Fishbowl (14 page)

‘Don't what?'

‘Anything!' Chris grinned, then he folded his arms, the smile still playing on his lips. ‘I bet the social networks hate you.'

‘Mike Sweetman offered me a hundred million for the site.'

Chris laughed. ‘Hold your enemies close, right? So close you can stifle them. What did you say?'

‘No.'

Chris laughed again. Then he shook his head. ‘He'll come after you somehow.'

‘He already has. He shut down access.'

That had happened when Chris had been in Australia, but he had heard all about it when he got back. ‘The search engines stopped him, right?'

Andrei nodded.

‘What's it got to do with you?'

‘That hundred million offer … he made it the day after he was forced to open up again.'

Chris stared at him. ‘Really?'

Andrei nodded.

‘Interesting.' Chris ate some of his chicken, thinking about what Andrei had just told him. Its significance didn't escape him. ‘Very interesting.' Chris had hardly touched the food so far and it was almost cold, but it was still tasty. ‘This is good.'

‘I'm no food critic,' said Andre, ‘but Yao's is a fine noodle establishment.'

Chris watched him for a moment, wondering if this was an apparently rare Koss attempt at humour. ‘So, what should you do?' he said, waving a fork with a piece of chicken on it. ‘You asked my advice. First thing – and this may not be immediately relevant, but one day it will be, so hear me out – is that when you take venture capital, never be in a position where you lose control of the company. Even if you go below fifty per cent ownership, there are still ways for you to retain a majority vote. Dual class voting stock, for example. If you don't do that, not only do you risk losing control over the important decisions about the way things are done, you may even be forced out. It's not a pleasant experience, and I know. The VCs will tell you that you can't retain that control, but you can. You just have to make them hungry enough to buy in under those conditions. There are no rules when that point is reached – there's only panic to get a piece of the action. You've got to see it, Andrei, the greed of these guys and their raw, naked fear when they think they're going to miss out.' Chris grinned. ‘It's a thing of rare and ferocious beauty, my friend.'

‘How do I make them that hungry?'

‘Build the business. Build it as you see the vision. What you have is potentially so compelling that the beasts of Sand Hill Road will come salivating to your door. The second thing, and this one is immediately relevant, is that you need someone to manage the infrastructure.'

‘We don't own the servers, we rent them.'

‘Of course you do. You still need someone to manage the relationship with whoever owns the infrastructure. Make sure they
give you the service you need, the responsiveness you need. For those people, you're in a queue. You need to be at the front. And if you've got a problem, chances are you can figure out the solution a lot quicker than they can. If you get a reputation for slowness or time outs, you're dead.'

‘Maybe Kevin could do that.'

‘Tell me something,' said Chris, suddenly realizing he hadn't asked an obvious question. ‘Are you guys at college?'

Andrei nodded. ‘Stanford.'

Chris shook his head, smiling.

‘What?'

‘Nothing. Look, hire someone to manage the infrastructure. Don't try to do it ad hoc, Andrei. If you're lucky, you might get by, but if you don't, you're dead.'

‘How much would that cost?'

‘Depends how much stock you're prepared to put into the package.'

‘Do you know anyone who might be able to do that?'

‘I can ask around. Do you have the money for this?'

Andrei frowned. ‘I'm not sure.'

Chris didn't say anything to that. If Andrei wanted him as an investor, he wanted Andrei to ask. ‘The third thing – and again, it may not be right now, but it's going to be very soon – is to be realistic about what you three founders are able to do and what skills you need to bring in. You must be great programmers to have got to where you've got to, and you've got a great vision, but even when start-up people have business experience, when the business starts to accelerate, as yours is doing, they're unprepared. You can obviously negotiate, if your advertising deal is anything to go by, but that's not enough by itself. It's likely other business skills you'll need to import. Again, another one of my mistakes – not doing that early enough. Be realistic, but be ruthless, about where your skills lie and where your fellow founders' skills lie, and bring in those that you don't have. And the fourth thing – get good people to advise you. When you look for VC
money, look for more than the cash, look for the kind of backers who have a solid base of experience, the kind of guys who are going to let you run the company but offer you wise counsel.'

