to provide an avenue to find your way to people who you would want to talk to, because they're interested in the things that are really important to you, but who you would never normally find. And I want you to be able to do it right now, today, this instant, and not have to wait for chance connections through friends of friends of friends that probably won't even ever happen. I think of it as Deep Connectedness – taking you wherever and to whoever you want to go to in the world.'

‘The other night I asked you if it's important,' said Chris. ‘I asked if it's the most important thing you could be doing. And you're telling me there's this Deep Connectedness you're trying to facilitate – which I totally get and which I think is totally cool – but my question is, how important is that?'

‘World changingly,' said Andrei without hesitation.

Chris smiled. ‘That's what everyone always says. I've seen guys setting up an internet site to sell socks and they think they're going to change the world. I tell them, “Dude, it's socks. I already wear socks.”'

‘But you don't already have Deep Connectedness. This is new. It's something that makes the world a new place. We still see the world as divided up by place. That's a way of thinking that comes out of old communication, where you're limited by physicality.'

‘Is it? The telephone's been around for over a century.'

‘And that wasn't enough to change it. Why? Because I may have a phone, and I may be able to connect with any number in the world – but I don't know who to call. There's no one helping me find out. The places we live, those are accidents. They're not the real things that unite or divide us. The things that do that are ideas, values, aspirations. And they're not limited by place. These clusters, these communities of ideas, exist between places, outside places, but they're real communities, or they're starting to be, and if we can create the connections, they'll be even more real. They'll be larger, fuller, deeper. They won't be limited to the elites. The way the world groups itself is changing. Give it Deep
Connectedness, and it'll change even faster. That's what Fishbowll does. That's what Fishbowll is for.'

Chris was silent, watching him.

‘You don't think this has the potential to be world-changingly important?' Andrei frowned. ‘Maybe I've got this out of proportion. You know, for the last eight months it's just been Fishbowll, Fishbowll, Fishbowll, morning, noon and night.' He paused again. ‘Maybe I've lost perspective.'

‘No,' said Chris. ‘I don't think you have. It's not socks. It's so not socks. I was just testing you a little, Andrei. Probably for the first time in my life I'm looking at a start-up where the founder is telling me it's going to change the world and I find myself thinking, he's right. And that is not a small thing, dude.' Chris smiled. ‘That is a fucking monster thing.' He picked up his Coke glass. ‘To the fucking monster thing that is Fishbowll.' He clinked Andrei's glass and drank. ‘Two more questions. Thirty-two million users. What do you project by the end of the year?'

‘Seventy to eighty million.'

‘Growth projections are never right. They're either too high or too low. Historically, over your eight months, where have you been? I'm guessing you've been too low.'

Andrei nodded. ‘Back at the start of the year I wrote my projections on a napkin. Right here – right at that table over there. Ben still has it. Every month he brings it out. He tells me it's nice to have some evidence that even Andrei Koss can be wrong.'

Chris laughed.

‘But the year-end projection I've just given you takes that into account.'

‘No, it doesn't. You think it does, but it doesn't. Not as far as infrastructure planning is concerned. Plan for a hundred, minimum. If you're prudent, a hundred and twenty million. Do you have the infrastructure to serve that?'

‘Not yet.'

‘Will you have it? Andrei – and I speak from personal experience that I can tell you about some day, if you don't mind me weeping into my beer – the thing that will kill you quicker than a coyote chasing down a roadrunner is if your server speed slows and if your site starts to go down. If Fishbowll gets a reputation for that, you may as well turn it upside down and empty the water out right now.'

Andrei stared at him.

‘I'm serious. That's where you need redundancy. If there's one thing you should go do this afternoon after we finish, it's go find yourself more server capacity. Don't sit down and code. Get on the phone and find yourself server space. Get your infrastructure ready. Now, the second question. Have you got any revenue?'

‘We've got a deal with 4Site.'

‘Who are they?'

‘An advertising company.'

‘What are they like?'

‘There's one guy who's cool. He's kind of old but he gets it. The other guys I've met think they know it all.'

‘What kind of a deal have you got? This is confidential, I promise.'

‘They get eighteen per cent commission and guarantee one million revenue this year, double next year.'

‘That's good. Is it exclusive?'

Andrei nodded.

‘This deal runs for how long?'

‘Eighteen months.'

‘You'll have outgrown them by then.'

‘I know,' said Andrei. ‘But I thought we'd need that long to figure out how the advertising model works. This isn't about making as much money as we possibly can. If we have to have advertising, then it's about using it, as far as we can, to enhance the user experience. My aim is to use the contract period to experiment with the approach. And we have a guaranteed income, which was important for us. We were running out of cash. We'd be dead now if we hadn't done that deal.'

‘I'm not saying it's a bad deal,' said Chris. ‘Eighteen per cent is about as low as I've ever heard. Who negotiated that?'

‘Me.'

‘I'm impressed.'

‘Don't be. I was lucky. My father knew some oligarchs. He's Russian. I'm Russian, too. I mean, I was born in Russia. I'm American now, of course.'

Chris looked at him in confusion. ‘And the connection is …?'

‘Don't worry about it,' said Andrei.

‘Are you talking about Russian oligarchs? Is there some kind of Russian mafia involvement here?'

Andrei cracked a rare smile.

‘Because I've been involved with some unsavoury characters, but if that's what we're talking about, Andrei, I'm out of my league.'

‘Nothing. There's nothing. Forget I said it.'

Chris peered at him for a moment. ‘All right. Tell me about Ben and Kevin. They own part of the company?'

‘Kevin owns fifteen per cent and Ben owns nine.'

‘And you have the rest?'

Andrei nodded.

‘What does Kevin do?'

‘He codes.'

‘You can pay a programmer.'

‘I do. Four. Kevin's not like that. Kevin keeps it all going. If there's a problem, he works at it until it's done. He's a Stakhanovite.'

‘A what?'

‘It's an old Soviet term for a hero-worker. Someone of superhuman productivity. Kevin's a Stakhanovite.'

‘Well, every start-up needs one. And Ben?'

‘He's a psychology major. He helps … I don't know, figure stuff out. He also analyses the data.'

‘So that's it. You three guys and the four programmers you pay?'

‘That's it. Do I need more? I don't know if I've got the money for more, especially if I've got to scale up for a hundred million users.'

‘Then you need to find it.' Chris sat back. ‘You
need
to find it. I can't believe you're still surviving as you are. Andrei, I share the vision. I get it, I totally get it, and I love it. It's awesome. The world is on a one-way journey to a global future and it's only a question of who gets to lay the road. It may be that when the history of this is written, Fishbowll will have a chapter all to itself. But when I look at it from a business perspective, I think, if you get it right, you also have the most extraordinary thing on your hands. You have a set of users that are walking around with bullseyes on their backs. They're not just selected for their interests but self-selected, and not just for their interests but for the interests they really, really care about. If advertisers have wet dreams, this is it.'

‘I know,' said Andrei. ‘We find that we have a little of what we call interest-tourism, where users just type in some crazy thing to see what comes up. Mostly it's new users and they do it a couple of times and that's it. But for the others, we're getting pretty good now at analysing usage patterns – who people talk to, how often, on what topics – to figure out how committed a user is to a particular interest. I think we're starting to understand that better than our users understand it themselves. Right now, advertisers bid a basic per-click rate at a daily auction, and that's adjusted up or down by a certain amount depending on a set of data about the individual user, like how long he's been registered, how often he visits, how much time he spends on the site. But that's still incredibly crude. I would say within a month we'll be able to adjust the per-click rate on the basis of a commitment score that we'll be able to generate from usage patterns, which I think will be incredibly predictive of propensity to buy. We're just trying to get the data to prove that right now.'

Chris slapped the table in delight. ‘I love it! What you have is magic in your hands and you're working out the best way to use it. You're like a wizard, Andrei. You're learning your capabilities.'

‘But Fishbowll's about Deep Connectedness, Chris. Advertising is there because we need it. I just want to make it as efficient as I
can. It's wrong that an advertiser should pay the same per-click rate for two people who have a radically different propensity to buy. That's just wrong. It's not efficient. We can make it much more efficient than that.'

‘Exactly. But you cannot do something like this and not be businesslike. Again, I could tell you a story right out of the Chris Hamer scrapbook. If you don't earn enough out of whatever you're doing to service it, to constantly develop it, to give your users what they want, and to make it run fast and smooth, someone else will. At your level, Andrei, the net has no place for altruists. Nature abhors a vacuum – the internet abhors non-profit.'

‘I don't have to make a profit to do all those things.'

‘Fair enough. Let me rephrase that. The internet abhors non-revenue. But let's not kid ourselves – that means big revenue, because your users are going to demand big things. And make no mistake, they
will
leave you if you don't deliver. First law of the net – if you don't, someone else will.'