Andrei looked at his watch. There was so much that he needed to get away and think about.

‘Do you have to be somewhere?' asked Chris.

Andrei shook his head. ‘What about the fifth thing?'

‘What's the fifth thing?'

‘What do I do about Mike Sweetman?'

Chris laughed. ‘See if you can get a billion out of him.'

‘I don't want to sell.'

‘No? Not for a billion? Then there's only one other thing to do.'

‘What?'

‘The same thing he tried to do to you.'

Andrei gazed at Chris sceptically.

‘Not today. Not right now. But you're in the big league, Andrei. You're swinging against guys like Mike Sweetman. The day will come when it's him or you. Whether you like it or not, you'll have to start thinking like that.'

A couple of days later Chris got another call from Andrei. Again, Andrei came right to the point. ‘I'd like you to come be part of Fishbowll.'

‘Really?' said Chris. ‘To do what?'

‘I don't know. All I know is we need someone who knows something.'

Chris laughed. ‘I think you know plenty, Andrei.'

‘Do what you like,' said Andrei. ‘Spend as much time or as little as you want. Just work with us. I want you to buy a share of the company.'

‘How much do you want me to buy?' asked Chris.

‘Five per cent. For a million.'

‘That's valuing you at twenty million.'

‘Mike Sweetman offered me a hundred.'

‘Yeah,' said Hamer, ‘but Sweetman was trying to take you out.'

‘He's not the only one who's offered me more.'

‘I thought you didn't ask.'

‘That doesn't stop people telling me.'

Chris laughed, wondering again if Andre's deadpan delivery was an attempt at humour or a simple statement of fact. ‘Do you need another million to get you through the year?'

Andrei didn't. After the last conversation with Hamer, he had rented more server space and had analysed the financial position, taking account of Fishbowll's likely advertising revenue, which was running higher than expected. Even if he employed someone to manage the infrastructure, the numbers looked OK. ‘I want you to buy a share because I want you to be part of us.'

‘Andrei,' said Chris, ‘I'll need to think about it.'

He ended the call. He did need to think about it – for a minute. Fishbowll was the most exciting thing Chris had come across since … it was the most exciting thing he had ever come across. He was impressed not only with the Andrei's vision for Fishbowll but with the younger man's thoughtfulness and maturity and, even more importantly, with his apparent willingness to learn. Chris believed that, stewarded well, the business Andrei had founded had the potential to become an important company, earn serious money for its founders and investors – and change the world. Although he was realistic about that. One could change the world – but all that meant was that a new group of predators would emerge to rip the rest of the population off.

He just had to find a million dollars. He didn't have it in cash, and it meant sacrificing some potential profit that would be lost if he sold out of certain investments now, but with a few phone calls he had liquidated enough assets to raise the funds.

He called Andrei the following day.

‘I'm in,' he said.

‘Great.'

‘Just one thing that's been bugging me. Who thought of the name?'

‘I did,' said Andrei.

‘Why the weird spelling?

‘Fishbowl with one
l
was taken.'

Chris nodded. He should have worked that one out for himself.

17

ANDREI HADN'T CONSULTED
with either Kevin or Ben before asking Chris Hamer to buy into the company. Ben had no problem with it. The meeting at Mang had left him with the impression that Chris was a guy who liked to talk himself up somewhat, but he was smart and experienced and Ben immediately saw the benefit Chris could bring. Kevin, the self-appointed business guru of the group, responded more defensively. He wanted to know what Andrei thought Chris could bring that they didn't already have. Andrei gave him a list. Then he wanted to know why Chris had to buy in. Andrei told him he didn't think Chris was going to work for them for a wage.

Kevin's resentment simmered. At first Chris wasn't around much. The legal work was done and the million dollars was transferred. The academic quarter came to an end. Andrei had managed to come through all his courses, although his grades had taken a significant hit. Ben and Kevin were just OK. They shared an unspoken understanding that they wouldn't be able to manage the same feat again in their senior year.

They also knew that they couldn't just disperse for three months over the summer vacation. They rented a big house in a family neighbourhood in Palo Alto, in a little street called La Calle Court, and deposited their stuff there. They put Ben's aquarium in the entrance hall, right opposite the door. Andrei went home to Boston for a week and then came back. Ben and Kevin, soon back in California as well, moved in. So did two of the programmers Andrei had employed. Friends and girlfriends
and various other people came and went. Sandy Gross stayed on and off before leaving for a vacation with a bunch of girlfriends in Europe.

The first time Chris Hamer stepped through the door he thought it looked like a frat house – a frat house with a lot of computer equipment in the living room. He rubbed his hands. ‘Cool,' he said. ‘Where's the beer?'

It was a caffeine- and alcohol-fuelled summer of wheelspins and partying, the kind of weird, wild, unfettered period of sheer intensity that can only ever happen once, and which, if you're not careful, you can spend the rest of your life trying to recreate. The freedom to focus on nothing but Fishbowll was an exhilaration. Andrei, Kevin and the programmers worked twelve-, fifteen-, twenty-hour stretches and then collapsed. Then they'd get up and someone would have organized a barbecue and they'd party while a series of epic movies played on a big screen on a wall on an endless loop that someone had rigged up, and then Andrei or Kevin would drift back to his computer and pretty soon another wheelspin was in progress. Fishbowll grew, developed and improved at a dizzying speed.

Chris came back and stayed for weeks, egging them on. If he was supposed to be playing the role of the adult in this room of computer-drunk children, he wasn't doing much of a job of it. He had a million dollars on the line in this frat house, but the anarchy and sheer exuberance exhilarated him. He sensed that he was caught up in an exceptional concentration of creativity and one would mess with the magic only at one's peril. Within the apparent wildness of the whirlpool, things got done. Astonishing, innovative, extraordinary things. When Andrei and Kevin and the other programmers sat at their desks and put on their headphones, it was work. If someone disturbed them, Andrei would throw down his headphones and let out a Russian curse that might have meant nothing, as far as anyone knew, but never failed to quieten the room. It was no way to run a business, but this wasn't a business – it was Fishbowll. Let it run riot. It would have time to grow up.

Nonetheless, there was one aspect of the operation that Chris couldn't let run wild. He had found Andrei someone to oversee the infrastructure, an engineer called Eric Baumer who had worked with him at FriendTracker. Chris lured him to the job with a modest salary, options worth 1 per cent of the company and his insistent personal assurances that one day those options would be worth a lot more than anything FriendTracker had ever delivered. Eric was meticulous, methodical and had proven at FriendTracker that he knew how to apply those qualities to keep a service running in the white-hot crucible created by the combination of exponential growth and hastily written software architecture. But not even FriendTracker had featured a place as anarchic as the house on La Calle Court.

While Andrei was deep in the coding of Fishbowll, Chris took it upon himself to make sure Eric was paid and kept the site running. Eric worked out of his home office in Hayward, about fifteen miles away across the San Mateo Bridge. To avoid scaring the hell out of him, Chris kept him as far from the Fishbowll house as he could. Whenever they had to meet, they'd get together over noodles at Yao's.

Most of the time, however, Chris hung around the house, drinking beers, talking Fishbowll and enjoying the vibe. He hit on most of the girls who came through the door and had occasional success. He hadn't had this much fun since the early days of FriendTracker, and FriendTracker, he had always felt, had been a fad. Fishbowll was here to stay.

Andrei had decided that he wasn't going back to Stanford in the fall. He was trying to organize a leave of absence for a year before getting up the courage to tell his parents. They must have suspected what was going on, however, and they arrived one Saturday afternoon, marched through the battlefield of the living room, and locked themselves in a bedroom with Andrei. Everyone stood outside listening to a lot of shouting in Russian. Afterwards,
Andrei and his parents came out and only then, it seemed, did his parents take in the state of the house.

Andrei's father shouted some more.

They stayed in a hotel and Andrei met them the next morning for brunch. By then they were somewhat calmer. They had taken in the points he had made about the revenue Fishbowll was already earning, and the amounts he had been offered for the business had had time to sink in. He brought them back to La Calle Court and introduced them to Kevin and Ben and Chris and the two programmers who lived at the house. By this time, his parents had sufficiently relaxed to have a conversation with them. Kevin asked about Moscow in the nineties and Andrei's father, over a beer, told a few anecdotes that scared the hell out of everyone. Then his mother lined them up, programmers included, and for the rest of the afternoon she had the full half-dozen of them cleaning the house. By the time Andrei's parents left that evening to go back to Boston, they seemed to have accepted the inevitable. Andrei had assured them he'd get a leave of absence.

Kevin was planning to get a leave of absence as well. Ben, on the other hand, was intending to go back to Stanford for the fall quarter. He sensed that a leave of absence would probably turn into permanent absence, and he wanted his degree. He still wanted to stay involved with Fishbowll and he talked to Andrei about how they could make that work. He would put less time into Fishbowll and then see if he wanted to come back full time when the year was over.

Chris thought it was a good idea when Ben told him about his plan one night. They were lounging on a pair of deckchairs with a couple of beers, watching two friends of one of the programmers playing ping pong on a table someone had brought into the yard. Inside, an all-hands wheelspin was under way. Since neither Chris nor Ben were involved in the prodigious bouts of coding that went on in the living room, they had found themselves hanging out quite a lot over the summer. They had conversations
about psychology and spirituality. Ben saw spirituality as the fulfilment of a psychological need. Chris saw it as a doorway into a deeper dimension of the mind.

Chris liked Ben and enjoyed their conversations, but didn't think Ben contributed as much to Fishbowll as Andrei thought he did. The analysis he did on the data could have been done by a statistical programmer for a relative pittance of a salary, and probably better and quicker than Ben did it. Ditto for the management of press enquiries by a trained PR person. Dealing with the National Security Letters that arrived regularly from the FBI was the job of a legal person, if only Fishbowll had one. But Andrei seemed to need Ben around, to have long, philosophical conversations with him about Fishbowll and its place in the world, as if Ben were some kind of muse. Privately, Chris doubted that whatever Andrei got out of that was worth 9 per cent of the company.

‘At least Stanford will take me back,' said Ben. ‘I'm not so sure about Kevin.'

‘Why not?' said Chris.

‘No, I'm kidding. They will – or they would, as long as they don't find out about what he's been doing.'

‘What's the issue?'

‘Didn't you hear about our disciplinary scrape? It was back in October.' Ben stopped for a moment. October. That had been pre-Fishbowll. It seemed like an eternity ago, yet it wasn't even a year. ‘We … well, Kevin has this thing about making up personalities when he goes on networking sites on the net.'

‘You mean he goes anonymously?'

‘No, he makes up, like, whole personalities. Men, women, whatever.'

‘Seriously?' said Chris.

‘Oh, it's serious. He concocts photos to make home pages and creates this whole life for them. It takes serious work. This isn't just a matter of making up a user name. It's a work of art.'

Chris turned and looked into the living room. Four desks were
pushed together and around them sat six guys at screens. Kevin was beside Andrei, eyes down, headphones on.

‘Is this some kind of sexual thing?'

Ben grinned. ‘You're asking a psychologist, Chris. What isn't?'

‘So … what …?'

‘No, it's not sexual. Not overtly. It's just a thing he does. He'd say it's a way of losing inhibition and allowing your mind to really express itself, a kind of fuller Deep Connectedness, if you will. Anyway, there was this guy called Dan Cooley in our dorm …' Ben paused. ‘You sure no one's told you about this?'

‘No one.'

‘Well, there was this guy called Dan Cooley, and Kevin – and I, incidentally – did a kind of experiment. I'm a little ashamed of it, actually, but I don't think it worries Kevin at all.' Somewhat sheepishly, Ben told Chris about the Cooley affair and its denouement. ‘He bought a pair of Adidas sneakers and they charged us with violating Stanford's Fundamental Standard. That's Stanford's Bill of Rights. It's about two lines long and you can make it cover anything you want. Anyway, Kevin said I had nothing to do with it. He took a bullet for me.'

‘You were lucky.'

‘Absolutely. He's definitely a good guy. We don't agree on everything – in fact, we don't agree on a lot of things – but … you know. Anyway, they gave him probation and counselling and they gave me a caution. Needless to say, everything he's been doing at Fishbowll has been a violation of his probation.'

‘Which was?'

‘You're not going to believe this.' Ben paused for effect. ‘Not to access social networking sites for twelve months!'

Chris grinned. ‘Dude! That is bad!'

‘He can't help himself. He does the same thing on Fishbowll. He admitted two personalities to us. I'm sure he's got more.'

Chris glanced at Kevin again. Kevin was gazing with intense concentration at his screen in the living room. ‘Andrei says he's a Stakhanovite.'

‘He absolutely is. He's the most Stakhanovite guy I've ever met. So anyway, this thing he does, with the personalities, we had a big discussion about whether Kevin should or shouldn't be doing it on Fishbowll. He put forward an argument about rights and control and the liberating effect of personality adoption on Deep Connectedness. Very libertarian, which is typical Kevin.'

‘And Andrei?'

‘Andrei bought it. I personally would prefer to see us trying to discourage pseudonymity, but Andrei's view is that it's legitimate. And if it's legitimate, our role is neither to encourage or discourage. I mean, I think, as officers of the company, we shouldn't be doing it ourselves. But to Andrei, if we accept it's legitimate, and if we accept that we can't control it and can't prevent it, then it would be hypocritical to say that we can't do it. Consistency is very important to Andrei. He doesn't let emotion overrule rationality. He's a deductionist. If he has a principle, he applies it everywhere, no matter how much it hurts.'

Chris sucked on his beer and swallowed thoughtfully. ‘Kevin's a libertarian, you say?'

Ben nodded.

‘What is Andrei's philosophy, do you think? Apart from deductionism.'

‘I wouldn't say deductionism's a philosophy. It's a methodology.'

‘So what's his philosophy?'

Ben thought about it. ‘You know, that's hard to say. I don't think Andrei has a philosophy
per se
. He measures things by efficiency. That's his yardstick of better or worse. If two conditions have equal measures of efficiency, he's neutral between them.'

‘So he's OK if someone kills someone else as long as they do it efficiently?'

‘No, I'm not saying that. The basics are obvious. He's a good guy. He's a very good guy. He's got a morality. But when it comes to the more discretionary questions – I'm not talking
about murder or theft – then it's efficiency. Efficiency is his measure. For example, he was opposed to letting advertising on Fishbowll. We had a lot of discussion about it. He didn't want to turn into a Mike Sweetman or whatever. I mean, we had
long
discussions. But in the end, we decided we had no choice. So now we've accepted advertising. And what happens? He is totally focused on making the advertising better, totally focused on making it more efficient, both from the perspective of the user and from our perspective. And when you seeing him doing that, the way he does it … the focus, the clarity …' Ben shook his head. ‘It's an awesome sight. And the thing is, it's not about the money. It's absolutely not. Have you seen our revenue numbers?'

Chris shook his head. Normally, as an investor, that was the first thing he would have asked to see. But, funnily enough, he never had. It just hadn't seemed relevant.